We Have DDR At Home

I love playing DDR, but it's one of those games where it's best to experience it at the arcade. Unfortunately not many arcades have them, and it's continuing to shrink. The nearest one that I could find is at Dave and Buster's, which is a 30 minute drive from my house.

There is the home console variant of the game, except the cheap plastic soft mat it comes with is horrendous to play on. They're slippery, wrinkly, and lack the handbar.

When looking up official DDR cabinets, I realized how incredibly difficult they are to obtain. Konami only licenses their arcade machines to a few select companies at exorbitant prices. Even their old cabinets such as Extreme and SuperNova are very rare and expensive.

What if I were to build one instead? Turns out it's totally doable, and many DDR enthusiasts have in fact done this.

Okay so mine doesn't look anywhere as great as the other homemade setups. It's not even running the official game. It's just StepMania that was reskinned. But this is the compromise you get when working with a budget.

However, I think this is a really convenient setup. Having it on wheels makes it easy to move around. The wide legs also give enough room to slide the pad underneath once you're done playing. The TV is attached by a vesa mount which itself hooks onto the stand, making it easy to take off.

Using StepMania also means I can easily load up custom charts. There's a big community with talented map makers producing simfiles for pretty much every song out there.

Most of the parts here were sourced from my local Microcenter. That includes the 43" LG TV, the InLand Heavy-Duty cart, and the Edifier G2000 speakers. The hard mat itself is an L-TEK EX Pro X w/ the handbar. Personally I'm not a fan of their handbar, it's not as sturdy as I would like it.

The picture above was my first attempt at making an arcade panel. I realized the elongated design was unnecessary, so I started making another one.

When it came to selecting which computer to use, I needed one that was small and yet powerful enough to run the game. Like my previous project, that lead me to get myself another Dell Optiplex. You can get a used Dell Optiplex Micro for dirt cheap prices nowadays. To have it mounted behind the TV, I had to 3d print a custom holder.

Originally this computer came with Windows 11 installed. Since I only needed a minimal OS to run Stepmania, I replaced it with Debian OS instead. With the addition of i3WM, you have a very lightweight desktop operating system. It genuinely only takes 15 seconds to boot to the game.

While this project is still a work in progress, I'm already having a blast playing! Another reason why I really wanted to work on this is because it's a great way to exercise. Some charts require a ridiculous amount of stamina and mental reflexes. If you're looking to shed some weight or just wanting to get into rhythm games, consider playing DDR!

LG 43" UHD TV
InLand Heavy-Duty Cart
Dell Optiplex 3070 Micro
L-TEK EX Pro X w/ Handbar
Uxcell Arcade Push Button
Arcade Keyboard Encoder