Favorcade

The Favor arcade cabinet - aka the "Favorcade” - is very near and dear to my heart, and easily one of the most fun side projects that I’ve ever worked on. It began as a casual conversation with my friend and coworker, Elon, about how cool it would be for our company at the time, Favor Delivery, to have a Street Fighter arcade cabinet in the office. The conversation eventually turned into “Well, we could totally build our own custom arcade cabinet and put tons of games on it.” So the next thing we knew, we were brainstorming ideas and looking up Youtube tutorials about how to build a custom arcade cabinet. We pitched the idea to the CEO, and he gave us the thumbs up and a small budget to buy everything we needed. Then we were off to the races.

Behold, the Favorcade:

First Steps

Starting this project was daunting. We knew literally nothing about building an arcade cabinet, and so initially there was a huge learning curve. It took us about six months to go from concept to completion, and the first few months were mostly spent reading, watching, and learning. We must have spent hundreds of hours on nights and weekends to make the Favorcade a reality. It was a true labor of love. Fortunately, Elon had a background in carpentry and fabrication, and he was able to skillfully manage the physical build of the cabinet. I was in charge of the design - the shape, the layout, and the graphic design - and getting the software working.

I began the design process by figuring out the side profile shape, and doing a concept drawing of what the final product would look like.

Once the design direction was agreed on, Elon started building the frame.

Controls

Every good arcade cabinet needs a good control layout. The layout has to consider a user’s hand size and position relative to the buttons and joysticks, and also how far apart the first player and second player controls need to be so people aren’t smushed together when they’re playing a two player game. I went through a couple iterations of the layout before I landed at something that I liked. We also decided to include cupholders in the design as a fun added bonus.

We then proceeded to prototype this layout by temporarily setting the controls into a cardboard frame, so we could get a feel for everything.

The next step was figuring out how to get the controls hooked up to the games. From the beginning, we had decided to use a Raspberry Pi and a framework called Retropie for emulation. It took quite a bit of trial and error to get everything set up correctly, but it was well worth the effort. Here’s a video showing the moment we got the controls working properly…I was stoked, to say the least.

Satisfied with the prototype controls, Elon began the task of actually building the control console and setting the display into the frame of the cabinet. I continued to work on the software setup, which involved customizing the UI for selecting games (Retropie gives you a nice Netflix-style game selection interface that can be fully customized), and writing several scripts to change the control scheme based on the active game platform. Some game platforms only used a few buttons (NES or Sega Genesis for example), whereas others used many (Super NES, Playstation, and many arcade games). It was quite a process to map and remap all the controls based on which game platform was being used.

Finishing Touches

One of the final tasks was adding some flair to the cabinet’s design. This included installing a backlit marquee sign with the Favor logo, and adding some graphics to the siding. I made a cool design for the sides that I thought gave off kind of a retro vibe and that also meshed well with the overall Favor brand. Elon decided to use vinyl stickers for the siding, so we ended up printing my design on giant vinyl sheets, and painstakingly cut them to the exact shape and dimensions of the cabinet. This was probably the hardest and most annoying thing that we did throughout the whole process. It was a nail-bitingly tedious operation to make sure the vinyl was put on correctly. Vinyl siding is NOT something I want to ever deal with again.

The Reveal

Revealing the Favorcade to our coworkers was incredible. It was so awesome seeing how excited everyone was, and seeing the joy that everyone got from using the thing that we made. And it was even more satisfying, I think, because we made it purely because we loved games and wanted to make our office a little more fun by sharing that love with others. Here’s a video of the reveal…I’ll never forget this moment. It was so great!

Final Thoughts

I’m super happy with how this project turned out! It was a totally new experience that was way outside our comfort zones, and it was awesome getting to bring something to life that so many other people could enjoy. Also who am I kidding…Elon and I were really looking for an excuse to practice our hadoukens and sonic booms in Street Fighter. Our game of choice ended up being an old NES game called Jackal. It’s an amazing game for its time, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a great co-op game experience.

Here are a few videos of people playing games and having fun: