After our RetroArch vs. LaunchBox comparison, the question we got most often wasn't "which one is better?" — it was "what else is out there?"
Fair question. LaunchBox is excellent, but three things push people to look elsewhere: Big Box is a paid license, it's Windows-only, and the animated video-heavy themes want a reasonably modern PC. If any of those is a dealbreaker for your build, here's what we've actually run on cabinets in the shop.
Quick comparison
Every one of these is free.
1. RetroArch
Still the obvious first stop. It's a frontend and the emulators, so there's one install to maintain instead of ten. The menu takes an evening to learn, but the CRT shaders alone make it worth having on any cabinet — even if another frontend is the thing your visitors actually see.
Trade-off: the interface was never designed to look impressive on a 32" marquee-lit screen.
2. Playnite
Our pick if your cabinet isn't purely retro. Playnite pulls in Steam, GOG, Epic, and emulated libraries into one list, scrapes artwork, and has a fullscreen mode built for a controller. It's free and open source, and the theme community is genuinely active.
Trade-off: Windows only, same as LaunchBox, so it doesn't help if you're trying to get off Windows.
3. EmulationStation Desktop Edition (ES-DE)
The grown-up version of the EmulationStation everyone knows from the Raspberry Pi world. Clean, fast, consistent, with solid theme support and a scraper that works without much fiddling. On a two-player cab it looks the part immediately.
Trade-off: less flashy than Big Box — no full-screen game preview videos out of the box in every theme.
4. Pegasus Frontend
Built for people who want to design their own look. Themes are written in QML, which means near-total control if you're willing to learn a little of it. It runs comfortably on hardware that makes Big Box stutter.
Trade-off: the theme selection is smaller, and the best results need you to build your own.
5. Attract-Mode
The most "arcade" option here. It was designed for cabinets, with configurable attract-mode loops that cycle game videos when nobody's playing — exactly the behavior an original cabinet had. Very light on resources, happy on a Pi.
Trade-off: setup is config-file driven. Expect a text editor, not a settings screen.
6. Batocera.linux
Not a frontend on top of your OS — a whole bootable OS. Write it to a USB stick, plug it into an old tower, and that machine becomes an arcade with nothing installed to the hard drive. Hard to beat for a cabinet you don't want to maintain.
Trade-off: you give up using that PC for anything else while it's booted, and adding non-supported software is more work.
7. RetroBat
EmulationStation's presentation, packaged for Windows with emulators preconfigured. It's the shortest path we've found from "bare Windows install" to "working cabinet" without buying a license.
Trade-off: it very much wants to manage its own folder structure. Fighting it is not worth the time.
What we put in our own builds
For a dedicated arcade cabinet with a marquee and a control panel, we reach for Attract-Mode or Batocera — both look right, both run on modest hardware, and neither costs anything.
For a cabinet that doubles as a PC gaming machine, Playnite is the one. Modern games and emulated classics in the same list, with a controller-friendly fullscreen mode.
And RetroArch stays installed on every single one of them, because it's still the best emulation backend regardless of what's sitting in front of it.
If none of these bother you and you like Big Box, keep it — our original comparison still stands. The point is that a paid license isn't a requirement to end up with a cabinet that looks and feels finished.
Building the cabinet to go with it
Software is the easy half. If you're still working on the physical side, our panel configurator lays out a control panel to your button spacing and we CNC it in-house on Baltic birch, MDF, or plexiglass — and the screen mask service hides the unused monitor area so only the arcade screen shows.