Well isn't this a sorry sight, my arcade cabinet has been going over some drastic changes over the past few months from PC replacements to slight hardware tweaks such as extra hard drives. Saying that it hasn't gone to well as the PC has never been working a 100% with it often taking 10 minutes of faffing around to get it to boot. So over Christmas I was generously given this old PC that was unwanted from a friend, the specs are as follows:

• AMD Dual Core Thing 2.2 GHz (not very familiar with older spec'd AMDs
• 2.5 GB DDR 2 Memory
• ATI 3870 512MB Graphics Card
• 1x 300 GB Hard Drive
• 2x 80 GB Hard Drives
• 500W Power supply

It's not the most up-to date PC but it is a huge improvement to the previous specs and general build quality, now with updated PCI slot I can finally put my 3870 to good use! As you can see from the above image the PC did have a problem with the power supply and that it's a small form factor unit with a rather large graphics needing to be installed. 

Over Christmas I've been looking to finally sort out the arcade cabinet hardware wise as its become such a burden even trying to play on it. This didn't start off well when I moved the hard drives to another PC which then in turn corrupted one of the drives partially making Windows delete half of its content. Now out of all the folder on the PC it deletes which one does it get rid of?! Yep that's right, MAME! All 100GB or so of it, so I spent the rest of the day backing up everything else off the drive and formatting it to try rid it of its errors.

Time to start a fresh I'm thinking, so I used another drive as my OS now choosing to install Windows 7 64 Bit over XP as I think that is what was causing most of the issues in the first place, well maybe using 7-8 year old heavily used hardware doesn't help. Everything installed perfectly without any need for drivers which is always a good sign, I optionally installed the latest ATI drivers. 

With all the software setup I went about transplanting the motherboard and other components to a bigger case making sure not to bang any of the hard drives. Everything pretty much went smoothly a part from the tightest fitting motherboard I have ever had my misfortune of dealing with. It took a few minutes of shifting around and tugging at to try and make the screws fit perfectly hopefully with that snug of a fit everything should be cosy enough not to cause me issues! As you can see in the above image t he case is still a mess with some drastic need for cable tidying to help with the airflow but the case probably won't be using a side panel any ways so this shouldn't be too big of an issue.

I'll leave it at that for now but more has been completed, so next I'm going to be looking at the cabinet itself.