An Arcade Cabinet With a 4:3 Monitor, and Why I Went With CoinOPS on a PC

Every arcade cabinet build hits the same fork in the road early on. Do you buy one of those all-in-one boards, wire it up and call it done? Or do you put a PC in the cabinet and build the software side yourself?

I'm partway through a cabinet right now, and I took the PC road. This is where things stand and why.

Start with the screen

The monitor is a 4:3 LCD running over VGA. That was the first decision, and the one I'd defend hardest.

Classic arcade games were made for 4:3 CRT tubes. That's the shape the artists drew for and the shape the gameplay was designed around. Put them on a 16:9 panel and you've got two choices, both bad: stretch the picture so everything's fat and wrong, or leave big black bars on either side and wonder why you bought such a wide screen.

It gets worse with vertical games. A lot of the famous ones (think Pac-Man, Galaga, Donkey Kong) ran on monitors turned on their side. On a widescreen panel those end up as a skinny strip in the middle. A 4:3 screen doesn't fix that completely, but it wastes far less of the glass, and horizontal games fill it the way they were meant to.

Tip

Finding a decent 4:3 monitor these days takes a bit of hunting, since nobody really makes them for the mainstream anymore. For a cabinet, though, it's worth the effort.

The Pandora Box option

If you've shopped for arcade parts, you've seen these. A "Pandora Box" (or one of its many cousins) is a small board with a pile of games preloaded. You connect your controls, plug in a screen, and it boots straight to a menu. No PC, no configuration, no fiddling.

That's a real advantage, and I get the appeal. But I passed on it, for a few reasons:

• The game list is what it is. You get whatever was loaded at the factory. Want something that isn't on it? Tough.
• Emulation quality is a mixed bag. These boards run on modest hardware, and it's common to see reports of games running a little too fast or slow, sound that's off, or input that doesn't feel quite right. For a machine whose whole purpose is to feel like the real thing, that matters.
• Where the games came from is a fair question. These boards ship with hundreds or thousands of commercial titles, and it's hard to believe they're all properly licensed. That's not something I want sitting at the center of the build.
• There's not much room to grow. When the board is the whole system, you can't really upgrade one piece of it.

For somebody who wants a cabinet running by Saturday and never wants to think about it again, a board like that might be fine. That's not really me.

Why a PC with CoinOPS

CoinOPS is a front end built for exactly this kind of machine. It sits on top of emulators and gives you an arcade-style menu that's meant to be driven entirely from the controls. You're not staring at a Windows desktop with a mouse, you're picking games with a joystick like it's a real cabinet.

Putting a PC behind it changes the whole equation:

• Flexibility. The software is on a normal computer, so the library, the emulators and the settings are all yours to change.
• Better emulation. A PC has far more horsepower than a cheap multi-game board, which gives the emulators room to run games accurately rather than just approximately.
• Upgradable. If something's not keeping up, you can swap a part. The cabinet outlives any one piece of hardware inside it.
• You're in charge of the content. You decide what goes on it, which also means you're responsible for keeping it above board. That's how it should be.

Heads up

The trade-off is setup, and it's not small. A board is plug and play. A PC is a PC: installing, configuring, mapping controls, getting it to boot straight into the front end instead of a desktop, tuning the video so it looks right on the monitor. You're signing up to be the system administrator of your own arcade.

That part doesn't scare me much. Honestly, it's half the fun.

Board vs. PC at a glance

	Pandora-style board	PC with CoinOPS
Setup	Plug and play, boots to a menu	Install, configure, map controls, tune video
Game list	Whatever was loaded at the factory	Yours to build and change
Emulation	Modest hardware, mixed results	Room to run games accurately
Content	Licensing is a fair question	You decide, and you keep it above board
Upgrades	Not much room to grow	Swap parts as needed

What's next

It's still in progress, so here's the rough to-do list:

• Controls. Getting the sticks and buttons wired to the PC and mapped so every game feels right without a keyboard nearby.
• Boot straight to the front end. Power on, arcade menu. Nobody should ever see a desktop.
• Video tuning. Making sure games display at the right aspect on the 4:3 panel, including the vertical ones.
• Curating the list. A shorter list of games I actually want to play beats a menu of five thousand things nobody will ever touch.
• The cabinet itself. Art, trim, and all the finishing work that makes it look like it belongs in an arcade instead of a garage.

I'll write it up properly once it's playable.