I've built my own PC once before, but this summer, I'm thinking I need to tackle a
virtual pinball machine.
I'm going to buy the wood parts for the widebody case & back displays. I'm going to have to find a 42" LED/LCD HDTV for the main display, and two more monitors to create the back glass. For a PC, I'm going to need some decent gaming rig parts:
Motherboard
A good quad-core CPU
Plenty of RAM
500GB+ HDD, possibly solid-state, to hold the OS and all the games
2 video cards, one really good one with HDMI (or DVI) to drive the HD display at the optimum framerate & aspect ratio, and another with 2 outputs for the 2 monitors on the back glass.
An
i-PAC: the game software expects a keyboard (left shift/right shift for flippers, for example), the i-PAC functions as a keyboard driver, allowing you to hook up other kinds of buttons and it'll translate them into standard keypresses.
Cooling. Lots of cooling. I'm going to have to mount the 42" HDTV
inside the case inches above the PC parts and under plexiglass. So I'm going to have to vent the PC and the TV.
Windows OS. I
should be able to turn off a lot of Windows bloatware features, like anti-virus and a bunch of background processes, to speed it up. This rig is for one thing only - high-speed game & video processing - and I should be able to strip out the rest.
Parts I have:
600W power supply left over from a previous PC build
Cheap-### speakers. Sound quality, for now, is pretty irrelevant. Cheap may be better as it's more "realistic" to what you'd find in a pinball machine. Blips and bloops and some pre-recorded sound bites.
Parts I don't need:
Keyboard. The i-PAC is the keyboard. If I need to configure the PC, I can temporarily plug in a USB keyboard from my PC then take it out when I'm done.
DVD-drives. I should be able to add via USB.
Networking/WiFi. If the mobo already has it, fine, but if I don't need it I can get by without it easily.
Future expansion:
LED-WIZ, which allows for software-controlled LED light displays, and, force feedback devices to make it "seem more real"