The question
An arcade starts before the game does. Selecting a cabinet, hearing the launch cue, arriving at a title screen, and returning to the hall all shape whether separate games feel like one place. Arcade Hub explores that shared experience through a deliberately small application.
What I built
The hub presents a retro cabinet menu with sound controls and a launch sequence. The reviewed source includes four game destinations: Blame Machine, Memory Matrix, Neon Reactor, and Authority Drift. An Audio Lab provides a separate place to investigate audio behavior. These are destinations configured in the hub source; their availability and gameplay were not tested for this page.
The hub owns the selection transition. With sound enabled, it plays the launch cue before navigating. It passes an explicit indication that the visitor came from the hub, along with a return address. The selected game then owns its title screen and gameplay audio. Muting the hub allows the transition without the cue.
Where the boundary helps
Trying to carry one audio session across independent pages creates a different problem from giving each game a clear starting point. The documented contract makes ownership change at navigation: the hub finishes its cue, then the game takes over. A return address gives the game a way back without making the hub responsible for gameplay.
The repository also separates the published interface from troubleshooting tools. Audio experiments and lightweight diagnostic endpoints support development without adding diagnostic panels to the cabinet menu.
What remains open
The follow-up notes record inconsistent reload behavior across games and leave a common rule to be decided: return to the title screen or restore the current state. They also identify shared spacing, typography, corner controls, and start-flow behavior as work still to consolidate.
The README’s menu list and the hub’s own three-cabinet subtitle lag behind the four destinations in the source. This page uses the source count and makes no claim that the whole arcade has reached a uniform finish. The useful record is both the launch contract already expressed in code and the consistency decisions still open.