Guide

Upright arcade cabinets routinely weigh between 200 and 400 pounds, and almost all of that weight rides on four small metal leg levelers barely two inches across. Finding the best furniture sliders for moving heavy arcade machines is harder than picking pads for a sofa, because a cabinet concentrates huge pressure on tiny feet, and … Read more

I have been collecting and repairing coin-op machines for over a decade, and the most expensive problem in my shop was never a dead monitor. It was the three identical bags of leaf switches I kept buying because my old parts were buried in unlabeled cardboard. That is exactly why I rebuilt my entire setup … Read more

I learned the hard way that prep decides an arcade restoration. My first cabinet, a water-damaged conversion with layers of operator paint, got three coats of expensive color over a surface I had only wiped down, and every scratch and swollen edge printed right through the finish within a month. That project sent me down … Read more

Minwax Polycrylic in satin is the best clear coat for most restored arcade cabinets, with Varathane Triple Thick as the fastest one-coat build and SprayMax 2K as the hardest option for control panels and coin doors. That is the short version of roughly six years of cabinet work in our shop, where we have sealed … Read more

I have built four arcade cabinets from plans, and the single biggest lesson is that the woodworking is rarely what sinks a project. What sinks it is inaccurate arcade cabinet templates and plans, a control panel drilled in the wrong spot, and a monitor that does not fit the opening you already cut. That is … Read more

Every cabinet build starts with one decision, and it happens before you cut a single sheet of MDF: which board goes inside. Our team tested the best Raspberry Pi models for arcade builds across three months of real bartop and full-size cabinet sessions, and the gap between a Pi 3 B+ and a Pi 5 … Read more

I have been building Raspberry Pi arcade machines for years, starting with a wobbly bartop in a friend’s garage, and the hardest part was never the software. It was guessing which control kit would actually work the day it arrived. This guide fixes that: these are the best Raspberry Pi arcade kits for beginners, ranked … Read more

I spent the last 90 days stuffing mini PCs into bartop cabinets, full-size arcade machines, and even a repurposed arcade1up, all to find the best mini PCs for MAME arcade cabinets that actually hold up under real cabinet conditions. Heat, vibration, enclosure space, and hours-long sessions matter here, and our team pushed each unit hard … Read more

Picking the best microSD cards for RetroPie builds is harder than it looks, because the card you choose decides how fast games load, how stable emulationstation runs, and how long your cabinet lasts. After testing eight cards across Raspberry Pi 3, 4, and 5 in our workshop, we settled on the SanDisk 128GB Extreme as … Read more

I’ll never forget the first time I wired up a Raspberry Pi inside a bartop arcade cabinet. I built the whole thing over a weekend, screwed the control panel on, loaded up RetroPie, and fired up Street Fighter II. After about 20 minutes of intense matches, the audio started stuttering and the FPS counter dipped … Read more