Here's the current progress on my Arcade Cabinet as it stands up to this point. As I get further along I'll update accordingly. I've given myself 3 years to fully complete this project (it's going to be done right, not just hacked together), and I'm about 6 months into it thus far.

The Cabinet: Right now I'm planning on modeling the cabinet after either the Asteroids cab, or the Mortal Kombat cab. I'm leaning towards Asteroids quite heavily at this point. I plan on building it all from scratch. Still need to figure out dimensions and materials however. The other option I have considered is buying a combo metal/fiberglass Japanese sit down cab, which are much cooler looking than American wooden cabs, but tend to be a bit short if you want to stand up and play (like most people are used to).

The Games: Most of my work over the last 6 months has been in the area of getting my ROMs together so the cab can play as many games as possible. This is actually a lot more work than it seems. As of right now the cabinet should theoretically be able to play 15,340 different games that I have accumulated, and emulate Arcade Games, Atari 2600, Game Boy, Game Gear, Genesis, Atari Lynx, NES, Neo-Geo Pocket Color, Sega Master System, Super NES, and TurboGrafx-16. Depending on how far along other emulators are when the cab is done and how my computer holds up, this number may go up or down.

The Hardware: I plan on buying a new Mac G5 when they come out (come on Apple, I'm waiting) and then using my old G3 as the CPU to run all the games. Input will be via standard arcade controls bought through Happ, and will include a two player setup w/ 6 buttons each, a trackball, a spinner, and 1 & 2 player start buttons (at a minimum). Controls will be connected to the Mac via the I-PAC keyboard encoder. I haven't figured out the monitor situation yet, but it will either be an actual arcade monitor, or a TV with S-Video. I am pretty sure that I'd like to use a broadcast quality Scan Converter for the video out, as I believe this will result in the best picture possible.

The Interface: I'm going to build a frontend interface to basically turn the MacOS desktop into the arcade desktop. Right now I'm planning on building it in Director, however, if Flash 6 ends up having support for opening files on a hard drive (which Flash 5 doesn't) then I'm going that route. If someone knows if this will be possible in Flash 6, please contact me. I have a vague idea for the design, but haven't sketched it out yet. I do know that all input to the frontend will be through the arcade controls themselves, not through a keyboard or mouse.

This is going to be a pretty slow process. I'm taking my time. As I get further along into the project, I'll be posting updates, with screenshots if necessary, about how it's going.