Exhibit / touch it
Cabinet anatomy
An upright arcade cabinet, cut open down the middle. Eight parts did the work, from the glowing sign at the top to the metal strip your shoes kicked at the bottom. Choose a number to find out what each one was for.
How to use the cutaway
The drawing is a side view of a made-up cabinet with the near side panel taken away, so you can see inside. Each numbered part is a button. Click or tap one, or press Tab to move between them and Enter to open one; the arrow keys step through them too. Walk through the parts goes from the top of the cabinet to the bottom, one press at a time. The slider tilts the monitor so you can see why it sat at an angle. Nothing moves on its own and nothing makes a sound.
The part
Choose a number
Pick any numbered part of the drawing, or walk through all eight from the top down.
Monitor tilt
Tilted 8 degrees back: overhead light bounces down toward the floor instead of into a standing player’s eyes.
All eight parts, as text
- 1. Marquee
- The lit sign at the top. A printed, see-through panel sat in front of a fluorescent tube, so the game’s name glowed across a dark room. Because it was only a sheet of plastic or glass, an operator could swap it in minutes when the game inside changed.
- 2. Speaker
- Usually one speaker, sometimes two, often fixed in the top of the cabinet or under the control panel and aimed at the player. Arcades were loud rooms, so game sounds were short and sharp, made to cut through the machines next door.
- 3. Monitor
- A picture tube, like a television’s but fed straight from the game board. It leaned back so that ceiling lights reflected away from the player’s eyes, and so the glass faced a standing person. For tall, narrow games the same kind of monitor was simply mounted on its side.
- 4. Control panel
- The shelf for your hands: a joystick and buttons, sometimes a trackball or a spinning knob. Underneath, a bundle of wires ran back to the board. Panels took more punishment than any other part, so the controls were cheap to replace and the panel usually lifted up on hinges.
- 5. Circuit board
- The printed circuit board is the game. It holds the processor, the memory chips that store the program and the pictures, and the circuits that make the image and the sound. The gold strip along one edge is the connector that plugs it into the rest of the cabinet.
- 6. Coin door
- A locked metal door with the coin slots. Behind it, a mechanism checked each coin’s size and weight and sent fakes back out. Good coins dropped into a box and clicked a mechanical counter. The door also hid the test buttons technicians used to check the machine.
- 7. Power supply
- Electricity from the wall is far too strong for chips. The power supply turned it into small, steady voltages: about five volts for the chips and twelve for the sound. Older cabinets used a heavy transformer you could feel in the weight of the machine; later ones used smaller switching supplies.
- 8. Kick plate
- A strip of metal across the bottom of the front. People stood close and shuffled their feet while they played, and shoes would soon have worn through bare wood. The kick plate took the knocks instead, which is why it is often the most scuffed part of an old cabinet.
Furniture with a computer inside
From the late 1970s to the late 1990s, most arcade games lived in an upright cabinet: a tall box of particle board or plywood, about as tall as an adult and often well over a hundred kilograms. It had to survive years of slaps, spilled drinks and people leaning on it, so the wood was thick, the edges were wrapped in a plastic strip called T-molding, and nearly everything that could break could be unbolted and swapped.
The outside sold the game. Art covered the sides, the marquee glowed, and when nobody was playing the screen ran a short demonstration called the attract mode.
The same box, many games
Inside, the game itself was usually one circuit board, sometimes two. Everything else, the screen, the speaker, the controls, the coin door and the power supply, was general equipment any game could use. Owners wanted to replace a game that had lost its crowd without buying a whole new cabinet. In 1985 a group of Japanese manufacturers agreed a standard plug for the board, one edge connector carrying power, picture, sound and controls. After that, changing the game could take minutes: swap the board, the marquee and the panel stickers, and the old box had a new name.
Other shapes
A cocktail cabinet was a low table with the screen facing up under glass; two players sat opposite each other, and the picture turned round for each player’s go. A sit-down cabinet put the player in a seat, for driving and flying games. Both were built from the same eight parts, arranged differently.
Leave the inside to the experts
Technicians opened these machines every week, but the part they treated with the most respect was the monitor. A picture tube runs on many thousands of volts and can hold a dangerous charge long after it is unplugged. If you meet an old cabinet, enjoy the outside and leave the inside to a trained adult.
Sources and further reading
The drawing and the notes are our own, written from general public references. These are good places to read more.
- Arcade cabinet (Wikipedia) Upright, cocktail and sit-down cabinets and their parts.
- JAMMA (Wikipedia) The 1985 wiring standard that let one cabinet run many games.
- Attract mode (Wikipedia) The demonstration loop a game shows while it waits for a player.
- Cathode-ray tube (Wikipedia) How the picture tube works, and why it stays dangerous when unplugged.
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Play the history
Cabinets from the years when every game came in a wooden box like this one.