P-Station: Retro game station
P-Station is a Raspberry Pi-powered game station.
It's based on the RetroPie distribution which allows you to turn
your Raspberry Pi or PC into a retro-gaming machine.
P-Station can be hooked up to a TV for video and sound using the HDMI connector at the back. It also has 3 USB connectors: one supplies power, the other two can be used for USB drives, keyboards etc. Finally, for convenience, it also has an RJ45 socket so I can plug into my home netwerk.
Pictures of the finished article
RGL: Retro Game Launcher
Rather than using EmulationStation which comes with RetroPie, I've developed my own application to browse through game lists and launch them: Retro Game Launcher. It can support all of the emulators & ports supported by RetroPie, so far I've configured P-Station to support MAME & GBA games and the Doom & Wolfenstein ports.This is a video of P-Station starting up, browsing through the game lists in RGL, playing pacman and then shutting down.
Building P-Station
Pictures of the P-Station build process
P-Station electrical components
| Raspberry Pi | Raspberry Pi 3 |
| SD card | Samsung EVO+ 64 GB microSD |
| Controller | Xin-Mo mini 1-player controller |
| HDMI | HDMI Panel Mount Coupler v1.4 3D Compatible Female to Female Adapter |
| USB | USB panel mount (x2) |
| USB | Cliff CP30205N USB Adapter |
| Ethernet | Cliff CP30220S RJ45 Adapter |
| Power supply | You need to buy a decent power supply. I noticed that most 2A/5V adapters work fine when hooked up directly to the Raspberry Pi. However, once connected indirectly via one of P-Station's back-panel USB connector, voltage regularly drops to below 4.65V. When that happens you'll see a rainbow-colored square on screen and the Raspberry Pi starts running at half-speed. The one I bought is actually a 2A/5.2V adapter. |
| Cables | I've used standard HDMI, USB and netwerk cables to connect P-Station's back-panel connectors to the according connectors on the Raspberry Pi. Said that, I did shop around looking for 30cm or 50cm cables. |
P-Station arcade components
| Joystick | Zippy (long, red) |
| Joystick shaft extender | 15mm Joystick shaft extender |
| Buttons | Sanwa OBSN-30 push button (4x white, 5x red, 1x green) |
| Service button | Micro service push button (green) |
| Service button | Micro service on/off button (red). In the end I've decided not to use the red on/off button; it's mounted but not wired up. |
Changes to default RetroPie setup
| Screensize |
Set screen size to 1080p in /boot/config.txt change:
hdmi_group=1 hdmi_mode=16 (1080p) |
| Disable low voltage warning |
In /boot/config.txt add:
avoid_warnings=1 |
| Disable DHCPCD |
On the command line issue:
sudo systemctl disable dhcpcd.service |
| Boot text/logo |
To prevent kernel messages from appearing on the console during startup and to not display the raspberry icons, modify
/boot/cmdline.txt:
change console=tty1 to console=tty3 If not present add quiet loglevel=3 plymouth.enable=0 logo.nologo at the end (note that recent RetroPie images include quiet loglevel=3 by default) |
