At last! Chris from Code the Things is back with part 2 of his awesome project for the ‘Destitute’ tier of our main build chart: he has turned it into an arcade cabinet.

In this second video about the project, he covers the painting, button installation and wiring, and PC hardware and emulator set-up!

What an Awesome Retro Rig!

From the initial woodworking covered in the first part of this series all the way back to the humble beginnings of Chris’ journey with our ‘Destitute’ build in a prior video, it has been a long and unsteady path for the hardware. But it seems like it has finally found a truly fitting home, and one that has a sharp look too!

Chris has basically created a superpowered version of the RetroPie bartop arcade cabinets you’ve likely seen in images floating around the web at this point. His system has more power than a Raspberry Pi, is in a full-size free-standing cabinet rather than a bartop, and uses a large HD television screen for its display. It’s a beautiful update to the style.

As for performance, it sounds like (as with any RetroPie experience) there were some hiccups along the way, but Chris’ technical know-how pushed through to a victorious end. As fans of retro gaming and emulation ourselves, our favorite part of this video is definitely the deep dive into PC hardware and software that starts around the 13-minute mark.

Anyway, long story short: we’re jealous of his set-up. It turned out great, showcased a brilliant and creative way to utilize a ‘Destitute’ tier PC for gaming, and the videos about it do a great job of showing the arcade system off (warts and all).

Conclusion

As has become tradition by this point in sharing Chris’ videos about our ‘Destitute’ tier, we’d like to close by underscoring how delighted we are to see people building and testing our recommendations—from the top of the chart to the bottom.

If you ever do something interesting like this with one of our builds, please do let us know about it!