Any time I start a new project, I always love going out and doing research.  A huge win was discovering the Build Your Own Arcade Controls website, dedicated to people who had already built MAME cabinets, and resources with how to find anything you need to make your own cabinet .  I spent hundreds of hours looking at all of the websites, absorbing all the information I could, and considering a bunch of the interesting designs.  It was time to figure out what I wanted to do.

Design Needs

You can’t design something if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish.  First things first, I needed to define my goals:

• Modern cabinet design, not specific to a single game
• Lighted marquee that I could customize and personalize
• Control panel should be removable, in case I wanted to change it later or have swappable controls.
• Single player games I wanted to be straight onto the cabinet.
• I wanted to play multi-player games as well.

Jeff’s Ultimate Arcade Machine..

During my research I stumbled across Jeff’s Ultimate Arcade Machine website. His cabinet and approach was exactly the direction I wanted to head, with very little modification.  THANK YOU JEFF for a GREAT cabinet design !!! These are the files that I used, which are posted here with permission from Jeff McClain. My design is slightly different, but if you make all the cuts based on these designs, you can still make a few additional cuts to get to my design variation if you want.

Design Modifications

I wanted a few different things compared to this design.  I needed a keyboard/mouse drawer that could be easily hidden, and I wanted a little bit more foot-room.  So, I doodled out a few design changes.

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