I decided I really needed my own arcade machine since I'm a child of the 80s, I enjoy videogames and I really wanted to make something cool. My wife didn't want to have something "ugly" in the house, so instead of making my machine out of particle board like the real thing, and like the other MAME cabinets I'd seen, I made mine from maple plywood I started with a design I found and made some of my own modifications (like a keyboard drawer and a pull out drawer instead of just a front door that swings open). I printed this up on grid paper and cut it out to make my first design. After my initial design my father helped me cut out all of the pieces - he used to teach and judge woodworking contests, so I needed his help a lot with the woodwork. After cutting them all out, we glued them together and used small staples in some places to hold until the glue dried. After this I purchased the hardware like buttons, trackball, monitor, coin mech, etc from Happ controls. When I was cutting out the top of the control panel I had a piece of Plexiglas attached so I would have that to protect the wood surface where hands would be. I then used photoshop to create the design that I would use for the marquis and the design under the control panel and had them printed at Kinko's after some testing with printed paper taped together. The final step was wiring everything together and staining, then clear coating the wood so it looked good.