The first question most people ask when they decide to build a retro arcade cabinet is which Raspberry Pi to buy. Resist that urge. It’s the most fun question and the least useful one.
Start instead with what you want the thing to play. Everything downstream depends on it.
Your game list is your blueprint
A cabinet built for Pac-Man, Galaga and other early arcade games needs a far simpler control panel than one built for Street Fighter, four-player beat-’em-ups or Golden Tee. Some fighting games want six action buttons per player. Others lean on a trackball, a spinner or some other special control.
Player count matters just as much, especially when a tidy two-player panel quietly becomes a four-player panel and takes your whole layout with it.
Mock the controls up on cardboard before you drill into wood. It costs almost nothing and saves the expensive mistake. One widely shared Raspberry Pi build did exactly that, testing the panel layout before committing to the final material.
From there you’ve got three paths for the cabinet body: cut your own from plywood or MDF, buy a flat-pack kit or repurpose an existing cabinet. The electronics can be tiny. The furniture around them is where the project starts getting ideas above its station.
The parts list is shorter than you think
You need a display, joystick and buttons, a USB encoder, a computer, storage, speakers and power hardware. That’s the spine of it.
The encoder sits between the arcade controls and the computer, turning button presses and joystick movements into inputs the machine understands. It’s the least glamorous part and the one people forget to budget for.
A Raspberry Pi still fits a lot of classic arcade games. The 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 currently goes for $65, and Recalbox 10.0.8 says it works just as well as the 4GB version. Once that board is sealed inside a cabinet, the extra RAM mostly lengthens the receipt.
An old desktop or mini PC is the other route, and a good one if you’ve got something collecting dust or you want headroom for newer systems. Batocera runs on x86 PCs and says modern Intel integrated graphics can already handle decent emulation. But hardware demands climb as the consoles and arcade systems you’re emulating get hungrier.
The software names trip everyone up
EmulationStation isn’t an alternative to a Raspberry Pi or a PC. It’s a front end, a menu for browsing and launching games. Recalbox and Batocera bundle that kind of interface together with emulators and other tools.
RetroPie remains popular, though its current weekly-image directory doesn’t list a Raspberry Pi 5 image.
Pi 5 builders have two more things to sort out. Raspberry Pi says cooling is optional for normal use but helps prevent thermal throttling under sustained heavy loads, which a cabinet running all evening will produce. And the Pi 5 dropped the 3.5mm audio jack that earlier versions had, so plan your sound accordingly.
Where the innocent shopping list multiplies
Beyond the cabinet, display and computer, you may need monitor mounting hardware, a microSD card or SSD, an amplifier and speakers, a power strip, cables, cooling fans and some way to open the cabinet later without dismantling half your work.
Artwork, illuminated marquees, T-molding and coin doors can wait until the machine is actually a machine.
Game Room Solutions shows how quickly even a modest build climbs. Its basic bartop cabinet is on sale for $129.99. A two-player joystick, button, wiring and USB encoder package runs $44.99. The speaker and amplifier package adds $29.99. Drop in a $65 Raspberry Pi 5 2GB and you’re at roughly $270 with no display, no storage, no Pi power supply, no cables and nothing decorative.
Cheaper than buying? Depends what’s in your garage
Reusing hardware changes the math completely. An old monitor and PC knock out two of the biggest line items, and a DIY enclosure beats a CNC-cut kit on price. Buy everything new and a full-size custom cabinet can pass $1,000 without anything extravagant on it.
Building sometimes costs less than buying. The reliable win isn’t the money, it’s the control over the screen, the games, the controls and the hardware inside.
One more thing to settle before you power it on. MAME points users toward licensed software, ROM sets released for free non-commercial use or data they dump themselves from arcade PCBs they own.
For comparison, Arcade1Up currently lists its Pac-Man Deluxe at $499.99.
