Ok, so it has been 3 months since the latest update and not a lot (if near any) progress has been made. On the plus side I have taken a week off work for my birthday and decided to ignite the back burner for this arcade project!
New iMac, New Front Loader!
Although no physical progress has been made on the arcade machine I have been researching alternative arcade front loaders and decided to go with HyperSpin. I have also acquired a newer iMac (A1311 Model) which has an i3 processor which will enable it to handle the beefier graphics display used by Hyperspin.
You can find a handy video guide for HyperSpin here
I also purchased an SSD caddy that will be replacing the disk drive. Adding an SSD drive will vastly reduce the boot time. I haven’t received the SSD caddy yet but when I do I will post a step by step. If you already have your hands on an SSD and an SSD caddy check out this iFixit guide.
iMac disc drive caddy for SSD drive
Boot Loader Tweaking
The boot loader is now a space invader! Using this gif and the applications below I replaced the previous PacMan loader with this little guy. Source
To modify the bootloader I used the following applications;
GifSplitter – To split the Gif into BMP files
Windows 7 Boot Loader – This program turns Gifs and BMP files into boot loaders and applies to your machine. Very easy to use!
Also here is a quick video guide to help with changing the boot loader using Windows 7 Boot Loader.
Stay tuned for the next development, If all goes as planned I should have all the case pieces cut and be able to assemble by this afternoon!
Beer Snobbery, Gadgets, Video games and Other Nerdy Things! 
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