That's awesome!  Congrats!
 
There's a cool little PC shop in my town that sells arcade cabinet components you build around a PC running mame.  It's been tempting a couple times but I was way too poor as a kid to spend time in arcades so I don't have the extra nostalgic motivator.

That is so cool. Would love to have an arcade cabinet like that., however do not have the money or skill.

Thanks for the kind comments. I have to give all the credit to a friend of mine. His name is Brandon Haynes. I would point you to his Giant Bomb profile or his Twitter account or something, but he doesn't exist outside of meatspace. 

@Teirdome: The local mall had an arcade when I was a kid. I would go there occasionally on the weekend and spend $5 which went pretty far at 25 and 50 cents per play. I can understand the whole thing might lack appeal without the nostalgia factor although my daughter seems to love it in spite of the fact that she has no context for it whatsoever.

Sweet. Loves me some home made cabinets...unless they go too far and have 4 player sets of sticks and buttons and 4 sets of steering wheels built into one machine that looks like Godzilla ate a whole arcade and then vomited it out.
 
I'm, working on my own home built arcade inspired by my buying the X-arcade controller. It will be based on the look of the Taito Cabinets from the early 80s but the build is designed entirely from scratch as i'm also gutting the X-arcade housing and building my own control panel.
 
Right now it's purely in the design faze as i've layed out the design in google Sketchup.
 
I recommend you,  yer friend , or anyone interested in building things to check out Sketchup. It's free, basicly it's a more user friendly CAD software. Still takes a little time to learn but i built my Cab virtually first which should help me prevent mistakes before they happen.
 
My advice for home builders, always design the control panel first or buy a pre fab control panel like Hot Rod or X-arcade.
 
Anyway, i plan on creating a blog through the creation process of my home build cab...but bare in mind "plan" and "procrastinate" are damn near synonemes ta me...so don't hold yer breath on it or anything.