I have been testing arcade equipment for home game rooms for over a decade, and skee ball machines remain one of the most requested categories from our readers. The catch? New official Skee-Ball machines typically cost $4,500 or more, putting authentic arcade alley rollers out of reach for most families. That gap created an entire … Read more
Picking between the AtGames Legends Pinball 4K and the Legends Pinball HD is one of the most common decisions home arcade enthusiasts face right now. Both machines promise the real feel of a pinball cabinet, complete with flipper buttons, a working plunger, and a backglass display, but they deliver that experience at different price points … Read more
I built my first fightstick seven years ago, and I still remember the exact moment I pressed a real Sanwa button for the first time. That crisp, clean actuation changed how I thought about arcade controls forever. After swapping buttons in more than a dozen sticks since, I’ve learned that the best arcade buttons can … Read more
Sanwa joysticks have been the quiet workhorse behind serious arcade play since 1982. Built in Japan by Sanwa Denshi, these microswitch joysticks became the de-facto standard in Japanese arcade cabinets, and they now show up in most commercial fightsticks, home arcade builds, and even modded console controllers. I have been using them in my own … Read more
I have spent the last three months testing arcade trackballs in my home MAME cabinet, an Arcade1Up Centipede unit, and a Raspberry Pi 4 build running RetroPie. I rolled through Centipede waves, fired putts in Golden Tee Fore, and tried to bowl strikes in Silver Strike Bowling. After burning through 8 different models, I can … Read more
After spending six weeks spinning, pushing, and soldering our way through every dial controller we could get our hands on, I can tell you the best arcade spinners in are not all built the same. We tested them on Tempest at level 30, on Arkanoid round after round, on Centipede speed-runs, and against a real … Read more
I have spent the better part of three months testing arcade sticks across Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive, and Mortal Kombat 1 on PC. Our team plugged in ten different models, logged hours of training mode, ran input timing tests, and even swapped a few Sanwa and Hayabusa parts between them. What … Read more
I rebuilt my first arcade cabinet six years ago, and the moment I bolted a real metal coin door onto the front panel, the whole project changed. Suddenly it stopped being a PC in a wooden box and started feeling like the machines I dropped quarters into as a kid. That is exactly what a … Read more
Building a home arcade is one of the most rewarding projects in retro gaming, but the audio side often gets overlooked. After testing 8 different arcade speaker kits over the past three months, our team found that the right audio system transforms a generic cabinet into something that genuinely feels like a quarter-muncher from 1985. … Read more
After restoring three arcade cabinets and building two MAME machines over the past five years, I have learned the hard way that not every coin mechanism earns its place in your arcade build. Cheap mechs jam, misread tokens, and frustrate players within minutes. That is exactly why we tested the best arcade coin mechanisms on … Read more