Building your own cabinet seems the best option, there must be at least 1,000 emulations out there and having them in one machine seems the best idea, unless you have a massive warehouse. Its probably more reliable too.
From what I can gather I need an empty cabinet or a broken machine I can strip out. I'd like to try it in a front opening cabinet (the newish Bell Fruit cabinet), preferably a club one as there are more buttons which would suite clubbers too.
I have seen the inside of one of these type of cabinets and they have a little shelf and areas were a stripped out PC could go. In relation to a PC i'm thinking an entry level one off flebay would suffice along with an LCD 28" tv/monitor (if 28" fits).
Ideally I'd want the machine to power up just by pressing the power switch at the wall, i'm sure PC's can boot up like this (read it somewhere years ago) and then obviously load the emulator or a load screen up automatically (a bit like a b3 rio booting up, it just loads everything).
I'd have a wifi dongle for updating the emulator, and probably some for of extension so a mouse or keyboard could be plugged in.
The thing I think I would struggle with is making a coin mech, buttons, payouts etc. work with the emulator and the 'auto loading' software I'd have to acquire. Everything else seems straight forward, unless i'm kidding myself.
I looked through some posts by other forum members and they have had their hurdles.
Your thoughts please!