Zoyous

When I ordered the Astro City Mini from Amazon.co.jp, the shipping worked out to be 3255 JPY or roughly $30 USD.

I would guess the $25 part is an encoder board to connect the buttons and joystick to the Pi. But I think you'd also need another ~$25 part to convert the HDMI out from the Pi to whatever input the A1up monitor uses. I've just gathered this from watching various modding tutorial videos. I think you have to do a bit of research as the monitor types vary between some of the cabinets.

I agree with some of what you're saying, but in another way it makes me wonder what you're contributing in QA or whatever advisory capacity you're in. As far as the appearance of the cabinet, there is certainly a significant portion of people who will spend more time looking at these cabinets and just having them around as retro works of art than will actually play them. That lines up with the segment of the market that is drawn to the accuracy of the miniatures made by New Wave Toys and Numskull. Yes, there's always something to nitpick but we have seen improvements along the way, so there is still a purpose to discussing what looks good and what could be better. As far as actual gameplay is concerned, you can say that only a tiny percentage of people are experts and will ever notice any problems. But for better or worse, these cabinets are going to drive arcade gaming into the future and some fraction of casual players who try these replica cabinets will discover that they have a lot of talent that they can then develop into highly skilled play. So an expert like yourself should really be advocating for those players and that possibility rather than just shrugging and saying most people can't play well enough to ever notice a problem with the control layout. "Most people won't notice" is the position already taken by the bean counters. There needs to be experts with a seat at the table (i.e., you) who can articulate why it's worth the extra effort to make the design better.

It's actually pretty accurate to the original "big blue" style cabinet. But I agree, it's kind of a weird-looking cabinet. I do like that A1up has finally angled the control panel on one of these.

Although I'm not crazy about the split design (I know it's based on a real split design cab, though), I do like how the Galaga artwork is larger and more centered than it was on the original A1up Galaga cab. Pretty cool that it has wifi for high scores.

Mukor rules your kitchen!

Oh, this uses a special controller? That explains why I can hardly aim! (Well, partially explains it...)

I believe Tron and Satan's Hollow are both 512x480 (vertically oriented). Most games throughout the 80s were more in the neighborhood of 320x240 so it was pretty striking in that regard.

Sorry, I don't mean to come across so harsh with my opinion on it! I did pump a good amount of quarters into it back in the day. I never did see a Discs of Tron machine, though.

Tron (the movie) is super cool, a 100% unique piece of cinema, although the concept of the world doesn't really hold up that well to close scrutiny, which may be one part of why it's been difficult to keep it going as a series. But the CG is gorgeous and the work that went into it was immense, in a time when there were no GUIs for creating such models and animations, and the rendering times were formidable to say the least. Even as a young kid, I knew the arcade machines of the day couldn't match the type of visuals seen in the movie, but I figured the arcade game could have been done with 3D vector graphics like Battlezone. But in that era it might have been the case that only Atari was capable of pulling that off. Still, Tron did have a much higher resolution monitor than was common at that time (and really even for the rest of the 80s). I think the same monitor might have been used for Satan's Hollow.

I agree, although people get so worked up about that cabinet I try to hold my tongue. But yeah, it's four bad minigames really. But the cabinet is super cool.