My Arcade Cabinet

For many, many years I always wanted my own arcade machine and for a long time I was thinking about building my own cabinet either from scratch or from the remains of a dead cab. I spent ages reading books and looking on the net trying to learn everything I needed to start the build (BYOAC was a great source of info - link at the bottom). The problem was I always found something got in the way of me actually starting chopping up wood, with the biggest issue being where could it go once I'd finished.

Then last year, a guy at my work recommended a company on eBay who were selling reconditioned machines running MAME for a very reasonable price. Not long after this, the large plant in the corner of my kitchen had an unfortunate accident and suddenly I had the space ;-) The deal was sealed.

A couple of weeks later this turned up on the back of a truck:

The great thing was, because the PC was already setup it was just a case of plugging in, chucking some ROM's onto it and I was ready to game. Over the next few months I added more games to the MAME build and messed about with the mameWah frontend to make it look a little less basic when it started up but I couldn't do much more as the PC inside wasn't that powerful. Also, Radiant Silvergun was really choppy and as that's one of my favourite games I needed to do something to fix it.

I came across HyperSpin on Youtube and decided that I was going to build a new PC to go in the cab, one that could run Hyperspin, all my MAME games and any other emulators I wanted. I ordered some parts and waited for a delivery......