Nick,
It really is amazing. You can spend very little or go all out like you said. Some people out there are selling pre-made machines (without the tables installed because they have been programmed by everyday people who make no money on their work). Just the hardware and the emulation software. A pre-built machine can run from $5000 to $5700 (without shipping, which is about a $300-$400 freight charge)from a dealer like this one:
http://virtuapin.net/index.php?main_page...7e3cf04d96dadb1I was able to build mine for $2250 so far, and all I have to buy now is the material to put the bezels around the playfield and the backglass. I can also spend a little more down the road to have custon vinyl decals made for the machine. My biggest expense was the 3 monitors which ran about $950 total. Next biggest expense was the PC parts which cost me about $450, but that's because I already had some video cards and hard drive lying around. I was able to save a bunch of money by getting the cabinet (with playfield glass and legs!) for only $300 delivered since there is a dealer only 20 miles form here and he wanted to get rid of the old cab.
Here's some pictures of the machine that you own, emulated:
If you search on Youtube, you'll see some videos of this game in action, and it plays very well (nice and fast!).
You mentioned MAME. Even though I already have a MAME cabinet, I thought it would be cool to put it on this machine too. I use the backglass to run my front end (HyperSpin) to choose my game. I have 850 installed, and they all have intro videos that play on the backglass. You use the pinball flippers to move up and down through the games, and the Magna-Save buttons (red button underneath the flippers) to move up and down an entire letter in the game menu. Everything else is mapped like the pinball (add credit, start, etc). I use a wireless joypad to play the games. Here are some pix of that:
So, if you consider that you can get a virtual pinball machine as well as a MAME machine for less than $2500, it's not a bad deal.
