RGB MATRIX INTEGRATION IN TO ARCADE MACHINE EMULATOR CABINET 

PROLOGUE

Over 18 years have passed since those early days of emulation, MS-DOS Based Emulators and the use of IBM PC clones to drive them.

Welcome to the era of Raspberry Pis in which tasks like Full blown Arcade Machine emulation can be easily done in a $30 Microcomputer.

I had been wanting to modernize my arcade room (which now includes 3 Arcade cabinets) in diverse states of Development.

One (My original Build) still running off a PC and non functional for the past several years. (For sentimental reasons I am not ready to tear in to this machine quite yet)

One commercial cabinet given to me by one of my customers originally running an old PC clone with Windows XP as I recall (THIS WILL BE USED FOR THS PROJECT)

One Original bowling arcade machine stripped of its original defective mother board and retrofit with a Cheap Chinese 60 in one circuit board compliant with the JAMMA Standard.

The Basics.

Have been dabbling with emulation on Raspberry Pis for a few years with  varying degrees of success/satisfaction, given I now own a Monoprice 3D printer I have printed a number of 3D Nintendo clone cases running a diversity of Emulation projects on them, until now mainly RECALBOX

For a number of years I have been interested in an arcade machine emulator general purpose  frontend by the name HYPERSPIN, they even had at least at some point in time support for RGB Matrix displays, spent quite a bit of time looking in to implementing it on one of my machines, but their documentation was poor (to put it mildly) they had a gigantic mess regardin new vs old versions, I Was actually told once straigh up by one of the admins regarding "The NEW release they kept on talking abotu but consistently failed to materialize" that this was a subject they simply "Didn't, talk about", when I inquired about support for one or more serial devices I was again shuit down and informed they simply had no interest.

The Interface is beautiful, the Hyperspin Admins and general community however, Less than helpful.

Recently however an unknown group released a "non official" port of this frontend  for Raspberry Pi, motivating the folks from hyperspin to get their asses in to gear and build/release an OFFICAL version for Raspberry Pi (Now on Version 2) this build is known as HYPERPIE

Now let me be perfectly clear on this the days in which I could spend weeks and weeks obsessing over setting up the ideal Arcade machine, setting up configuration files, downloading artwor, Sound samples etc etc etc.. are long gone and will never come back.

Fortunately for me however a number of people have set out to do this for us and offer "Pre made" images loaded with anything and everything you could ever possibly desire in an arcade machine (including the games), Links to these images are maintained by the good folks over at ArcadePunks, the particular image used for this project is titled ("128gb CRISP Hyperpie image “Get a whiff of THIS”)  by the user "I_Died_Once"

After Imaging this particular build to my Raspberry Pi3B+ (Latest iteration of Raspberry Pi) I was so impressed the next thought was, I wonder if I can get it displaying to an RGB LED MATRIX like I used to do, potentially to an LCD screen as well just like 20 years ago.