Arcade1Up Arcade Cabinet Arcade1Up's cabinet kits let you easily and affordably build your own modest home arcade.

Arcade1Up Arcade Cabinet

  • Pros

    Easy to assemble. Solid build quality. Accurate controls. Looks and sounds faithful to the original arcade games.

  • Cons

    Fairly short; a riser is strongly recommended. No way to add or change games. No option for a CRT-style video filter.

  • Bottom Line


If you're old enough to remember when Bill Clinton was president, you're probably old enough to remember arcades. The sound of falling quarters and synthesized sound effects, the sight of flashing lights, the smell of mediocre's hard to forget the experience of these entertainment staples for Generation Xers and very early Millennials. Even if you had a game system at home, you were prepared to drop countless quarters into arcade slots while you hung out with your friends.

The dream of many a truly dedicated arcade-goer was to own their own machine, which cost several times more than the Sega Genesis or Super NES and could only play one or a few games. Thanks to Arcade1Up, you can now easily and relatively affordably build a monument to classic gaming in your own home (starting at $299), with accurate graphics, sounds, and controls. Its cabinets are about three-quarters the size of the original arcade machines, but they look and feel authentic, and since they use tiny emulation devices and LCDs instead of massive arcade boards and CRT monitors, they consume a fraction of the power. If you've ever had the grand idea of building a home arcade, Arcade1Up makes it a far more realistic possibilityand earns our Editors' Choice.

Arcade1Up Arcade Cabinet

Choose Your Games

Arcade1Up offers several different arcade cabinets priced between $299 and $399, each with multiple games. There's Centipede (with Centipede, Missile Command, Crystal Castles, and Millipede), Final Fight (with Final Fight, Ghosts & Goblins, 1944, and Strider), Galaga (with Galaga and Galaxian), Golden Tee (with Golden Tee, Golden Tee '98, Golden Tee '99, and Golden Tee 2K), Mortal Kombat II (with Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3), Pac-Man (with Pac-Man and Pac-Man Plus), Space Invaders, and Street Fighter II (with Street Fighter II: Championship Edition, Super Street Fighter II, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo).

Two more cabinets are upcoming: Marvel Super Heroes (with Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men: Children of the Atom, and The Punisher) and Star Wars (with the original Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi arcade games).

The game selection in each cabinet is set, and you can't add or change the games (unless you're willing to do some extensive modding and install a Raspberry Pi or PC inside the cabinet). Arcade1Up sent us two cabinets to test, Mortal Kombat II and Street Fighter II.

Building the Cabinet

Assembly is a fairly simple process that takes about an hour. It's very much like building furniture from Ikea, down to placing wooden dowels in holes to align the sides of the cabinet before you secure them with screws. Lay one side panel on the floor, then attach the front panel, marquee, and a few supporting panels, and then the screen panel. Attach the other side and secure the panels with screws, and you'll be able to stand up the nearly assembled cabinet.

Bolt the control surface onto the front, plug the ribbon cable from the control surface into the display, then attach the power cable to the display and run it through the back panel. Screw the back panel into place, and you're ready.

Once put together, each cabinet mostly consists of two large sides with the classic overhang, a marquee panel, a front panel, a screen panel with a 17-inch monitor, and a control surface with the joysticks and buttons (depending on the model there might be one, two, or three sets of joystick and button controls, or a trackball for Golden Tee or a flight yoke for Star Wars).

Every outward-facing surface (except for the back, which is unpainted particle board) is laminated medium-density fiberboard (MDF) decorated with the games' logos and designs. The Mortal Kombat cabinet features the art of Raiden on the sides, the Mortal Kombat II logo on the sides and marquee, and the logos of all three included games (Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3) on the lower front panel. The Street Fighter II cabinet has the Street Fighter II Championship Edition logo on the sides and logos for all three included games (Street Fighter II Championship Edition, Super Street Fighter II, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo) on the lower front panel.

Arcade1Up Arcade Cabinet

Once it's assembled, the cabinet is sturdy and attractive. It's also quite short, about three-quarters the size of a commercial arcade cabinet at just 45.8 inches tall. This is a bit too small for the average adult to comfortably play standing up, though it's fine when sitting down on a stool or chair.

