IDLE Press Arcade

IDLE Press set out to put indie games where they rarely appear: in physical arcade cabinets, running on location. Each cabinet is a small Linux PC wired to joysticks, buttons and a coin mechanism through an Ultimarc IPAC-2 control interface, and every game comes from a different indie studio, most of them made for a desktop or console.

Without shared infrastructure, every cabinet would be a hand-built one-off. Operators had no dedicated way to check that all of a cabinet's controls worked or to calibrate its monitor. Getting a game to boot fullscreen with no desktop, no update pop-ups, no mouse cursor and automatic crash recovery meant configuring Ubuntu by hand on every machine.

Developers had no reference for what an arcade game needs that a home game doesn't: an operator menu, attract mode, coin and credit handling, high-score entry, and no way for a player to quit to the desktop. IDLE Press needed a foundation both audiences could rely on.

A diagnostic app built for the cabinet

We built IDLE Press Utilities in Unity 6 for technicians standing at the cabinet. The Input Testing tool shows the live state of all 28 primary IPAC-2 inputs for both players, with joystick diagonals, multiple button presses and a running event log, so a stuck or dead switch can't be missed. Operators can rename each switch to match the game in the cabinet, such as Jump or Fire, and the labels are saved between sessions. A Video Calibration tool steps through standard test patterns such as SMPTE colour bars. Cabinets rarely have a mouse, so every screen works from the keyboard.

One-command kiosk mode

Our Ubuntu 24.04 script package turns a fresh install into a dedicated arcade machine. The operator copies the game onto the PC, runs one script and reboots. From then on the cabinet boots straight into the game fullscreen, hides the cursor, turns off update pop-ups and restarts the game if it crashes. A separate operator mode gives technicians a full desktop for maintenance and returns to kiosk mode on its own. We built on the open-source arcade-builds project and removed its Snap Store dependency, so indie developers can send their builds to IDLE Press privately instead of publishing them publicly.

Standards both audiences can follow

We wrote and published a documentation site with separate tracks for operators and game developers. Operators get step-by-step guides to installing Ubuntu, setting up kiosk mode, using the utilities app and troubleshooting. The Developer Guide sets out what an IDLE Press game must do, from operator menus with price settings and audit counters to attract-mode timing, coin and credit handling, high-score initials entry and lockdown rules. The site runs on Jekyll and deploys automatically whenever the docs change, so IDLE Press can update it with a plain Markdown edit.

IDLE Press now has a standard, documented process for bringing a game into the program. The developer builds against the guide, the operator installs the game with one script, and the utilities app checks the hardware before the cabinet goes live.

• Kiosk setup: manual per-machine configuration → one script and a reboot
• Input verification: no dedicated tool → live display of all 28 primary inputs
• Monitor calibration: no standard process → built-in test patterns
• Game distribution: public Snap Store required → private builds installed directly
• Developer requirements: undefined → a published Arcade Developer Guide

The work also lowers the barrier for indie studios. A developer who has never shipped an arcade game can read the guide, set up a local test cabinet with the same scripts the real cabinets use, and arrive with a build that's ready for the floor.

See more of our Unity app development and game development work.

Unity 6, C#, Unity Input System, UI Toolkit, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Bash, systemd, GNOME Kiosk, Jekyll, Just the Docs, GitHub Pages, GitHub Actions, Ultimarc IPAC-2