The Arcade category gathers the coin-op systems. It holds two large multi-manufacturer collections, MAME and FinalBurn Neo, which together cover tens of thousands of games; the dedicated Sega and Sammy arcade platforms of the 1990s and 2000s (NAOMI, NAOMI 2, NAOMI GD-ROM, Model 3, ST-V, Atomiswave); and two special cases, Daphne for LaserDisc games and DICE for the discrete-logic cabinets that predate the microprocessor.
Unlike console games, arcade games come as romsets: a .zip (or .7z) archive holding the content of the original chips, which must not be renamed, unzipped or modified. Each emulator expects a specific romset version: a set built for a recent MAME will not run under FinalBurn Neo, and the other way round. This is the number one reason why a game refuses to start — each system page states the version it expects.
New in Recalbox 10.1: the dedicated Mednafen_STV core for the ST-V, libretro-hypseus-singe for the Singe and Singe 2 games of Daphne, significantly better performance on NAOMI 2 (Vulkan, including on CRT) and on Model 3 (+15% FPS on Raspberry Pi 5). Arcade sticks are now configured automatically on every system, and GunCon 2 aiming accuracy has been fixed.
| System | Manufacturer | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Daphne (LaserDisc) | Arcade (LaserDisc) | 1993 |
| DICE | Arcade (discrete logic) | 1972 |
| FinalBurn Neo | Arcade (multi-manufacturer) | 2019 |
| MAME | Arcade (multi-manufacturer) | 1997 |
| Sammy Atomiswave | Sammy | 2003 |
| Sega Model 3 | Sega | 1996 |
| Sega NAOMI | Sega | 1998 |
| Sega NAOMI 2 | Sega | 2000 |
| Sega NAOMI GD-ROM | Sega | 2000 |
| Sega ST-V (Titan Video) | Sega | 1995 |
On Raspberry Pi 5, the older MAME 2003, 2001, 2015 and AdvanceMAME builds have been removed: the recent MAME runs the whole game set with better performance.
Nothing benefits from dedicated hardware as much as arcade games: a stick, a two-player panel, or even a real cabinet. The Arcade in Recalbox page covers romsets, emulator versions and input devices, and the Recalbox RGB JAMMA kit plugs a Raspberry Pi straight into a JAMMA cabinet.