RCade: The Arcade Cabinet with CI/CD Deployment, Custom Graphics Card for CRT [video]

TL;DR: The RCade arcade cabinet at Recurse Center pairs a real CRT with a custom USB-to-CRT graphics card and a CI/CD deployment system, making it easy to build, deploy, and share games. ## Greg's Opening: On Impostor Syndrome and Sharing Projects Hi. Thank you very much. As an opening, I only have 4 minutes. I'm part of this project, but didn't create it — I was invited because I was so excited that I convinced them I was involved. Actually, I did less than half. I want to talk about what inspired me. During my batch, the hardest thing was making things, because you go through all of this. You don't believe in yourself, or you think you shouldn't be part of it, or you're convinced you have impostor syndrome, like a massive wave drowning you day after day. It took me half a batch to overcome that. Then you start to believe, maybe I do have a place. I said, people seem to like it. You have to adapt yourself to the audience, and also let the audience adapt to you. That book inspired me a lot — it's about perfectionism and the difficulty of putting things out. You're already in this world, and it has been perfectly given to us; we don't need to make it better. But this incredible team really believed in themselves, and put in tremendous effort to make this happen. I'm very proud to introduce them. Frank, come on up. ## Frank: The Vision and Build Hi everyone. I'm Frank, an alum from Summer 2 2025 and Fall 2 2025. I'm really happy to be here to talk about the arcade. All the projects Greg built inspired so many amazing things, including the arcade. You've heard about RC Disco (which allows other Recursers to deploy their projects in real time), RC TV (a rotating display that shows other people's projects), and most inspiring to me, the Quick Writer — an 80s LED display, 96x36 pixels, monochrome. Greg built a system where anyone could write JavaScript or Wasm and create animations. RC has a term called "generous learning," but I think these projects are more like "generous building." They are projects that make other people feel capable. They inspire others to create, letting people who might have thought they couldn't build hardware try it for the first time and realize they can. That's the energy we're trying to bring to the arcade. What did we want it to be? Physical and inspiring. We felt we needed an old-school CRT monitor — those thick, glowing, warm, static ones. When we considered doing this, a lot of people told us we were crazy. On the other hand, Steven said: "Let's do it. If you don't think they're crazy, wait until Steven gets up here and you'll see how crazy it is to handle this stuff." We also wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to start building games. We wanted to use modern technology, not have to learn how to write infrastructure just to deploy a game. We wanted it to be remote-friendly — remote attendees can create, deploy, and also play the community's games. Finally, we wanted it to be hackable and modifiable, so future Recursers can add hardware and software. What is it now? It includes a real CRT monitor, custom hardware (including a very cool graphics card that Steven will explain), a CLI tool for quick deployment and scaffolding new games, and a deployment system — putting a game onto physical hardware becomes as simple as pushing to GitHub. How did it start? I really wanted to build something like this, something that would inspire others the way the Quick Writer inspired me. When I first mentioned it to Ava, she responded: "Oh, Greg mentioned it to me too." We started messaging like crazy, discussing ideas for most of last year, trying to find hardware. Ava took us to Wonderville, an independent arcade bar, with free community games. We saw inspiring projects like the Wonder Cab. Joe Mel and I played a game called Hover Burger, and that's why we have those knobs. After that we started looking on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. I eventually found this one at 9 PM, in Staten Island. I got into my truck and started driving, without telling anyone where I was going. Thanks to Andrew Dong for taking my call and letting me write down the address. Fortunately, it was a friendly family, and the guy was a truck driver who helped me get it into my car. This is it arriving for the first time. It was originally a device called the Taito Game Room Classic, I think a cabinet from the 80s or 90s, with a real CRT display. We gutted it completely; all the wires were cut. We had never dealt with this stuff before. Thanks to Joseph who worked with me and taught me how to do it. On the right here, you can see some interesting color math — we were trying to figure out which wire corresponded to which color. This is the first image we got from this monitor. It might not look like much, and it's distorted. But everyone who said "Hello" that day, except me, got it right. Working with a bunch of really smart people, hopefully learning along the way. On the left here is the original hardware — a Raspberry Pi, bit-banging VGA signals through GPIO. Basically, we used the digital pins on the computer, switching them fast, trying to simulate the analog signals these cabinets use. It was great, but we only had 6 pins per color, so 6-bit color. It looked really bad. It's much better now, thanks to Steven. After that, we built custom hardware. Using a Raspberry Pi Pico (handling all the controls) to convert it to USB, which is hot-swappable, so future Recursers can build really weird custom hardware. Jomo has been working on a custom board that people can replace. Thanks to Iris and Anjana for help debugging and building. I also had some old LED displays. David helped me drill holes and get particle board dust everywhere. Thank you for drilling, and also for carefully cleaning it. Now I'm very happy to introduce Stephen, who never shies away from technical challenges. When we were discussing the hardware for this screen, everyone said we were crazy. Stephen said: "Oh, I already have a board that almost does it. I think making a new one shouldn't be too hard." ## Stephen: The Custom Display Adapter Hi everyone. I'll talk about this display adapter. My slides are made with Emacs. I'm a software engineer, I do a lot of software in my spare time, but also a lot of hardware, despite having no formal EE background. If I can do it, you can do it too. One of my favorite projects is the Taylorator, which fills the entire FM broadcast spectrum with Taylor Swift songs. We had a small problem. We had this beautiful arcade cabinet and a great original CRT. We didn't have a good way to drive it. Using the Raspberry Pi bit-banging gave terrible color banding because we only had 18-bit color, and we were limited by the Raspberry Pi's poor GPU performance. What we really wanted was to be able to use any computer with our CRT, so we could swap computers without being tied to a single piece of hardware. The best way is to have some kind of adapter, from USB to our CRT. We needed some custom hardware running custom firmware that does two things: first, make the computer think it's talking to a monitor; second, generate the actual signals to drive the CRT. In plain terms, what I'm building is a very specific, very fancy dongle. A quick intro to what a CRT actually is: they're very simple devices. You have an electron gun that shoots electrons. There are deflection electromagnets that can deflect the beam horizontally and vertically, so you can place the beam at any point on the screen. Wherever the beam hits, it illuminates the phosphor in front. All you have to do is scan your beam horizontally, drawing one line at a time, and thus you can draw your image. This is essentially VGA. The following content is a detailed hardware design description. Stephen explains in detail how to implement a USB display adapter using a microcontroller, generate the correct timing signals to drive the CRT, and eliminate color banding. The final result is a graphics card that allows any modern computer (via USB) to directly drive an old CRT. (Note: This section is a summary based on the technical part of Stephen's talk in the transcript, translated to ensure fluency and preserve key information; the full technical details remain in the original.) ## The Result RCade is now a complete system: physical cabinet, CRT, custom graphics card, CI/CD deployment tools, and CLI. It inspires others to build and share games, and proves that even the oldest tech can be perfectly combined with modern workflows. Source: RCade: The Arcade Cabinet with CI/CD Deployment, Custom Graphics Card for CRT (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-OpIbLUOU0)