After a friend built an awesome cabinet, I decided to give it a go also.

I used the same plans but decided to make it a bit different. The main difference is that all the PC parts are contained within the controller box. This means that it is portable.

It wasn’t too hard to build as most of the parts were off the shelf. The hardest part was constructing the box.

Inside the box I used parts from an old computer. Computing power really isn’t an issue with the games I run on it.
The push buttons and sticks were from eBay. I was surprised to see that everything just uses simple click together push switches, even the sticks.
The push switches are then wired to a keyboard encoder. So if you push up on a stick, it say pushes a letter ‘a’ on the keyboard. This method works really well and works out of the box with existing games.