Picked up the used cabinet and was slightly disappointed. I looked it up, and it is a Defender cabinet. Someone painted over the defender side art, and the controls look horrific!

No worries, as I need to replace them and customize them anyway, but it was just dirty, smelly, and I hate the shape. Since I forgot to take a photo, here's what the Defender Cabinet looks like.

Notice the odd protrusion in the front, and the high mounted coin door? Looks like a gimpy cab.

With the new cabinet as motivation, I decided to sleep on any changes. To make progress, I measured the width of the cabinet and cut some 3/4" plywood to the right size for the motherboard.

Then I mounted the old MoBo tray onto the plywood (the case was a BTX style and the cpu fan really wanted to be attached to the tray, so I cut away the parts I don't need and moounted it to the plywood.

It actually worked out as a decent tray mount, and once connected, I installed the HD, CPU, RAM, etc...

Note that I did not install a cdrom drive. I plan to usb one only if i need it, or possibly add a DVD/BlueRay later, but I doubt I'll do anything like that to this cabinet. I'll save that for my 2nd Generation Sit-down driving Xbox media center flight simulator with the Kung-Foo grips.

Oh yeah... I'm lookin ahead.

Restored the Ultracade OS and MAME partitions to the new drive and rebooted.

After some minor hardware driver updates, and the video card updates, I now can play arcade games on my plywood mounted arcade game. Whoo hoo! and Lame... all at the same time.

Finally, as a treat, I added the wireless network card, and surfed the web a little bit just to feel like I belong.