Xtension Gameplay Arcade Cabinets Are Perfect for Raspberry Pi Systems

I love playing classic arcade games. In fact, I love them so much, I spent several thousand dollars having a custom-built arcade cabinet put together. But you don’t have to spend nearly that much to have a professional looking cabinet these days, thanks to folks like Rec Room Masters and systems like their Xtension Gameplay cabinets.

The cabinets come in kit form, and make it easy for you to put together a great looking, full-size arcade system that won’t break the bank. The base 24″ system starts at $499.99, while the 32″ version starts at $749.99. They come with two-player Suizo-Happ arcade controls and everything you need to build a system – other than the computer, the display, and speakers. Thanks to bargain priced monitors and Raspberry Pi systems, you can add those things for under $250, and complete your arcade system for less than $1000. Rec Room Masters provides instructions not just for building the cabinet kit, but for adding on and setting up a Raspberry Pi arcade system.

If you want to splurge, they also offer an upgraded cabinet called the “Emulator Edition” which adds a real arcade trackball, and 10 buttons for controlling on-screen menus.

Rec Room Masters makes a number of other arcade cabinet designs, including cocktail style, sit-down, and virtual pinball machines. For more information on these and other arcade cabinets, head on over to their website.

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Raspberry Pi computers have been quite the revolution for makers, encouraging experimentation and creativity thanks to their low cost and compact size. And while the tiny computers are by no means high-end in their processing power, they continue to get faster with each generation. Now, you can gang together multiple Raspberry Pi boards into one machine.

The Turing Pi is a Mini ITX size motherboard that’s designed to cluster together up to seven Raspberry Pi compute modules to harness their power, and for designing and prototyping applications that run in a clustered environment. It’s specifically designed to support container systems like Kubernetes and Docker, as well as machine learning apps like TensorFlow.

All seven microcomputers connect into slots on the board, which provides power and and a number of shared ports for the system. It’s got a total of eight USB ports, HDMI and Audio out, as well as a Gigabit Ethernet port.

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