goliath cab on the way

[boxman]

A long long time ago I decided I wanted to re-live all those childhood days hammering at arcade machines so a few years back I decided I was going to build my own cab. I ordered all the sticks and buttons and came on this site to ask for advice and everything. I designed my own cab and cut all the wood out to build it.

I never got around to actually putting the thing together and soon after that I moved into a tiny house with my girlfriend. The arcade machine had to be put off, it just was never going to fit in that house.

Two years on and I finally have space and time to play around with these things but the original design will not be used. I no longer have access to a workshop and a lot of the wood had been used for other stuff along the way. It would have probably turned out crappy anyway because I'm not much of a carpenter.

Somehow, and I have no idea how I managed this, I have convinced my girlfriend that an arcade machine is a good idea and went out and bought an empty Electrocoin Goliath Mk3 cabinet. I have all the sticks and buttons and some 3/4" ply from the unfinished project before. The cab should be here in the morning. I'm going to replace the control panel with my home made one and use a 22" CRT monitor.

Today I was on ebay and managed to get a cheap motherboard and ram for the cab. It's a 2.4Ghz celeron with 512mb of RAM. Apparently it had onboard video "SiS Ultra-AGP II" which I have never heard of but I'm guessing it should be fine for 2d stuff. I'm currently on the lookout for an 80GBish IDE drive for it.

I assume this PC should run pretty much everything apart from those CHD games and 3d stuff, right? I hope so. I remember reading a while back that you should try to match your specs with certain mame versions so what version and romset should I try to use with it?

Basically this is what I have:

PC
2.4Ghz celeron
512MB RAM
SiS Ultra-AGP II onboard gfx

Cabinet
Electrocoin Goliath Mk 3
2 x Happs Comp Joys Black
6 x Happs Comp Buttons Blue (top row of 3 buttons)
8 x Happs Comp Buttons Purple (bottom row of 4 buttons)
2 x Happs Standard Buttons Yellow (coin buttons)
1 x Happs Standard Button Red (for pause and quit with shift)
1 x MiniPAC with all the wiring stuff

Hopefully I can finally get this idea off the ground and start playing all the classic games from my youth! I'm pretty excited and happy as I managed to get the cabinet, monitor and the main pc bits for under £100.

Any ideas/advice/thoughts are very much welcome!

[boxman]

Got the cab, a bit banged up but overall I am pleased. Spent the last hour or so gutting and cleaning it. The one slight problem is the smoked glass has two scratches in it, each one is 1mm x 20mm. I've turned the glass upside down so that the 2nd player has to look at it.

Anyone know if this is possible to repair easily?