How about a sleek, wall-hung arcade cabinet glowing with RGB flair, pumping out pixel-perfect classics like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, all without eating up your living room floor space? It’s the kind of setup that makes you want to dig out your old quarter stash and cancel your weekend plans. Umbrella Arcades’ Wall-Mounted Arcade, a $4,380 steel-clad beast packing 20,000+ games, has been turning heads for its museum-quality polish and plug-and-play prowess. But when Linus Tech Tips, the internet’s favorite tech tinkerer, saw it, their reaction was quintessentially LTT: “We could totally build that ourselves.”
Linus and the LTT crew set out to replicate the essence of Umbrella’s Wall-Mounted Arcade—a compact, wall-mounted multicade with a modern PC heart—without the eye-watering price tag. Umbrella’s version boasts an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS, Radeon 780M graphics, 16GB DDR5 RAM, and a 4TB M.2 drive, all wrapped in a 135-pound steel frame with Sanwa joysticks and a detachable control deck. It’s a love letter to arcade purists and emulation nerds alike, supporting everything from Atari 2600 to PS3. LTT’s goal? Build a comparable machine using off-the-shelf parts, a Minisforum Venus UM790 Pro mini PC as the brains, and a custom enclosure that screams “we didn’t just buy this from a catalog.”
- 14 Classic Games Included: Play Mortal Kombat I–3, Ultimate MK3, and 10 more retro hits like Rampage, Paperboy, and Gauntlet for nonstop arcade...
- Authentic Arcade Feel: Real-feel joysticks, responsive buttons, and dual speakers deliver a true arcade experience in the comfort of your home
- Crisp 17-Inch Display: BOE color monitor showcases every detail, from pixel-perfect punches to vibrant retro graphics, just like the original machines
The catch: they wanted to keep costs well below Umbrella’s $4,380, ideally under $2,000, while matching its retro aesthetic and performance. It’s the kind of bold plan that makes you admire their hustle—until the actual build and mounting of hardware begins.
The LTT build begins with the Minisforum Venus UM790 Pro, a compact powerhouse rocking an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS and Radeon 780M graphics. It’s not quite the beast Umbrella’s Ryzen 7 7840HS is, but with 32GB DDR5 RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD, it’s more than capable of handling 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 cabinets. They start with a jigsaw, sketching outlines with a straightedge and a suspiciously mug-shaped curve template. But the jigsaw’s wobbly cuts spark a pivot to a bandsaw, which slices through the MDF with cleaner lines, shaping the cabinet’s frame, marquee panel, and control deck. To smooth the bandsaw’s handiwork, they break out a router, running it along edges to erase imperfections and give the MDF a near-professional finish.
The control deck is where things get spicy. LTT sources Sanwa joysticks and buttons from Ultimarc, matching Umbrella’s commercial-grade quality. They opt for a two-player setup with eight buttons per side. The detachable control panel, inspired by Umbrella’s design, uses magnetic mounts for easy swaps.
The display is a 32-inch 1440p IPS monitor from ASUS, chosen because it gets the job done without breaking the bank. It’s not the 4K OLED of a high-end Umbrella unit, but at $100 (after shipping) on eBay, it’s a budget win. Audio comes from a pair of Logitech speakers tucked into the enclosure, delivering punchy sound for Pac-Man chomps and Mortal Kombat fatalities.
If the heart of LTT’s wall-mounted arcade is its Ryzen 9-powered Minisforum UM790 Pro, the soul is Batocera, the Linux-based emulation OS that Linus and crew leaned into for this build. Batocera is the darling of DIY arcade builders, a one-stop shop that bundles emulators, a slick interface, and enough customization to make even the pickiest retro gamer swoon. Think of it as the software equivalent of a well-lit arcade marquee: it draws you in, makes navigation a breeze, and hides the messy wiring (or in this case, config files) behind the scenes. For LTT’s build, Batocera is tasked with wrangling over 10,000 games across 50+ systems, from Frogger on the Atari 2600 to Tekken 3 on the PlayStation.
