During the last months I've been involved with my final paper for the subject "General Education" as part of my vocational education to become an IT professional. Being able to pic the topic myself and the fact I always wanted to build an arcade cabinet. I thought I would like to show you what I was able to achieve with the help of mainly this forum, the main page, the wiki and various other sites.
First off I had to get a pc, luckily my friend was willing to give me his old microATX motherboard, cpu and ram as well his old monitor, which ended up replacing the monitor I was using on my pc, because it would have problems with new generation grahpics cards.
So I bought the rest I would need for the computer and ordered arcade parts from arcadeshop.de, a great source for arcade parts in Europe.
Parts List:PC:Mobo: Foxconn G33M02
CPU: Core2Duo
RAM: 4 GB DDR2
VGA: ASUS Radeon R7 240, 2GB
HDD: WD Caviar Green 3.5", 3TB
SSD: SanDisk Ultra+ 128GB
Monitor: ASUS VH242H 24" Wide LCD TFT FullHD, 16:9
Case: SilverStone SST-ML03B
Controls2x ILSA Competition Joystick
20x ILSA Pushbutton SL
2x 1P/2P Start Button CV
1xI-Pac ve

So after that I was off to build the cabinet. First thing I had to do was to make the holes in the CP, I didn't have a layout so I cut out little cardboard shapes to arrange on the wood and "testplay".

Once I was happy with it I drilled the necessary holes. Afterwards me and my father attached the CP to the kick plate. We then attached the whole front part to the floor plate with piano hinges.

Next we had to build the frame, this took a very long time.

Now all we had to do was attach the side panels, backplate and roof, then install all the hardware and plexis. Because this project was getting expensive and settled for a cheap solution regarding the artwork. I just bought some sticker paper and made myself some sideart stickers. The marquee was printed on some special adhisive printable foil on my brothers LaserJet.


And so the cab was done.
Now what was left to do was the whole software part, for which I want to thank you all for the great info and software provided at this forum.
TL;DR I built an arcade cabinet for school