How a few glossy, wall-hung arcade cupboard glowing with RGB aptitude, pumping out pixel-perfect classics like Road Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, all with out consuming up your front room ground area? It’s the type of setup that makes you wish to dig out your outdated quarter stash and cancel your weekend plans. Umbrella Arcades’ Wall-Mounted Arcade, a $4,380 steel-clad beast packing 20,000+ video games, has been turning heads for its museum-quality polish and plug-and-play prowess. However when Linus Tech Ideas, the web’s favourite tech tinkerer, noticed it, their response was quintessentially LTT: “We might completely construct that ourselves.”
Linus and the LTT crew got down to replicate the essence of Umbrella’s Wall-Mounted Arcade—a compact, wall-mounted multicade with a contemporary PC coronary heart—with out the eye-watering price ticket. Umbrella’s model boasts an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS, Radeon 780M graphics, 16GB DDR5 RAM, and a 4TB M.2 drive, all wrapped in a 135-pound metal body with Sanwa joysticks and a removable management deck. It’s a love letter to arcade purists and emulation nerds alike, supporting the whole lot from Atari 2600 to PS3. LTT’s purpose? Construct a comparable machine utilizing off-the-shelf components, a Minisforum Venus UM790 Professional mini PC because the brains, and a customized enclosure that screams “we didn’t simply purchase this from a catalog.”
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Arcade1Up Mortal Kombat II Deluxe Arcade Machine
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The catch: they needed to maintain prices properly under Umbrella’s $4,380, ideally beneath $2,000, whereas matching its retro aesthetic and efficiency. It’s the type of daring plan that makes you admire their hustle—till the precise construct and mounting of {hardware} begins.
The LTT construct begins with the Minisforum Venus UM790 Professional, a compact powerhouse rocking an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS and Radeon 780M graphics. It’s not fairly the beast Umbrella’s Ryzen 7 7840HS is, however with 32GB DDR5 RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD, it’s greater than able to dealing with MAME, RetroArch, and even heavier emulators like PCSX2 for PS2 titles.
For the enclosure, LTT dives into 1/2-inch MDF—medium-density fiberboard, the workhorse of DIY cupboards. They begin with a jigsaw, sketching outlines with a straightedge and a suspiciously mug-shaped curve template. However the jigsaw’s wobbly cuts spark a pivot to a bandsaw, which slices by means of the MDF with cleaner traces, shaping the cupboard’s body, marquee panel, and management deck. To clean the bandsaw’s handiwork, they get away a router, working it alongside edges to erase imperfections and provides the MDF a near-professional end.
The management deck is the place issues get spicy. LTT sources Sanwa joysticks and buttons from Ultimarc, matching Umbrella’s commercial-grade high quality. They go for a two-player setup with eight buttons per facet. The removable management panel, impressed by Umbrella’s design, makes use of magnetic mounts for straightforward swaps.
The show is a 32-inch 1440p IPS monitor from ASUS, chosen as a result of it will get the job completed with out breaking the financial institution. It’s not the 4K OLED of a high-end Umbrella unit, however at $100 (after transport) on eBay, it’s a price range win. Audio comes from a pair of Logitech audio system tucked into the enclosure, delivering punchy sound for Pac-Man chomps and Mortal Kombat fatalities.
If the center of LTT’s wall-mounted arcade is its Ryzen 9-powered Minisforum UM790 Professional, the soul is Batocera, the Linux-based emulation OS that Linus and crew leaned into for this construct. Batocera is the darling of DIY arcade builders, a one-stop store that bundles emulators, a slick interface, and sufficient customization to make even the pickiest retro gamer swoon. Consider it because the software program equal of a well-lit arcade marquee: it attracts you in, makes navigation a breeze, and hides the messy wiring (or on this case, config information) behind the scenes. For LTT’s construct, Batocera is tasked with wrangling over 10,000 video games throughout 50+ methods, from Frogger on the Atari 2600 to Tekken 3 on the PlayStation.
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