Well like most people who build these things it all started with M.A.M.E (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) which is a program that runs the ROM's of arcade games.  I spent a lot of my years in the arcade playing Street Fighter 2 and all the variations of it :-), as well as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and all of those other side scrolling money eating machines.  I played with a program called Mame32 for a while, and then I saw a special on TechTV's Call for Help  about building your own cocktail arcade cabinet (like the one's in Pizza Hut and Mr. Gatti's way back in the day) by just putting in a computer monitor and a computer full of games.  They used the X-Arcade joystick for controls and then they showed the host playing some games and.....I WAS HOOKED! 

I began looking on the internet for plans for this cocktail cabinet and found several sites with controls similar to the X-Arcade and to make a long story short...it all directed me towards the best site in the entire world...www.arcadecontrols.com!!!!  The message boards on this site are the best I've ever been to, and the people on that board were so helpful.  I had never even seen a pair of wire crimpers before!  So I asked tons and tons of questions and finally got up enough nerve to BUILD my controls for the arcade cabinet instead of buy the plans for one and all that. I actually bought an old golf game cabinet from an amusement park guy for $200 and then gutted the whole thing.  I then put built the control panel and wired it all up and finally had my first cabinet!

Not too pretty is it?  Well it was my first one, so what can you say.  Anyway, after I built that and played for a while, there were a lot of things that I didn't like about it.  First of all the controls weren't wired the way I wanted...rushed and unorganized...and the construction of the whole panel was just kinda sloppy.  So, I decided to build a whole new machine from scratch.  I looked on the net and found some plans for like $50.  I didn't feel like spending money just for the plans so I decided to keep doing some research on what type of cab I wanted to build.  I knew I wanted a 4 player control panel to relive the glory days of X-Men and the like, but I knew that there just wasn't a whole lot of elbow room on the size cab that you see above.  So I looked for other options, until I finally found a site called www.dreamauthentics.com.  They had a "mega" cab with a 360 degree rotating picture of it!  I stared at that and then gasped at the price for that thing!  It was like $6000!!!!  Crazy!  I figured "man I could build one of those for a lot less than that, and it wouldn't be that hard either!"....um....so I did!  Yup, you got it, no plans at all, just looked at several sites and eye balled everything.  Not many people build these things...er...not many wives let their husbands build these things...but mine is an exception!  She even let me move it in to our apartment after we got married...ah yes, a woman after my own heart :-).  Anyway, this site will give you as much in depth as I feel like typing on how to build your own showcase cabinet!  You too can build a cabinet starting with this....

   and turn it into this....