I probably should put a permanent post up somewhere but I'll just give you a recap of info that may matter if you're interested in having your own emulation arcade cabinet. I highly recommend this forum to deep dive because it has sub-forums for controls, monitors, cabinets, etc. http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/
First, you need to understand your goal in creating a cabinet. Unlike some people, my goal was NOT recreating long-ago nostalgia like playing console games on my parent's living room TV. There's nothing wrong with that but as someone who wrote games professionally back in the 80s and later became a video engineer, I wanted to play these games in their original native resolutions, aspect ratios and frame rates. But my goal went beyond original authenticity to ideal authenticity. Even back in the day, an arcade cabinet's monitor would be left on 100 hours a week in an arcade and after five years be pretty thrashed. The joystick mechanisms would be worn and imprecise. Sometimes arcade manufacturers would cut corners by sourcing an inferior button instead of the top of the line. I had no interest in recreating that. I wanted to create the experience of playing the originals in their most ideal form. How they looked (or would have looked) with a brand new top of the line, period correct monitor perfectly calibrated, and pristine high-quality controls. What the manufacturer would have made in the 80s or 90s with no cost corners cut.
My cab is based around a 27" Wells Gardner D9200 quad-sync analog RGB CRT. Wells Gardner made high-quality industrial CRTs specifically to go in arcade cabinets (Atari, Sega, Namco, etc). The D9200 is one of the last and best monitors they made and I bought it new from them shortly before they went out of business. It's very flexible as it scans four ranges of frequencies 15khz, 24khz, 31.5khz and 38khz. This covers very nearly all of the resolutions and frequencies of any CRT raster-based arcade machines ever made by global arcade manufacturers. 38khz supports resolutions up to 800x600 non-interlaced which is what I run my game selection interface in. Scanning to higher frequencies is also nice for running games from some later consoles like Dreamcast which were capable of displaying 480p natively. This lets me run all the classic arcade games in the native resolution, frame rates and frequencies. No scaling, averaging or interpolation.
For my CRT to switch between all these frequencies on the fly it must be sent a properly formatted signal. Doing this natively is tricky and requires using a GPU with native analog RGB output. I use the last, fastest native analog RGB GPU - the Radeon R9 380x. The real magic however is using special display drivers and a special version of the MAME emulator called GroovyMAME to generate precisely correct horizontal and vertical frequencies matching the game code written for each arcade cabinet's original display hardware. GroovyMAME and the community around it have done remarkable work crucial to accurate historical preservation through precise emulation. Much of their work has now been mainstreamed into MAME, making it more accurate than ever. Dive into that rabbit hole here: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/board,52.0.html
To be clear, my high-end monitor and highly-tuned signal chain probably allow most of these games to look better than the original monitor in the original cabinet. While perfectly authentic, they aren't exactly 'historically accurate' because an average cabinet in an average arcade in the 1980s probably looked worse due to age, use and abuse. However, intentionally degrading original content to look worse to match some historical average jank, seems wrong to me. It's true some of the original monitors were connected with composite video, not component. Some of the cabinets had cheap, poorly shielded cables while mine has a double shielded broadcast studio cable with ferrite cores at both ends to eliminate cross-talk and noise. So I'm playing the original game code but presented as the people who made these games would have wanted their own personal cabinet - if they could take one home. However, I draw the line at modern revisionism like AI upscaling or frame gen. Because that's no longer the original pixels and frames in their most ideal form.
Next is choosing your controls. Fortunately, many of the manufacturers of original arcade cabinet controls are still around like Happ (buttons), Wico (joysticks), etc. My cabinet has controls for two players as well as a trackball for games like Marble Madness and a counter-weighted spinner for games like Tempest. These are all interfaced to the emulation PC in the cabinet through USB control boards made by companies like Ultimarc. Each of the buttons is also backlit by an RGB LED and the colors of each button change to the button color that was on the original cabinet, for example, when playing Joust player 1 is yellow and player 2 is blue. This also indicates which controls are active in each game.
