thanks guys. i'm fairly pleased with how this is turning out. i was so nervous when starting this project, because all of my cabinets up to this point had been purchased, and I just modified the control panels.
My son, Malaki, was born on the 23rd, 7lbs 3oz, and everyone is doing well. I'm so excited to get this cabinet finished so we can all play together. (except eventually it will probably be the 4 kids playing and i'll get pushed aside) My daughter (will be 2 next week) has recently started showing an interest in the cabinets..she loves to push buttons and says "daddy, i play game" all the time. her an my oldest son were playing Mortal Kombat for a while the other day, it was awesome.
I have the PC in the cabinet and started setting it up, but i may end up reloading windows and starting over. I originally planned on using a damaged laptop for this cabinet, but i would like to run a few pc games on it, and i'm afraid the video card in the laptop will not be enough. SO i took the htpc i had set up in our family room and moved it to the cabinet. It is a 3ghz Phenom x4 940 with 8gb of ram. I am currently using the RADEON HD 4200 graphics that are built into the motherboard...they work fine for mame, havent tested them with any of the pc games yet. at least since it is a desktop pc, i can easily upgrade the graphics card if i need to. I'll setup the laptop as my HTPC.
i'm having a few problems with it right now though that i can't seem to work out. I have an autohotkey script that i use for my single pause/exit button. if you press the button quickly, it sends the "P" key, but if you hold it for 3 seconds, it sends "Esc" instead. it is working fine in windows, but not when mame is running. i'm not sure why though. i had this script running on my old PC (Windows xp) and it worked fine....i just copied the entire mame directory from that pc to this one, so i'm not sure what is going on. I guess it could be an issue with windows 7 64bit vs xp, but the same script runs fine on my laptop, which is windows 8 64bit. i dont' have any other windows 7 computers running in the house, so i'm probably going to end up doing a clean install of windows and starting from scratch on this one.
i do have my mala layout about 50% setup, i'll post pics of that once it is finished.