Is your arcade cabinet lacking in features or guide like speakers? Well This guide will show you how my Group improved our Arcade cabinet to be much more functional and have it look nice.

Step 1: Installing New Speakers.

one of the first things we did was that we implemented new speakers into our cabinet instead of just using the prebuild speakers that were inside our monitor that we used. For the new speakers we used old car speakers that we dug out of an old car that we had but you could probably buy them from an auto shop or at Best Buy.

After you have the new car speakers you most likely will need a amplifier as the speakers will be very quiet when you install them. Personally we just took the amplifier board out of an old set of speakers and just soldered the car speakers to the amplifier board but for most it would be easier to just buy an external amplifier. For the speaker grill you could either buy the grills or if you have the technology you could 3D print the grills.

Step 2: Wiring the Arcade Buttons Using XArcade.

So lets say that originally you wired the arcade machine buttons to work using a IPAC controller or some other way of wiring the buttons. Personally we switched out the IPAC controller for the XArcade wiring harness as we found it more efficient and user friendly to setup. You can buy the kit for the XArcade here. the kit comes with 20 buttons, 2 arcade joysticks and a usb connector. Each XArcade connector corresponds to a certain button input and can be setup as you please

Step 3: PC or PI?

So last but not least you have the important decision of do you want to power your arcade using a PC or a Raspberry PI? With a PC you will be working with a more powerful machine and also a more user friendly machine. the one downside with a PC is that it is a very sizable machine and it will take a lot of room. With a Raspberry PI you have a much more compact linux machine that would be very easy to fit inside of an arcade machine. The PI even has a operating system that is made for retro gaming called Retropie. The downside of the pi is that it is less powerfull than a PC.

Step 4: Final Touches.

After you have desided that you have every enhancement that you need for your cabinet it's time to make the cabinet look nice. For example you may want to get a banner to display at the top of your cabinet or you could add a decal and a paint job to the sides of the cabinet. After you are done the touch ups to the cabinet you should be done!