Falk3r,
Thanks for your comment. Yes, you're invited to the open house party! Come on over.
To answer your question it took 6 months for software collection, refinement, setup and tweaking and another 7 months to complete the hardware portion. I was also slowed up in the middle of the hardware portion because I had foot surgery (lost about 2 1/2 months which I included in the total time calculation). Taking out the surgery recovery time I suppose the hardware portion only took about 4 1/2 months.
Toughest parts? Hard to say. Figuring out details with about everything I suppose. I'm a perfectionist and not an experienced woodworker. That makes for a slow project cycle. Tough items were the bezel, front plexiglass configuration, finding a proper lightgun holster, finalizing my cabinet side template...it goes on and on.
Besides this forum (huge help) I used the following sites for most of my guidance and information:
http://www.arcadecab.comhttp://www.arcadecab.com/Projects/Cab_Mods_for_X-arcade%60s_TankStick.htmlhttp://sachi.sytes.net/techblog/http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BuildingYourOwnArcadeCabinetForGeeksPart1TheCabinet.aspxLike most projects it always takes longer than you thought right? Lots of smaller details that I didn't realize on the onset that I would have to deal with. The impetus for the whole project was A) I'm an arcade fanatic, B) I had a older, larger CRT monitor that I didn't have use for otherwise that made MAME game look about as good as an arcade monitor and C) I'd been using this huge X-Arcade Dual Tankstick to play games and it was getting unwieldy . I had to do something with it. I wanted to combine all these things into a cohesive whole.
Truly, it has been a journey to get to the point I'm at. At times frustrating, but mostly fun. My wife will tell you that I've been obsessed.
Well worth it. I wish you the best.