I've built a completely new full size arcade cabinet using the book "Project Arcade". The book is great, it gives you step by step plans and a CD full of examples, pictures, links etc.

I modified the plans slightly, and built the whole thing with 3/4 inch MDF. Take my advice this stuff is very hard to cut, use a circular saw. A jigsaw blade flexes too much and causes waves in the cut. (see pics)

The machine stands approx. 6 1/2 feet tall and weighs about 250 pounds with no PC or display.

All the controls were bough new from Happ controls in the USA. The coin door and PC came from eBay. The keyboard encoder for connecting the controls to the computer came from Ultimarc in the UK.

The machine will be powered by a Pentium 4 3ghz processor, 1.5gig of ram, 80gig of hard drive space, ATI radeon video card, and a soundblaster Live running Windows 2000 with the MameWah front end.

The cabinet is painted with 4 coats Dragon Fire orange over a flat white base.

The cabinet is still far from finished. I have just added the 20" TV and the wiring and artwork still have to be done.