About Arcade Tsunami
A technical reference for arcade hardware — spec sheets, owner consensus and a full game database, for people who evaluate a cabinet the way they'd evaluate a server.
The point
What this site is
Most arcade-cabinet pages online are a photo, a price, and a paragraph of adjectives. That is useless if you actually want to know whether the control panel can take a Sanwa stick, whether the monitor is a real 4:3 panel or a stretched 16:9 one, or whether the 3,000 bundled games include the twelve you actually care about.
Arcade Tsunami is built around the assumption that you want the spec sheet. Every cabinet, control set and build part on this site gets its measurements, its panel layout, its moddability notes, and a summary of what owners say breaks first.
Games are first-class
The thing that makes this site different from a catalogue: every arcade title has its own page, and cabinets are linked to the games they actually run. That buys you two things nobody else offers.
- Reverse lookup. Start from the game. "I want to play Tempest — which cabinets include it?" is a question you can answer here in one click.
- Control-compatibility warnings. Tempest needs a spinner. Discs of Tron needs a rotary joystick. A cabinet can technically "include" those games and still play them terribly on a plain 8-way stick. Where we know a title will play badly on a given panel, we say so on the page.
Browse the game database to start from a title instead of a product.
Where the information comes from
We are explicit about sourcing, because "trust us" is not a spec.
- Specifications come from manufacturer documentation and listing data, cross-checked against owner photographs where the listing is vague or contradicts itself.
- Owner consensus is summarised from published customer reviews. When a complaint recurs across many owners — mushy sticks, thin speakers, a cabinet that is too short for adults — we record it as a pattern and link the part owners replace it with. Review excerpts are quoted for commentary and link back to their source.
- Prices and availability come from the Amazon Product Advertising API and are refreshed at least every 24 hours. Each product page shows the timestamp of its last refresh. Whatever Amazon shows at the moment of purchase is the price that applies.
How this is paid for
Display advertising and affiliate commission. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases made through outbound product links, at no extra cost to you. Neither advertisers nor commission rates influence our ratings — nobody can buy a better score here.
The complete affiliate disclosure and our rating method are on the Rules & Disclosure page. What we collect and which cookies get set is on the privacy policy.
The community side
Accounts are free and optional. With one you can post to the Social Wall, show off a build in Hall of Fame, enter the monthly contests, and keep a list of your own cabinet's parts. Posting rules are on the rules page; they are short and mostly amount to not being tiresome.
Corrections
Spec sheets go stale and manufacturers quietly change panels between production runs. If something here is wrong, tell us through the contact page and we will fix it and say what changed. Corrections from owners with the hardware in front of them are the single most useful thing anyone sends us.