Selecting games is done via a joystick driven menu. Software to do this is called a frontend and there are a variety ranging from open source to commercial. I use a commercial one called Launchbox because it handles calling various emulators, interfacing with control boards, organizing and maintaining the game library of thousands of titles across a dozen platforms very well. I actually use the BigBox mode of Launchbox which is made for dedicated emulation cabinets. Another nice touch is integrating various databases arcade historians have created. While browsing the game library it's fascinating to read the history of how the game was made, see the original arcade cabinet and the launch advertisement along with the usual game logo, title screen and gameplay video. Linked data like this allows you to follow the evolution of various game types, companies and franchises over time from their origin to their end point.
CONCLUSION: All of the above is, admittedly, pretty obsessive. If you want a terrific arcade/console emulation cabinet you DO NOT need to do what I did (or even half of it). However, I recommend not just buying a cheap mini cabinet from Costco. To be fair, while the worst cheapies are awful, the best of that class isn't that bad. But you can do much better with just a little more money, thought and care. Things like authentic arcade controls, and rolling your own cheap, used PC will allow you to run a frontend you can add other platforms and games to - and - MOST IMPORTANTLY run a CRT emulation pixel shader on the output. I recently upgraded the PC in my cabinet and bought a used corporate PC on eBay for less than $100 delivered. It's more than fast enough to emulate everything up to PS2 perfectly and I have no interest in emulating later consoles on a CRT cabinet because that's when games started being written for flat screens. I love my CRT but I'm not a purist. CRTs are expensive, hard to maintain and finnicky analog gear. As a video engineer I have to admit recent versions of the best CRT emulation shaders like CRT Royal running on a high-end flat screen are very impressive. If I was building my cabinet today, I might go with a very carefully selected, high-end flat screen instead of a CRT. Frankly, the kind of flat screen I'd want might cost more than a very good used CRT but it would provide some flexibility to do things a CRT can't. And there would be some trade-offs vs my best-ever-made CRT but engineering is all about trade-offs and there's nothing that's ever going to be perfectly ideal on every dimension someone like me cares about.
I'll be the first to admit that I may have gone a little overboard in creating my arcade emulation cabinet. But given I started in the industry creating games in the 1980s, hung out in the arcades, owned and repaired arcade machines and, later, went into video engineering - maybe it's not that crazy. Plus, at the time I made this cabinet I still had several original arcade cabinets but needed to make room in my basement arcade for more pinball machines. So I decided to see if I could make "One cabinet to replace them all." And I got sufficiently close.
When my cabinet was new I played it almost daily for the first year. Now I play it at least once or twice a week but I've had the cabinet for nearly 15 years (and have upgraded the PC and front-end a couple times). However, there are still periods were I play it almost daily. These tend to happen either when I get into deep diving a genre (for example, Japanese shmups) or when there's a significant new title enabled (or fixed) in MAME or another emulator that I find especially interesting.
An example would be when the unreleased Atari game Marble Madness II was added to MAME. This was an extremely rare unreleased ROM which was unfortunately hoarded by a couple of collectors for many years and considered 'at-risk' from a historical preservation perspective. Once the game ROM finally found it's way to being safely archived online, MAME added support for it. To be clear, Marble Madness II was unreleased for good reason (the reason being it sucked). But I love the first Marble Madness and it's a historically significant, influential title (with an awesome soundtrack) so diving into its (wisely) aborted descendant was fascinating. It is, indeed, not at all a good game. What was interesting was exploring the ways it's not good, and most importantly - why. After all, it's based on a now-legendary mega-hit game with an innovative play style and distinctive visuals. That should be pretty hard to screw up. As you might guess, none of the original Marble Madness team were involved in MMII. But, clearly the MMII team played a ton of the original, yet they somehow managed to misunderstand what made it so great.
Other times, I'll boot up the cabinet because some classic game I never really got into will be featured on a retro-gaming blog or YT channel and that'll pique my interest in exploring the title as well as its precursors and descendants. That's why it's handy to have the full game libraries of every arcade cabinet title, a couple dozen 80s home computers and every game from every home console from the first generation (Atari VCS - 1977) to the sixth generation (Sony PS2/Gamecube - 2001) all browsable by platform, year, manufacturer, play style, genre and rating. When I come across some reference to a game on the Japanese Sharp X68000 computer being a derivative of an earlier game on the Amiga 1000, and both being inspired by a 1982 arcade title - I can play them all back-to-back and compare. I doubt I'll ever not love being able to conveniently play any classic retro-game in a full cabinet with top notch controls, pixel/frame accuracy and maximum fidelity.
