The design proposed by the article is very interesting - it's cheap and compact (in an amusingly humorous way, I find). Considering it's not demanding in terms

The design proposed by the article is very interesting - it's cheap and compact (in an amusingly humorous way, I find). Considering it's not demanding in terms of space, it can be built and used as "filler activity" with children. While the geek's dream is certainly playing arcade games on a real-world cabinet for hours, with a child, it can be an activity to do more or less frequently on small sessions (e.g. half hour). My very wild guess is that children should be able to enjoy arcade games when they're around 7+ years old - arcade games are on one designed to be quickly challenging, on the other, at home, they have virtually infinite lives; every child is different, of course. On the other hand, a real PC with a couple of arcade joysticks, and maybe Wii remote controllers, is considerably more flexible, and can be a good test drive to see if the activity works :-)