[vsp]

There are lots of homebrew cabinet projects out there on the web. (There was even a commercial release, called Ultracade, which was basically MAME at one-coin-per-play with 80+ games plus whatever game packs the owner had installed. How they got around the licencing issues involved in selling this is beyond me, and I believe they're now defunct, but I saw an Ultracade machine in an Ocean City, MD arcade this summer.)

For me, it's more of a time-and-effort issue than anything else, as well as the fact that it'd involve a certain degree of physical tinkering (and, again, I'm lucky if I guess correctly which end of a soldering iron to hold, as high-school Metal Shop was a loooong time ago).

The control panel is, of course, the heart of the unit -- even an awesome game is no good if you can't control it properly. There are lots of issues involved in the design.

While most games involve a joystick and one or more buttons, there are so many oddballs out there... two joysticks (Crazy Climber/Robotron/Battlezone/Assault), a spinner (Tempest), a spinner AND a joystick (Tron/Mad Planets), rotary joysticks (Ikari Warriors/Heavy Barrel/Gondomania), trac-ball games (Centipede), joysticks or knobs that depress or lift (Discs of Tron/Super Punch-Out!), unique designs (the Star Wars yoke). Now figure in driving games (analog steering wheel, analog pedals, two-gear games like Out Run, four-or-five-gear games like Night Driver, complicated setups like Spy Hunter...) Now figure in shooting games (Crossbow, Vs. Duck Hunt, Operation: Wolf, Point Blank...)

Somewhere, the line has to be drawn, else your control panel would be eight feet long and weigh six hundred pounds, with toggle switches to turn various sections of it on and off. But the fact remains that there are lots of games that are in MAME but simply can't be played (or played efficiently) on an average PC due to these issues, and if I'm going to shell out the cash to build an arcade-cabinet solution, I might as well try to accommodate as many of these as I can...

There's also the side issue of four-way joysticks vs. eight-way joysticks. (Some games, like Sinistar, had more than eight directions, but most joystick games were designed more humanely.) Four-way games (Pac-Man) don't respond well to eight-way joysticks -- this is a very common problem with console versions, because the player will hit a diagonal and the game will go crazy-go-nuts at times. Likewise, playing an eight-way game with a four-way joystick is often impossible, and awkward at best.

Vertical or horizontal monitor? Some games use one, some use the other, and that's (unfortunately) not an easy thing to change on the fly unless you're extremely creative with your cabinet design.

Stand-up or cocktail cabinet? The cocktail looks cooler, but generally provides less space for control-panel modifications.

The alternative to all of this, of course, is to buy (or make) a custom control panel to plug into the PC. A lot of companies offer these (the X-Arcade and the Hot Rod are brands that come to mind) as pre-made plug-in joystick panels for the PC, and I saw a bunch at this past summer's Classic Gaming Convention in Valley Forge, some more full-featured than others, most around $400. Retrogames had a review of a cheaper one-player model (under $100) linked recently.