Hello all. I've been lurking the boards over the past few days, and decided to register, as I have gained a bit of info from this site. I figured I'd introduce myself, and throw out info regarding my first cab project. For a little about me; I'm a 33 year old Senior Network Engineer for an ISP, and I have quite a bit of old school PC hardware experience. I've always loved the retro games, as well as some of the newer games, whether it be arcade or console.
A little about my first project; I haven't exactly gotten it too much off the ground, as I still have a few decisions to make. I have a gutted Silver Strike bowling cab (2009 I believe), and I'm doing some clean up and mods to it in order to incorporate a (2) player joystick/button set up, as well as a trackball. I may build off of it at a later date to include 4 players. At this time, I've only handled some cab clean up, and purchased the monitor. I decided to go with a 27" ASUS VS278Q-P because of the response times. I'm still pondering on how good of a graphics card I actually want, and what frontend GUI to utilize. I would prefer to go the Linux route, but there aren't many visually appealing offerings out there. I do have a few pics of the current cabinet and progress, but as I said, there isn't exactly much progress yet ;-)
I'm attempting to decide what button layout to incorporate, and I am leaning towards ordering my buttons (HAPP), joysticks (HAPP), and control interfaces (KeyWiz/OptiWiz) from "groovygamegear".
If anyone would like to comment on my current decisions, or sway me in another direction, i would love to hear your thoughts, as I am a bit of a noob at this, and appreciate any feedback. I look forward to hearing from you guys, and hope to be a regular to this site from now on.