Arcade Machine HOWTO

Step 1: Find an abandoned arcade machine. I found mine walking home one morning. My sister spotted it at the Manly train station, left near the LifeLine and other clothing collection bin. She said, "hey look, an arcade machine". I said, "No, that's MY arcade machine, and promptly ran across the road, dug it out from beneath the other junk, and wheeled it home (lucky it had 2 wheels).
Here it stands in all it's glory. I've already stripped and gutted all the insides. Took out a 12" CRT, Mainboard, speaker, some sort of CRT control board, a split +5V +12V power supply, and a 240V AC transformer.	You can see the wonderful artwork the local youths have added to it's side. The glass panel (sitting elsewhere) also had some wonderful gold squiggles on it.
This is where the screen was, strangely enough.	It has a door at the front, and the back. They operate in both the open and closed positions. Well, actually the rear door operates in the on or off position, since it doesn't have a hinge.
More graffiti :( You can also see where the control panel hinges up.	Inside you can see the mother/main board thingo. The two coin mechanisms and the coin box. Everthing else is sitting outside in the wheely bin.
Step 2: Strip out everything from inside. Some people claim you should use the original CRT, but I think this only applies to late 1990 arcade machines. I think most of the components inside my arcade machine would have merely posed a fire hazard if I had attemped to power them on- I chucked them all out. You might also want to clean out the cockroach eggs, and years of arcade gallery dirt and grime. :)
Here is the main motherboard. It has 7 ROMs on it, which all combine to form....... G R E E N B E R E T (A really crappy sideways scrolling shooter from 1985 It's got a Z80 CPU on there, running at a whopping 3Mhz.	This is what is going to replace the aged arcade mainboard. I think it runs a tad faster :)
Inside it's got an AMD K6-2 300Mhz CPU, 64Meg RAM, 100Mbit NIC, and an original ISA SB16 (with ASP) - (it's the only soundcard I could get to work in DOS).	This is a 15" monitor I stole from my linux box. I took off the back plastic cover, and it hangs in place by the front cover. I had to use a jigsaw to cut out a wider opening in the plywood that supported the original CRT.
Step 3: Get some PC hardware to run inside. Instead of putting a ROM board for a single arcade game inside, I put a computer inside which runs MAME - the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. I'll talk about this more later.
The monitor control circuit board was half supported by each the front and back plastic covers. With the back cover removed, nothing really held it in place, so I put a small plastic brace/spacer between it and the CRT tube, and then threaded some heavy string around the PCB and tied it to the front cover. This supported it and stopped it from dropping off.	The coin box This takes up quite a proportion of space inside the arcade machine, with two tubes on top where the coins from the two coin mechanisms fell through. This made it quite difficult to fit in the computer as well as a speaker on each side. It'll have to come out
With my trusty hammer, I bashed it out good. :)	And with a jigsaw, I cut two speaker holes for the 8" woofers.
Step 4: Make any custom modifications. I wanted to make the sound a bit louder and nicer than the tinny little speaker that was original in the machine. I then thought........JUKEBOX!.... I could make a combination Arcade Machine / Jukebox! I had a pair of 8" woofers, tweeters and cross-overs laying about, so I cut some holes to fit those in. All I need now for a good jukebox is a nice amp.
Here's a back view of my handwork with the automated wood cutting utensil - jigsaws are fun :)	Another shot of the arcade machine in outside my house.