The complaint arrives about a week after the cabinet does. It looked right in the photographs, it plays fine, and you are bent slightly forward the entire time. This is not a defect and it is not you being unusually tall. It is a consequence of the format, and it has a known fix that most people buy too late.

Why it happens

A commercial upright arcade cabinet stands somewhere between 65 and 78 inches tall, and its control panel sits around 34 inches off the floor. An Arcade1Up cabinet is about 4 feet tall. It is a faithful reproduction of the top two thirds of an arcade machine and it is missing the bottom third - which, in the original, was mostly empty cabinet whose entire job was holding the panel at the right height.

So the machine is not badly designed. It is deliberately shipped short, because a 4-foot box fits in a car and on a shelf and through a doorway, and the missing foot is sold separately.

What a riser actually does

The official risers add one foot - 12 inches - and take the cabinet from about 4 feet to about 5. They are all-wood, they match the cabinet's footprint, and they are sold per cabinet family rather than universally. The Classic SE riser, for example, measures roughly 20.5 x 19.75 x 13.25 inches assembled and is listed as fitting cabinets 44 to 46 inches tall.

That "fitting cabinets 44 to 46 inches tall" line is the one to read twice. Risers are not interchangeable across the whole Arcade1Up range. Footprints differ between the standard cabinets, the deluxe ones, the counter-cades and the pinball machines, and a riser that is the wrong footprint is either unstable or visibly wrong or both. Buy the riser named for your cabinet.

The measurement that decides it

Before you order anything, measure your own machine - not a number from a listing, because the range varies more than people expect between models.

Stand at the cabinet the way you would play it. Measure from the floor to the surface of the control panel. That number is the whole question.

  • Around 34 inches is what an original commercial upright gave you. It is what your memory of an arcade is calibrated to.
  • Around 42 inches is the height usually recommended for comfortable standing play, and it is roughly where a 12-inch riser lands a stock cabinet.
  • Under about 32 inches and you will hunch, regardless of how tall you are. This is where most stock Arcade1Up cabinets sit.

Now the part the product pages will not tell you. A 12-inch riser is sized for someone of average height. If you are over about 6 feet 2 inches, a stock riser gets you close but not all the way, and you will still be looking down more than you want to. The fix is not a second riser - it is a plinth under the riser, which is a much easier thing to build than it sounds.

Building the extra height

A plinth is a box. It carries a load in compression, it is completely hidden, and it does not need to be beautiful - which makes it the single most forgiving woodworking project attached to this hobby.

  • Match the footprint of the riser, not the cabinet. The riser is what sits on it, and an overhang is a stubbed toe waiting to happen.
  • 3/4 inch plywood is plenty. Sheet goods are stiffer than they look once they are a closed box.
  • Make it a box, not a frame. Four sides and a top, screwed and glued. An open frame racks; a closed box does not.
  • Add 3 to 4 inches, not more. Height helps until the centre of gravity gets away from you. A 5-foot cabinet on a 4-inch plinth is stable. The same cabinet on a 10-inch tower is a thing you will worry about around children.
  • Paint it matte black. It disappears, and disappearing is the entire design brief.

If you would rather not build anything, the alternative is to go the other way and sit down. A bar-height stool around 32 inches puts you at the right height for a stock cabinet and leaves leg room underneath. This is a completely legitimate answer and it is what a lot of cocktail and counter-cade owners land on. It is also cheaper than a riser.

What a riser will not fix

Two things get blamed on height that are not height:

  • Screen angle. Arcade1Up screens sit at a fixed angle chosen for a seated eye line at stock height. Raising the cabinet raises the screen with it, so the angle relative to you barely changes. If the screen is the problem, the riser will not solve it.
  • Panel feel. A stock panel that feels vague at 30 inches feels vague at 42. That is a lever and gate question, not a height question, and it is a cheaper fix than a riser.

The order to do this in

Measure the panel height first. If it is under 32 inches and you play standing, buy the riser named for your cabinet - it is the single largest improvement available for the money, and it changes how often the machine gets used rather than how it plays.

If you are tall, budget an afternoon and about twenty dollars of plywood for a plinth on top of that. If you play sitting down, skip the riser entirely and buy a stool.

Cabinets, risers, stools and the parts that go with them are in Cabinets & Machines and Build Materials.