A bartop arcade cabinet became a dual-mode retro terminal when builder valkyrie0528 noticed that pulling the controls panel and dropping in a keyboard felt exactly like sitting at an 8-bit home computer. The fix was a second swappable front panel: mechanical clicky keyboard, touchpad, and a small USB breakout, all fitting the same recess as the original joystick and button layout.
The software side is equally deliberate. valkyrie0528 runs cool-retro-term as the terminal emulator and pairs it with a custom widescreen wallpaper depicting two 5.25-inch floppy drives flanking the screen. Both the wallpaper file and full build details are on the Hackaday.io project page. The panel-swap concept is the detail worth reading for: one chassis, two completely different machines, no permanent modification.
This build is an entry in the 2026 Retrocomputing Challenge, which is still open for submissions. The project page documents the physical construction closely enough to replicate the panel system on an existing bartop cabinet.
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