Need help for Arcade layout

[Naramag]

Hey!

I want to turn my raspberry retropie in an arcade machine. So I am about to build a wooden frame to house everything, but the joystick and buttons are difficult. The retropie runs several systems, from old atari 2600 up to PS2. I am planning to make two hidden compartments to place two playstation controllers and a keyboard, but I want a panel with two joysticks and an undefined amount of buttons to play most of the games with. Like a classic arcade.

But I am having someting like a writers block with it. How many buttons would you place and how would you arrange them? I am looking at my paper, see the markings for the joystick placement and 4 buttons arranged in a diamond shape, but after that I draw a blank. What would you do?

[Coldkil]

I did a similar project as a gift for a friend - retropie build on a compact wooden case that has the classic arcade lever/buttons setup. From my experience, even if i have set up all 8 buttons most of them are actually left unused in most retro games, only notable exclusions are fighting games. Most use 2 or 3 buttons total.

If you search on amazon there are a lot of kits specifically made for these setups - you get all buttons, lever, cables and a controller that just plugs to the Raspberry via USB. Much simpler to manage and setup than directly connecting to the Raspberry I/O. However you're losing on quality since brands are just chinese no-names, but they work pretty good and replacing them in case of damage/malfunction is pretty easy since they basically all use the exact same pin/plug layout. The controller usually supports up to 12 buttons and kits have 8 button plus a "start".

I have sotred them oin a sort of "round arc shape", with the left buttons being more near the player and the right ones being far. I did it like this because usually the hand is not perpendicular to the wooden plane but always angled, plus you have more actual room to place your hand on it.

I plan to do a similar thing if i manage to find a cheap/non-working cabinet i can just strip off everything. Hopefully the CRT works and i can reuse it