Studio 3 - Arcade Hardware Update

Good day humans

I don't post here as much as I should, so.. time to do some of that, I guess. So, since Studio2, a lot happened on both the electronics and the structure aspect of the hardware-side of the arcade.

PS: 2nd time writing this, because the content got blank when I pressed SAVE WORK. Always copy the content before pressing the magical green button (I did, so I didn't lose the content, still have to modify it all though).

Display Upgrade

To begin with, I broke the display I was using because.. well, I was careless and my bottle dropped on it. Heart-breaking images below.

Right away, I started working on solutions, because griefing usually leads to no good.. The three options I found were:

• Purchase another display of the same type
• Use 2x 27" 16:9 displays
• Use 1x55" 16:9 display

I nearly went for the 55" display, until I saw the price and quality/price.. So instead, I found a new provider on Alibaba, and managed to get the product I wanted. The new restriction, of course, was a screen protector. After much negotiations with the seller, I managed to get exactly the size I wanted (same as old one, 1m20 x 30, more or less), with 3mm tempered glass for protection, additional settings, and etc.

Yesterday I've received the display, which happened to be absolutely gorgeous, much lighter, much higher quality and more control than the previous screen. On the top of it, it came with some basic display handling, and even a remote control, so I was happy. Price-wise, it was the same as the previous display, so I was overjoyed.. and a lot poorer. 

I will include pictures below, since it comes hand-in-hands with other stuff I wanna talk about.

Physical Arcade Progress

I've done a fair bit of work on it since Studio2. Why would you chill or go traveling around during the holidays when you can work hard on your projects, am I right?

Pictures will speak for themselves. Here's the progress:

And then:

At this point in time, I can start working on the lighting, and on covering the surface with the white plastic sheet in the background. Those will, of course, be sprayed painted.

Machine Update

Finally, I've started gathering the pieces of the PC that will go inside. My requirements were simple: 

• CHEAP (i'm hungry.. (Please don't take me seriously))
• No need to be overpowered
• Needs to be able to run all day
• Needs to be able to run the game 60fps STABLE
• Cheap
• Did I say cheap? 'cause I need it to be cheap.

At first, I wanted to test it with an old PC I had lying around, just to see how bad my optimization was. The game was running a good 45fps, until the particles came in during the gameplay.. Then I'd get gigantic drops while the particles were showing. I quickly realized that a GPU was required.

In the end, I found the parts I wanted:

• Cheap mining motherboard (actually a bit of a mistake, because it required pretty good components, like DDR4 RAM and 6th gen CPU at least)
• i5 6th gen (aouch..)
• 4gb DDR4 (aouch.....)
• Some PSU I already had for 3 years and never used (yay, finally getting a use for it!)
• GTX 650 (cheap!)
• Win10 (if you need a license, get it from Amazon. It's reliable, if your key doesn't activate fully, the seller will give you a new one, and it's like 20$).
• Some HDD lying around

I also had the opportunity to test that yesterday, and it all ran smoothly! Violent pictures below:

I was very happy with what the way the game ran. I didn't put a FPS counter, but I didn't notice any drop throughout the game. On the picture above, the new display is used.

The motherboard will be attached directly onto the arcade, so I won't need a case.

Conclusion

Happy days. Everything is going fantastic, and everyone's happy. I won't lie that this is taking a hell of time and hard work, but it's coming along beautifully.

You might've noticed that on the picture of the new display, there was a band on the top. The display is not exactly the same size as the previous one (slightly taller), but thanks to the way I've worked on the software, I was able to fix that with a simple number input, and the UI scaled properly.

Next up, lighting, adding the speakers, the plates, and internal testing!

No body allowed!