Dirt Rally Tabletop Arcade

Daniel Chote has been thinking about putting a Raspberry Pi into a kids’ driving toy for quite a while. For better or worse though, hacker Matt Brailsford beat him to the punch with this Tomy Turnin’ Turbo Outrun build, which we featured in August. Rather than scrap the idea entirely, or build an “also ran” game conversion, Chote chose to start from scratch, printing a chassis, steering wheel, and throttle control lever for his new system.

Initially he installed SteamOS in an Atom-powered dev board to power his build, but after running the game Dirt Rally at a very poor frame rate, decided to instead switch to a full Intel computer on the smallest motherboard that he could find. Game images are displayed on a 7" touchscreen, allowing for a build small enough to be produced with Chote’s 3D printer.

The resulting game looks like a lot of fun. The yellow vinyl decals, along with blue printing filament finish off the build quite nicely, meant to emulate the look of a 1995 Subaru Impreza. Be sure to check it out in the videos below, or if you’d like to build your own, check out the project’s GitHub page for firmware and 3D printing files.