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SEPTEMBER 15TH, 2012

Granny Smith Arcade Machine

For the Granny Smith release party, I wanted to make an old school arcade machine, and since the game is controlled with virtual buttons it should make a nice experience to play it with physical buttons. My initial idea was to build it from an old discarded radio or tv, but it was hard to find to find an appropriate cabinet.

After putting up some shelves in the kitchen I had this masonite board and some small pieces of wood laying around, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed. I sketched out the pieces directly with a pen and then used a regular jigsaw to cut it. I should maybe have used proper screws to assemble it, but I was lazy and did it with nails instead. It actually turned out more sturdy than I thought it would.

The idea was to suspend a tablet on inside to act as screen and for running the game. It took some tweaking to get the height of it right and find a way to easily remove the tablet if needed without disassembling the whole device. Below is the final setup, which also leaves room for connecting the charger at the bottom of the tablet. The tablet is an Asus Transformer TF300T.

The controls was my biggest headache for the project and I was researching different ways of mechanically translating a button press into touch directly on the screen. Apparently, anti-static socks use silver thread, and they can double as the tip of a touch stylus. I never got further than that fortunately, because I came to think of a little toy from the goodie bag of this year’s Game Developers Conference – a Zeemote wireless joystick. Connecting that to an Android tablet and hook up the buttons to the joystick should do the trick.

I ordered real arcade buttons from DealExtreme. They feel and look exactly as cheap as they are ($7 for four buttons, including shipping), but only two of the four I ordered actually worked. I wanted four buttons to also allow throwing baseballs and bananas, so I complemented the arcade buttons with more sturdy metal buttons bought locally. They don’t feel like arcade buttons, but are way more reliable. Perhaps the trickiest part of the whole project was to solder wires from the buttons onto the Zeemote. Anyone who have seen a Zeemote know it is extremely tiny. Now imagine opening this device and soldering cables directly onto the circuit board. I didn’t get it right the first time, and I was more than once convinced I would ruin it, but eventually I got all the wires in place, and it has worked ever since.

Controlling the tablet with a Zeemote is done using the Zeemote SDK, available to developers for free. Now I would say I’m a fairly experienced game developer and I have never in my career seen a more complicated API for something as simple as reading input from a joystick. Seriously, it should be three or four functions at most, but the Zeemote SDK somehow manages to present this in an API with tons of classes and methods, even suggesting that you base your whole game around their sample framework! I refused to use something that silly and started looking for alternatives. Fortunately there is a little Android app called USB/BT Joystick Center 6 that is totally awesome. It lets you hook up any USB or bluetooth joystick and map the input to key strokes, button pressed or even touch input. I hooked it up and it worked instantly!

Now all the pieces were in place, so I painted the cabinet black and printed stickers for the front and sides. Voila, the Granny Smith arcade machine. /Dennis

Making an old-school arcade machine with an Android tablet | Green Rom Project – News
September 15, 2012 at 8:21 pm

[...] Pad TF300T, some arcade buttons and a Zeemote bluetooth controller. Go ahead and check out Mediocre’s blog to see more about the process and details. It took a bit of work and money to put it all together, [...]

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Making an old-school arcade machine with an Android tablet | Android Tablets
September 16, 2012 at 2:33 pm

[...] Pad TF300T, some arcade buttons and a Zeemote bluetooth controller. Go ahead and check out Mediocre’s blog to see more about the process and details. It took a bit of work and money to put it all together, [...]

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Making an old-school arcade machine with an Android tablet | iniphones.com
September 17, 2012 at 6:28 am

[...] little colonnade buttons as well as a Zeemote bluetooth controller. Go forward as well as check out Mediocre’s blog to see some-more about a routine as well as details. It took a bit of work as well as income to put [...]

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Zeemote (@Zeemote)
September 17, 2012 at 11:55 pm

Hey Dennis – got a kick reading this. Thanks for posting! – Iris @ Zeemote

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como crear una máquina arcade clásica con una tableta Android | Android Cafe
September 18, 2012 at 1:50 pm

[...] arcade en tu casa. Si quieren seguir paso a paso la realización de ésta frikada, pueden pasar por el blog de su autor. Comparte éste post:Artículos que pueden interesarte también:Motorola comienza a mudar a [...]

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Developer constructs Granny Smith arcade machine in preparation for official launch party | TalkAndroid.com
September 19, 2012 at 11:48 pm

[...] Source: MediocreGames [...]

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Developer constructs Granny Smith arcade machine in preparation for official launch party | Gadgets Tech Tips News
September 20, 2012 at 1:01 am

[...] Source: MediocreGames [...]

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Developer constructs Granny Smith arcade machine in preparation for official launch party | John Ryan Lee
September 20, 2012 at 5:12 am

[...] Source: MediocreGames [...]

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Developer constructs Granny Smith arcade machine in preparation for official launch party - Google Truth And Rumors
September 20, 2012 at 7:41 am

[...] Source: MediocreGames [...]

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Ograf
September 27, 2012 at 12:52 pm

Nice!! please can you tell me what is the engine used in granny smith game :)

thanks

Reply 
mediocregames
September 27, 2012 at 1:13 pm

Hi, we have built most of the technology in-house, so it does not use an off-the-shelf game engine.

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How can I build an arcade cabinet for my android - Android Forums
July 25, 2013 at 7:59 am

[...] own design for it. I have a Nexus 7, and I was thinking of building the cabinet based off this one: Granny Smith Arcade Machine | Mediocre blog how as a no experience hardware assembler would go about [...]

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Ron
January 14, 2015 at 3:51 pm

USB/BT Joystick Center 6 is no longer available on the Play Store. Is there any alternative? Another question: When remapping the keys, do I need to do the same remapping on the other devices I want to use the device on?

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Mediocre Moderator
January 15, 2015 at 12:40 pm

Hello Ron, could you please drop an email to our support and we’ll do our best to help you out on the issue. The address is: support @ mediocre . se (without all the blanks). Thank you!

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