It's been over twelve years now. Incredible. I'm still best friends with my buddy and we both still play the machine from time to time. The cabinet has been through a couple moves (including a tiny apartment) and it's always a hit at parties. I'm still extremely happy about the project and can only hope it will get passed down through the generations. I can't believe I paid only $200 for that original SFIII cabinet, including the game. What a steal. Comparable dynamo cabinets in my area are going for over $1000 now and they don't even include the game. I wish I had kept the original monitor. Looking through some old pictures I can tell that it was a WG K7000 and probably just needed a cap kit.
The cabinet has seen some upgrades over the years. Notably, the Billabs BL27CB0P monitor started to experience
squishing around the edges. Since there is no way for me to send the monitor in,
I recapped the whole thing myself almost ten years after the problem first started to bug me. Taken in its entirety, it was the most difficult job of the project. There were 72 caps.
I also decided to go with
GroovyMAME as my main emulator. I upgraded the MOBO/CPU/RAM to a 3.2 GHz i3 550 with 4GB of RAM I picked up for $20, a 250GB SSD, and a Radeon 9600. I went with the 9600 because it's fanless and I wanted to eliminate as much noise as possible. That card performs perfect with GroovyMAME and Windows XP. The system is powerful enough now that it can actually run MK4. I made a post about
using the Billabs BL27CB0P with GroovyMAME. I stuck with Windows XP because Windows 7 was having issues with the motherboard I was using in combination with the older video card. I didn't want to waste too much time with it as I prefer having more control over the XP startup screens and OS hiding. Since my video card is quite old and I'm running Windows XP, newer versions of MAME/GroovyMAME aren't playing too nice. I went with 0.178 as it's the latest version that works perfectly with the Radeon 9600.
AdvanceMENU is great and was forked into
advmenuPLUS, which I prefer. It has support for custom layouts (that I don't use) and I found it more configurable and faster than AdvanceMENU. After all the configuration,
my game selection interface looks like this.
On the game front, there are full sets of Daphne and 0.179. That's actually it. I removed all the console emulators since I build a small RetroPie box for my TV and it does the necessary upscaling. I want the arcade machine to be specifically for arcade games presented in their original resolution. The project is at a point where I can't see anything being added. I have dreams of making a cocktail cabinet or a sit down simulator. Perhaps those will take up the next twelve years of my posts. Thanks to everyone on these forums for all your knowledge and help.