Ed R.'s Custom Coffee Table Hides a Wireless Raspberry Pi Powered Four-Player Arcade Cabinet

Semi-anonymous maker "Ed R.", of the YouTube channel Fifty Percent Awesome, has built a four-player arcade cabinet with a difference: it hides in a functional table when it's not in use, and doesn't require any trailing cables — even power cables.

"After having arcade-machine envy for too long (and not having enough space for an actual arcade machine)," Ed explains, "I built this coffee table that converts into an arcade machine. Retro gaming hidden inside a functional piece of furniture that doesn't look like it's hiding a retro gaming setup."

The first step was to pick the hardware which would power the project. A Raspberry Pi 400, the variant of the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer built into a keyboard, was chosen, with real arcade buttons and joysticks — enough for four players simultaneously. On the software side, Ed chose to go with Batocera. "Batocera is a retro gaming OS, similar to RetroPie," he explains. "While RetroPie is more popular, I find the performance of Batocera to be much better than RetroPie."

Altogether, that plus a display is enough for a functional arcade system — but Ed wanted the machine to take up as little room as possible. As a result, he set about designing an enclosure that doubled as a table — hiding absolutely everything, including the display, from view when it's not time to game. The resulting wooden table is hand-made, with custom mounts and 3D-printed adapters for the display, controls, and the Raspberry Pi 400.

Impressively, the table-stroke-arcade-cabinet is also fully wireless. "It can be powered by plugging into a standard wall outlet," Ed explains, "but I didn't like the idea of the wire lying around on the floor, so I made it so it can be powered by a couple of Ryobi 18V batteries as well (the same ones used in their power tools)."

The full build process is detailed on Ed's YouTube channel, with links in the video descriptions to the bill of materials and print files for the 3D-printed Raspberry Pi 400 and Ryobi battery holders used in the cabinet.