I have a couple of friends go about building a MAME machine. One had a SFII cabby he got for $400 in 95. He gutted it and made one (the monitor had been dead for a while.) He put an old 17" monitor in there which looked really dumb, and made it hard to play. He used an old 300mhz Pentium with 64megs of ram so only older games worked. When he updated his computer he put all the old stuff in the MAME case and he baught a flat 25" TV (think it as like an Apex or something) and used a GF2mx TV out. Last I was there it looked like the real deal when playing SFII.

Another friend make a cocktail from scratch. I really liked his and I'm considering that as a MAME project.. Smaller then a full size, can be used as a table, fits all apartment enviroments.. Only problem is forget about 2 player fighting games.