Thanks, vertexguy, emphatic, markc74, javeryh, mgb, Mike A, XSFDriver, circusfreak, Gilrock and lomoverde!
There were a couple things that I wanted to respond to in particular...
It also has a 21:9 marquee monitor.
I wanted to clarify here in case of confusion that mine isn't a 21:9 marquee. It's a LG M2900S, and it's wider and shorter than that. (It'd be a 25.6:9 if you were using that notation.) So if you're eyeballing it and thinking of using a 21:9 in a design, be aware that it'll end up 21% taller than this marquee is.
Great thinking outside the box using a portion of the TV screen to fill the entire screen area. If you are the first to come up with that idea, then genius!
This is an interesting question.
I think that Maximus's
Marvel vs Capcom: Revolution v2 was the first build here to go oversize vertical - least, the first one I could find. I thought that he didn't mask off the ends to show a square, and exposed the whole screen, but on review of the thread I see he went back and added masking later on. I suspect this is the 2014 machine that Gilrock mentioned that he got the idea from, but please correct me if I'm mistaken.
I had thought that Token's
Moonshot and I might have been the first to do masked portrait builds here that only show the center square... Token's thread predates mine by a couple months because he was posting while he was building whereas I didn't want to post until I knew mine would get finished and work correctly, so I only started my thread at the very end of my build - but we were building at the same time, and had the idea independent of one another.
But, it looks to me like Maximus gets the credit for invention there.
As a five year ownership update... I'm still made happy by Mimic every time I play with it, which I still do pretty frequently. I wouldn't change much if I were building it over again - I might have gone with a real coin door converted to coin buttons like
Shapeshifter has, which would require a slightly wider center column. I also might have gone with a removable interior-latched control panel in addition to that removable access panel below it that I used - but those are pretty minor revisions.
The illuminated balltops have held up well. If you use a wire slip ring under the sticks and high quality teflon insulated wires to the joystick tip LEDs, it seems to be a valid long term thing. I've had to replace microswitches in the joysticks quite a few times, but that's been about it for stuff wearing out.