That's basically the only way to go in .au if you want some level of quality.
I'll give you a little history lesson about arcade games in Australia....
Back in the day here there was only one company making/importing arcade games called 'Leisure & Allied Industries' and they had their own chain of arcades called 'Time Zone'. There were a few smaller arcades but they didn't have much and a lot of that were bootlegs like Crazy Kong and other games with psychedelic colors running on bootlegged Galaxian hardware.
They would build their own cabs (unlicensed/bootlegged) and they would also put in bootleg PCBs (really nasty pieces of crap) that they had copied in China. They even bootlegged Daytona USA but the bootleg was so big it didn't fit in the cab, which is kind of funny. They also copied the marquees, control panel overlays, side art (if it had it, most were bare wood grain vinyl chip board/plywood, formica in green, red, blue or yellow or painted black) and they used cheapo crappy micro-switch joysticks and buttons made by some .au company called MCR (the joysticks are known as 'MCR Joysticks'.
Almost every cab here in .au is an LAI copy cab. The early ones were reasonable quality and pretty solid but later they were very cheap and nasty using MDF. They also had their own cab styles like "Low Boy", "Fat Boy" with a stupid pinout called "universal" and there was a game-X to universal harness in the cab that joined the cab to the PCB. The additional harness dropped the voltage so much that they had to add extra dual red/black wires and molex plug that joined directly to the switching Chou PSU because without it, maxing the voltage pot resulted in about 4.5v or slightly less. Eventually most of the cabs went to JAMMA. In the above pic the small brown cabs are kind of like the cabaret cabs you mention a lot in your vids but they are called "Low Boy", are very solid, using the universal wiring with a big front access door and rear access door too, so they are great to work on. The Fat Boys are the typical 2 or 4 player Turtles type cabs with JAMMA wiring and 25" tube and were used for Street Fighter II, Simpsons, XMen etc. There was also a 38" showcase type cab used mostly with gun games like Point Blank, Police Trainer etc and a few other common styles, but regardless everything is copied. There are no genuine original cabs here in Australia. At least not genuine Japanese/USA cabs that were built in the 80's (maybe some genuine cabs were imported later by other companies). There are no genuine control panels, no genuine marquees, no original anything from the 80's. They printed their own marquees/CP overlays etc and it included their company logo too.
When PCBs got too complicated to copy (late 80's and later with multiple custom chips and protection devices etc) they would fit the original PCBs but they still copied the cabs/panels/marquees etc.
At some point they fitted 'genuine kits' to their home made cabs. They would copy the cab and everything else was genuine, including control panel, side art, PCB etc. Their butcherism extended to every cab from the simplest wooden joystick/button cabs right up to metal base and metal tubing twin driving games like Daytona and Sega Rally (sub-contracted out to an .au company called 'Gamemasters') and it continued as-is until the company shut down around ~2000. I believe they are still going in some form somewhere on the east coast but are now exclusively doing redemption games. There were even unscrupulous companies selling those later copied cabs as genuine/original and charging huge prices.
The only genuine-factory-made arcade games here in the 80's were pinball machines.
So basically I have those Japanese sit-down machines because they are the nicest thing available nowadays, and personally I prefer to sit down and relax while playing. The 29" screens are pretty awesome too.
There's two Sega Astro City cabs. One nearest the camera is running Sega's Dynamic Golf (NAOMI) with a genuine control panel. A local buddy who runs a business repairing arcade monitors converted the dual res Nanao MS-7 to tri-res to handle the 31.5k sync (he's a monitor wizard and is always super busy doing repairs to monitors sent from all over the planet, in many cases monitors that others deemed unrepairable).
The other Astro City has a Time Crisis in it (Namco Super System 22) with Nanao MS-7 monitor. I have a full set of Namco SS22 games and can swap out any of those games into that cab.
The other sit-down cab is a Taito Egret II. The front bezel is a door and lifts up to allow the monitor to rotate 90 degrees. I fitted a brand new Wells D9200 which can do any resolution and any frequency from 15k to 38k and up to 1024x768. It's super complicated using lots and lots of surface-mounted technology and they are a bit fussy with old PCBs. It especially doesn't like PCBs that have faulty syncs and blows up if left too long. Fortunately my monitor repair buddy keeps them working. I also have a spare D9200 chassis and a spare Nanao MS-7 chassis.
I run MAME in the Taito cab through a Taito Type X2 genuine arcade PCB and a hacked HDD (which I cracked and copied to a spare HDD as a backup) that runs all the Type X2 games. It's basically a Taito-made PC and a hacked version of MAME that runs off a USB stick. It connects to the cab through a common Sega JVS I/O board (JPac and special video card is not needed).
I also use this cab for testing games and doing repairs because it can handle anything so a lot of the time the front door is open and there's something hanging out of it. Because it's JAMMA I can also run any of the other 500+ PCBs I have in it too :-)
The cocktail in the middle was made by another .au company called Hankin in 1982 and has Nanao 19" monitor. I run a 60-in-1 in it.
Having repaired 1000's of PCBs over the years I really don't want to be repairing my own stuff too so I run modern things that don't break in all my cabs and/or have tons of spares (for example I have 10 working Sega Rally 2 PCBs in a box). It's simply not possible to have genuine dedicated cabs for the older stuff at a realistic price so MAME in a real arcade cab covers it quite nicely for everything else.
I also have a project machine that I just fixed. But in order to get it inside I need to clean up tons of crap in the garage so I can get it out, so it sits there until I have time.