If you want a better standing experience, you can get an optional riser kit for $45. This simple box is made from the same material as the cabinet and lifts it to a height of 57.5 inches. The riser is all black, with the Arcade1Up logo on the front, and securely attaches to the cabinet with four self-tapping screws (no holes are drilled in the cabinet sides, so expect to use a bit of force to screw them in). We highly recommend adding a riser to your purchase.

Joysticks and Screens

While the cabinets are fairly small, the controls are standard size. The Mortal Kombat cabinet has enough joysticks and buttons for two players. The joysticks feature metal stems and red, plastic "baseball bat" knobs (though the stems have screw mounts, so you can swap them out for third-party ball knobs if you wish), with square movement gates and responsive, clicky direction switches (eight for each joystick, covering cardinal and ordinal directions). Each joystick is matched with six large, convex plastic buttons arranged with four in a square (High Punch, High Kick, Low Punch, and Low Kick), a fifth Block button in the center, and a sixth Run button to the lower left. Player 1 and Player 2 buttons sit above each player's cluster of controls, and a black power switch and three-way volume switch sit above and between them, just below the screen.

The Street Fighter II cabinet has a slightly different control configuration. It supports two players like the Mortal Kombat cabinet, but the joysticks have black ball knobs, and the buttons are arranged in two rows of three. For both cabinets, the controls are accurate to their respective games.

Arcade1Up Arcade Cabinet

Each cabinet's screen is a 17-inch LCD mounted securely on a panel, with a 20-pin ribbon cable connecting it to the control surface. It's bright and crisp (considering the decades-old arcade games it displays), with an unspecified resolution Arcade1Up simply calls "high definition." It could be 720p or 1080p, but the distinction is moot when it's upconverting arcade games that hit an absolute maximum of 480p on the original CRT monitors. Regardless of the specs, the screen is sharp and colorful but lacks the option of a CRT filter or simulated scanlines for artificial visual authenticity on the flat panel.

Sound comes through a single speaker driver built into the upper right corner of the control surface, under a series of grille holes. It doesn't produce the most crisp or powerful sound you'll hear, but it certainly gets loud enough to fill a small room and attract attention and reproduces the synthesized music, sound effects, and voice clips of the games well.

Arcade-Accurate Emulation

Arcade1Up is cagey on exactly what is running in each cabinet, saying only that it's "proprietary hardware, developed specifically for Arcade1Up." Regardless of what's under the hood, each cabinet features arcade-accurate reproductions of its listed games, accessible through a very simple menu that appears when you turn it on. For the Mortal Kombat cabinet, that's Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. It takes several seconds for the cabinet to start up, and another several seconds to load the game. Holding down on the Player 1 button for five seconds boots the cabinet back to the selection menu, and holding down the Player 2 button for five seconds resets the loaded game.

The games look, feel, and play accurately. All three Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter titles are as close to arcade-perfect as emulated games can be expected to get. The controls are responsive and perform just as they should, though going back to mid-90s fighting games after you've been playing Mortal Kombat 11 and Street Fighter V for a while will make the inputs feel a bit stiff and awkward. But that's how the games played when they came out, and it shows just how much fighting games have evolved in mechanics and responsiveness in the last couple of decades.

Arcade1Up Arcade Cabinet

For Nostalgic Gamers

Arcade1Up's cabinets aren't as complicated as modern game systems, or even retro compilation systems like the NES Classic. They're much bigger, though, because they're built to be very specific engines of nostalgia. If you grew up in the '80s or '90s and longed to have your own arcade machine, Arcade1Up is the simplest and most economical way to do it.

For $300 to $400 (depending on the games) and an hour of your time putting it together, you can have an arcade cabinet in your home. Sure, for that price you can get your own Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, or Xbox One, consoles that are magnitudes more powerful and offer far more games, but ultimately you don't want an arcade cabinet simply to play video games. You want one as a statement of taste and nostalgia standing up in your home, telling everyone, "I played these arcade games, I still love these arcade games, and now I finally have my own." So as gaming furniture more than gaming hardware, Arcade1Up's cabinets earn our Editors' Choice.

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