• @MajorHavoc
    21•25 days ago

    As someone who sometimes buys these, the price, when on sale, is often cheaper than buying wood and hardware to build my own outer cabinet, control deck and screen.

    There’s trade-offs - the materials used aren’t quite as nice as I would pick, but then the included, already applied, art is very nice. And there’s the convenience of not having to plan out all the details like control layout, monitor, side art, top bezel.

    To me, it’s really a piece of furniture, rather an affordable way to play the included games.

    The CPU cores also only last about 5 years, for me. Which isn’t good, considering that a cheap modern computer will easily last 8-15 years.

    I, personally, don’t give a ton of consideration to the included games. I’m really just buying the outer shell and licensed artwork. That’s what I’ll be looking at when not playing.

    I’ll replace the innards with a Raspberry Pi when it dies, if not sooner. So I’ll play whatever games I want that fit the control scheme.

    I also replace all of the controls, about half the time. The included controls outlast the CPU core, but don’t feel as nice to play on as a set that’s reasonably easy to replace them with.

      • @MajorHavoc
        10•25 days ago

        So, they are just a fancy decoration?

        Exactly. There’s so many better ways to play these games:

        • Pandora’s Box
        • Batocera / Emulation Station / RetroPi on a Raspberry Pi
        • Various mini systems with a jailbreak (Sega Genesis Mini and PlayStation Classic are particularly good)
        • SteamDeck or PC with Emulation Station and RetroArch

        So the price is really only justifiable, to me, by thinking of the cabinet being a piece of the decorated furniture.

          • @MajorHavoc
            7•25 days ago

            Pandora’s Box is a game machine, with games pre-loaded. It tends to have thousands of arcade games pre-loaded.

            It’s a popular choice for restoring actual full size arcade machines, with dead motherboards. It’s also an option to upgrade (or just revive from motherboard death) an Arcade1Up.

            With some effort, a cheap PC will do the same job, but some folks like that they’re premade and ready to use.