building an arcade cabinet

I recently decided to build an arcade cabinet. You know, the big 6 foot plus tall amalgam of wood, circuit boards, buttons, joysticks and a screen that ate all your quarters as a kid. Pac-Man, Joust, Galaxian, the list goes on.

Nostalgia hit me one day, and I realized how much I missed the "classic" arcade games of my youth. Classic arcade games, for me, covers everything made from about 1980 to the late 1990's. I found MAME, an arcade emulator, online. Playing some of those old games on my pc is fun, but it just doesn't have the same feel as playing on an actual arcade unit. So I'm going to build one!

Right now I'm in the planning stages. I'm a little intimidated by the construction aspects of the cabinet itself, but hey, I need some more daring adventure in my life. I just retrieved my old pc from my parents. It's a Pentium 3, 500MHz. I'm hoping this will be enough power(currently testing). One of my goals is to build this as cheaply as possible. Cheaply as in "not spending much money", not cheaply as in "a cheap, rickety piece of crap". It very well could end up being both "cheaplys" though. Cheaplies? Cheaply-s? "Cheaply"s? Anyways...

There will be more updates (with pics!) as the project progresses.