Have any of you seen these Arcade 1UP cabinets? They have been around for a couple of years
Now. They are about 2/3 real size arcade cabinets, using emulators and an LCD screen, with proper arcade controls and the livery and artwork from the original arcades.

Each machine costs about £399 and comes with 12 games to choose from connected to the cabinet theme.

There are Pacman, Mortal Kombat 2 and Street Fighter II versions. They do make more on their website, but these 3 are the standard ones you see in stores.

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I decided to post about these because I went into one of the Smyths Toy Stores (so Tom could give me some idea about what he wants for Christmas) and they had the Pacman and Mortal Kombat versions running in store. Tom instantly saw the Pacman one and dragged me over to play as he knows it's one of my favourite games, and we ended up playing it for ages. We then gave the MK2 cabinet a play, but I rebooted it to see what other games were on there and we ended up playing 2 player Rampage. Tom hasn't played that before and really enjoyed it.

Are they worth it?

Not sure really. The cabinets feel well made, and whilst the controls didn't feel like anything top end like Sanwa they felt robust and well made with good response.

A limitation is they only coming with 12 games. Also the Pacman cab has a vertical orientation screen and only 1 joystick and 3 buttons, whereas the MK2 is a more traditional horizontal screen with 2 joysricks and 8 buttons each side so is more suited to more games.

I need to do some research into what hardware these actually have in them. If they can easily be altered to add more games or completely change the OS and frontend then they could be quite a bargain. They are well made cabinets. And only being 2/3 size don't take up as much room. They do come with a riser so the cabinets are a more natural height to play standing up.
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A quick Google and find this link.

https://hackinformer.com/2018/12/26/...000s-of-games/

This guy took an Arcade 1UP and replaced the main board with a RPi3, had to add a display board to interface surg the screen, and used a USB control board similar to an iPac encoder.m to cinnect up the controls. So he basically replaced most of the cabinets insides.

I still want to find out what the cabinet is using as standard and if that can be hacked.
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Do they come flat packed and need assembly?
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No, prebuilt and ready to go. They even find with the black riser to make them taller to play standing up.
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Looks neat in the pictures, but hard for me to gauge the size without seeing one in the flesh.

The kids recently went to a birthday party at an arcade - there were a lot of pinball machines, a few racers, and a bunch of arcade cabs that were clearly just running an emulator..... Part of me now wants to get an arcade cabinet even though I know I'll end up spending more time scrolling than playing.
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I used to have an arcade cabinet that I had converted from a real one into a MAME cabinet. But after moving house a couple of times it started to fall apart and when I had a good look it wasn't worth trying to save as it was mainly chipboard and very heavy with the CRT. So I stripped out the controls, wiring and boards with the intention of building a new one, but haven't ever got around to doing it. These cabinets interest me interested if I can customise them to add more games. Far cheaper than buying the custom emulation cabinets you can get. Those, even flatpack, can cost over £1000.
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That ship has sailed for me, no space and also not real interest anymore, just playing my retro stuff lying on the couch is much more comfortable. And I know about the retro feeling of a cabinet but nah.
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I know what you mean, but there is something special about playing arcade games on a real cabinet. More so games from the 80s where a real joystick and buttons make the difference.
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There are some things in life that I want, and have looked at before, and could possibly acquire, but know that they'd likely get used so rarely that it'd be almost a waste of time, space and most certainly money.

An arcade cab (with joysticks and buttons) with a whole selection of games
A proper sized pool table
A big surround sound system
A fancy gaming PC set up
An outdoors swimming pool
A nice mountain bike
Proper 5-a-side style football goal posts with nets
Full height basketball ring

(in no particular order)
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You have to consider something else too, setting the whole thing up.

What do you want to run on it, solely MAME? Or other retro systems too?

Do you wanna make a RetroArch installation only, running EmuELEC or Batocera?

RetroArch is fine, runs a lot of systems but is a complete pain in the ass to set up. Not only game wise, but mostly controller setups and configurations. That's where in my opinion it lacks the most. Setting everything up takes hours only to notice that 1 week later it's not working anymore already and you restart the whole procedure. Not talking even about setting hotkeys which you definitely need.

Do you plan to add games or to make a ready setup and never touch it again? That is the best option of course, as like I mentioned, fiddle around too much with RetroArch and it ****s you over.

Best would be to install a RPi4 inside, which is powerful enough to run retro games, I have mine completely set up with 1TB SD card with around 30.000 games and it runs almost everything fine, even Daphne, which is obviously nice on an arcade cabinet. You don't even need the computer stuff, just concentrate on consoles, skip also DS and 3DS due to the dual screens.

Getting arcade stick controls working properly is probably the biggest issue, also not easier on Linux.

Just get a ready MAME cabinet, pay the triple, but it works out of the box
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