Construction

In a word, the best way to summarize my design choices: "cheap".  I spared every expense that I could possibly think of, and in the end some of those purchases I didn't make ended up costing me or affecting the quality at the end.  Hopefully I can track the main ones in the Problems section so that you can avoid the pain!

The cabinet itself is based pretty much off of Kyle Lindstrom's excellent "Ms. Pac-Man" plans.  I widened and lowered the control boxes, and also made a snap decision at the hardware store to go with a 3/4" top instead of a 1".  With some creative cutting you can get most of the necessary pieces cut from a single 4' x 8' piece of plywood.

Aside from this one positive design choice, pretty much everything woodworking I did was a disaster.  I am quite surprised at both the sturdiness of the cabinet, and the fact that I managed to persevere long enough to get games running on it.

If you're going for a MAME cabinet the VERY FIRST THING you should do is FIND YOUR MONITOR.  Think about it: if you want to use a CRT, it's by far the biggest heaviest object that your enclosure must support.  Everything else you do can be cut, shaped, formed, replaced, etc. to match.  It sucks designing a cabinet for a 27" TV that ends up housing a tiny 19" computer monitor... but it sucks even worse if you do it the other way around, because that's a whole lot of wasted wood.  I had in my garage a spare 19" TV that was doing nothing productive so I figured it would make a nice big vertical screen.  The opening was cut to size, I ended up having to decase it just to fit everything else underneath.  (Would-be builders: start with an upright - the cocktail doesn't actually save any footprint, and it's much harder to cram everything in.  Uprights are easy to fit parts - monitor up top, computer in the copious amounts of empty space down below).

Anyway there's really not much juicy info here so I'd say just go read the build log.