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UPDATE - March 17th, 2008
This is a re-creation of a page I had for quite a few years. I no longer own the cabinet described. I'm still trying to locate the pictures that I originally had.
My current homepage is still http://www.markblanco.com
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This is a 'Classic Cabinet'-safe site. I didn't destroy a classic arcade cabinet to house my MAME setup. I built it from scratch.

I worked on this project (on and off) for a couple months, but the bulk of the construction was finished in less than a week.

The basic design was taken from the plans from LuSiD's Arcade Flashback, -THANKS!!!- however I modified the marquee/speaker shelf area slightly and used my own control panel design. I also added extra supports for the monitor shelf.

The cabinet is constructed out of 3/4" particle board. I cut all the wood myself in my dining room (which I temporarily converted to a workshop!), and then assembled the cabinet in the game room where it is now. The monitor bezel is spray-painted cardboard. The marquee is just plain glass purchased from a frame store (I might change it to plexiglass). I primed the cabinet with two coats of grey primer, and then applied two coats of gloss black. I used a hand roller because I painted it inside my house. I knew that using a spray can would generate too many fumes. The fumes from the rollers, however, were gone in a couple of hours.

The PC inside is a P3-700 with 128MB RAM, Geforce 3 Ti200, 8GB Maxtor HD, generic onboard sound controller, and a generic 32X CDROM. The monitor is a generic 17" . I use this setup to run MAME32, as well as Nesticle, ZSNES and WGens. All my games run silky smooth, even the high-end fighting games, which I've since removed due to the control issue (explained later). All the classics run great.

The control panel is connected to the PC via a Hagstrom LP-24 Keyboard Encoder, available from Hagstrom Electronics.

The fully functioning coin door is from Happ Controls, as are the buttons and joysticks.

I originally planned to use a 25" TV with the video card's TV out, but I wasn't satisfied with the quality, even with the S-Video output. That's why I decided to go with the monitor. I run with scanlines on, to give it more of an arcade feel.

I went with a 6 button per joystick setup. Each player also has a coin button, and a start button. The coin door is also funtional. There are also 4 more "admin" buttons across the top of the control panel. They are "Enter", "OK/Reset Game", "Pause", "ESC". I also put a button on each side of the cabinet for pinball flippers. There is also a trackball that has two miniature buttons under it (for left and right mouse buttons). The right mouse button doubles as the "admin screen" for MAME (default is TAB). This comes in handy if I need to change the control setup for a game, I don't have to open the cabinet and grab the keyboard.

The Keyboard encoder worked out good for my purposes, but if I build another cabinet (a possibility), I will probably go with hacked joysticks. The reason is that I am unable to play fighting type games due to the number of simultaneous inputs required. The keyboard just can't handle that. Street Fighter 2 played fine by myself, but when I tried to play with a friend, we found that we couldn't do complex moves at the same time. Now overall, this isn't a problem, since this cabinet is really for the classics, anyways.

I attached the wires from the buttons to the encoder using an old hard drive cable. See the underside of the panel. It fit perfectly on the LP24, and enabled me to not solder directly to the encoder.

(Update - I no longer have a DVD-rom in my cabinet, but the information below might still be helpful to someone)
I put a DVD-rom in the PC because I wanted to be able to play Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. Note to anyone thinking about getting Dragon's Lair or Space Ace DVD...if you want to play it on a PC, then you *must* get the DVD-ROM version. I have the standard DVD version (for home players) and it locks up eventually on the PC. Once I got the DVD-ROM version, it worked like a charm.

Pics of the cabinet in various stages of construction: You'll notice in pics 1-3, that I was going to use the control panel housing from a set of MAS sticks, but in pic 4, I decided to cut my own panel.
Pic 1, Pic 2, Pic 3, Pic 4

If you have any questions, comments, or criticisms (please be nice...) feel free to email me at markblanco@hotmail.com