What this is

A live image that turns an ordinary 64-bit PC into an arcade cabinet. It boots straight to the game menu — no install, no desktop, no login. Alpine Linux underneath, MAME and a purpose-built frontend on top, driven by the cabinet's own controls.

It handles the parts that make a cabinet a cabinet: portrait and cocktail orientation, 15 kHz CRTs through a VGA adapter, J-PAC and other keyboard encoders, per-game bezels and control mappings. Every cabinet also serves its own admin page, so a phone on the same network is the whole configuration story.

No games are included. The image is the appliance only. Games arrive over the network once the cabinet is activated, and they arrive from here.

What you need

• A 64-bit x86 PC. Intel or AMD graphics are the tested path. Discrete NVIDIA is best avoided — the open driver cannot clock modern cards properly.
• A disk, 16 GB or more. Required, not optional: the cabinet keeps its games, its settings and its hub credential there. It is erased during setup.
• 4 GB of RAM. 2 GB is the floor and boots slowly; below that the image does not come up at all.
• A USB stick of 1 GB or more, and a wired network.

Getting it running

1. Write the image to the stick.

   sudo dd if=rocade.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

   That erases /dev/sdX. Be sure which device it is.
2. Boot the PC from it. It comes up to a splash and then the game menu. The screen shows the cabinet's address.
3. Open the admin page at that address, in any browser on the same network. Set up the disk under Storage, then set the display orientation and map the controls.
4. Activate the cabinet. You need an activation code — ask whoever runs the hub for one. Enter it on the Games tab, or on the cabinet itself:

   rocade-pair XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

   The cabinet makes its own key and redeems the code once. Nothing expires, and a code cannot be used twice.