by TacticalCoder 5 hours ago
It is cool but... I much prefer to go an emulate the real thing: if you are using a CRT anyway (2nd sentence in TFA says it's using a CRT), you may as well make the cab compatible with the good old arcade JAMMA standard, use a Pi2JAMMA adapter, and stick a Raspberry Pi into the cab.
As a bonus you can then buy old PCBs and switch between either your Pi or a real PCB.
It's also much simpler: no need for complicated controllers and whatnots for all the heavy lifting is done by the Pi2JAMMA adapter.
It's what I have: a real arcade cab (a vintage one, from the 80s) but "modernized" in that at any time I can switch between real PCBs (I've got both real vintage PCBs and vintage bootleg PCBs: a prized possession) and my Pi+Pi2JAMMA.
I take it anything that can be run in TFA can be run on a Pi: I'm not sure if that project does something that couldn't run from a Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter so maybe I'm misunderstanding the (cool and good looking) project.
The marquee that's a display that can change is nice: I've seen a few arcade cabs (on arcade cabs forums) that had these and they'd switch the picture depending on the game being played.
As noted in the article - and in the related article [0] by Stephen who goes in-depth into the development of the custom CRT display adapter - some of the constraints/wishes were: wanting to go beyond 18-bit color to avoid color banding, and also to have a generic USB interface so that the CRT could be driven by a laptop or any PC.
I also think that the people involved in this project enjoyed inventing/creating/coding just as much as they wanted to "get it done" - and so, there's definitely a healthy/heavy mix of "we took this existing thing" and "we invented this completely new way of doing things".
[0] https://www.scd31.com/posts/building-an-arcade-display-adapt...