A home arcade cabinet with a dozen Midway classics
Arcade1Up started the current home arcade machine craze a few years ago when it released slightly scaled-down, stand-up arcade cabinets at relatively low prices for home play. They were a bit shorter than necessarily comfortable, which is why the company eventually included risers that lifted the machines to a height that could let most adults easily play while standing. Arcade1Up’s Deluxe line is the next obvious step, a one-body cabinet that stands slightly taller than a standard cabinet with a riser. They’re a bit more expensive than non-Deluxe cabinets, but the extra height is worth the cost. We tested the Mortal Kombat Deluxe model, available for $499.99, and enjoyed the look of the machine and the cavalcade of classic Midway games on it. That said, it’s a lot of money for a handful of old games, which is why, like all arcade cabinets, it should be seen more as a piece of furniture and a nostalgic collectible than a piece of modern gaming hardware.
The cabinet ships unassembled in a flat pack, like a piece of Ikea furniture. Also like Ikea furniture, it comes with step-by-step illustrated instructions with no words. A separate user manual is filled with text, however, on how to use the cabinet after it’s complete.
Assembling the cabinet isn’t a complicated process, but it is involved enough that you should be ready to spend a bit of time working on it. It took me approximately two hours to assemble it, though it will likely go quicker if you get someone to help you. Assembly consists almost entirely of connecting particleboard panels to each other with dowels and screws. The electronic components including the screen, lighted marquee, speakers, and controls, are all their own preassembled panels and sections, and putting them in the cabinet is almost as simple as joining the plain panels. You use smaller screws and plastic brackets for some parts, and you need to make sure the wires are properly dangling inside the machine and not caught on anything.
Once the cabinet is ready, you then connect the wires from the lighted marquee, speakers, and power extension cable to the metal box behind the screen, and attach the ribbon cable hanging from that box to the joystick assembly. The power extension cable has a plastic plug that fits snugly in a hole on the back panel of the cabinet, with a connector a few inches past it for plugging in the power adapter itself; it keeps the cable from directly pulling on the machine’s electronics when you’re trying to plug it into an outlet and provides a much safer disconnect point in case you trip over the power cable.
The assembled cabinet consists of an electronics-filled upper half and an empty lower half. It feels solid, with all of the screws in place along with small steel plates that keep the halves bolted together. The machine measures 61 by 23.5 by 19.8 inches (HWD), which is a little taller and wider than the non-Deluxe Arcade1Up cabinets we’ve seen (57.
