Gerald from Chile put together a really very nice arcade cabinet project that he sent me to share with everyone.  Be sure to take a closer look at the arcade graphics on the cabinet :)  Thanks Gerald!

Gerald's quest for a cabinet started from the moment he first laid eyes on MAME.  A day after graduating, he tracked down an old Tetris cabinet made in Chile.  He explained his project to the guy he bought it from, who didn't believe him... Sound familiar?  The results are slick ... :)

A friend of Gerald's helped him with the artwork for the cabinet.  The original cabinet was in fairly bad shape, so Gerald redid the artwork with some custom graphics...
 
 

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The monitor bezel artwork was made by Gerald, with the graphics coming from a very blurry  and small image of Space Invaders, and a few good  quality flyers for some old games.  It's a bit hard to  see, but that's the "MAME Video" running on the monitor :)

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The control panel artwork done by Gerald's friend.  Take a careful look ... Think his friend has any particular interests? :)

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I also like the artwork on the buttons. Once more, I find something that I want on my cabinet :)

One of the slicker things about this project is the rotating monitor - and it's easy as can be to rotate...
 

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On the left, you see Hyper Olympic, a horizontal game playing on the 20" monitor.  On the right is Gunsmoke, played vertically... It took Gerald about 15 seconds to rotate the monitor!

 

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Here's the back of the cabinet. You can see a round disc coming out of it -- this is what the monitor rests on.  You just put your hand in the back of the cabinet and rotate it "like a tuning knob of a very big radio."  The picture on the right is below the monitor, from the front of the opened door for maintenance. You can see wheels that help the rotation to be smoother.

On to the top of the cabinet ...
 
 

Here's the audio setup, behind the top marquee.  The speakers were cheap computer speakers, completely disassembled.  Notice that the PCB of the amplifier is stuck on the wood, and the audio controls can be used from the other side.  Also, Gerald used a fluorescent lamp to illuminate the top marquee.

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Gerald used a variety of techniques to wire up his cabinet . . .
 

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For the maintenance buttons and the second player controls, Gerald used a hacked PowerRamp.  One nice touch is that the coin slot is fully functional via the PowerRamp as well.

A problem Gerald had with his system was a bit of flakiness with the monitor.  Whenever the resolution changed, the picture went out of sync, with lots of diagonal lines.  (The monitor was a 15 year old monitor). The workaround was to unplug/replug the VGA cable from the PC - not terribly elegant.  Instead, Gerald made a "reset" button consisting of 5 microswitches connecting the input wires.  When you press the button it disconnects the 5 wires of the vga input and reconnects when you release the button.

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Spaghetti time.  This is a shot of the underside of the control panel.  Notice leaf based pushbuttons, which Gerald prefers over microswitch.

For the player one controls, a simple $6 gamepad was hacked.

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Another interesting thing about this cabinet is that it has two video cards, and he chooses which one is active in the BIOS of the PC.  The second video card is an ATI ProTurbo with Mach64 chipset, and that's the one connected to the arcade monitor.  When the PC boots, there's a menu that lets you select between Windows or MAME.  This way he retains full functionality of the PC, which is outside the cabinet (using a Voodoo 3 3000 card with regular monitor).

By the way, all the artwork for this project was printed using Poster software.  Also, Gerald ordered two of the $4 trackballs but never received them (from CTRsurplus) so a bit of buyer beware is in order.

All in all a very nice project, thanks for passing this our way!  Gerald's hoping for feedback on the project, so be sure to drop him a line :)