Modder resurrects rare arcade cabinet with DIY electronics

A Belgian modder and YouTuber has restored a rare and obscure arcade machine from his childhood by building his own custom electronics and software completely from scratch.

It is not well known, but at one time, Belgium had a small arcade industry. Devices such as the Shuffle-Ton were beloved by Belgian children, and were based on an old Belgian folk game involving tossing metal coins into a box to try and get them into the right holes.

These obscure arcade cabinets recreated the folk game for the modern era with electronic scoring and the ability for up to four players to compete against each other.

In the early 90s, a company called Erron updated the concept again, adding more sophisticated electronics and multiple game modes. Sadly, this version, named Shuffle Box, was not popular. As a result, the factory ceased production. This left several half-finished cabinets assembled, but with the electronics yet to be added.

YouTuber Overtinker managed to track down one of these unfinished cabinets and used it as the basis of his project.

Since it had never been used, the arcade cabinet shell was in pristine condition, apart from some dust and dirt. The first job was to fit a display screen. An old 19” Dell monitor filled the space in the backglass nicely once it was properly mounted.

A Raspberry Pi 3B+ was selected to run the display and the rest of the electronics, such as the beam sensors for the coins and the addressable LEDs. The small size and ease of use of the Raspberry Pi made it a great choice for this project.

After extensive work installing all the wires and LEDs needed and 3D printing various other accessories such as coin chutes, it was time to work on the software. Overtinker had virtually no reference material to work from, so the software had to be designed and built from the ground up.

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Using some early advertising footage as a reference, he recreated the text, outlines, and images for the background display. Since it is a fairly simple game, he used the Python library Pygame as the basis and built the code from there.

The result looks extremely professional. It is an impressive outcome for a DIY project by a single enthusiast.