How many dedicated games do you own and on what do you play MAME????
I own six (6) more-or-less "dedicated" cabinets:
1) An Ikari Warriors, which was a converted DE cabinet, and is JAMMA, so it's not 100% "dedicated." I have several other PCBs which work with those LS-30 rotary sticks, and I also use it to play anything vertical and JAMMA... including an ArcadeSD board nowadays.
2) An Asteroids. This will be Asteroids/Ast Deluxe/Lunar Lander just as soon as Braze releases the multi kit... so it's dedicated now, but will be a 3-way multi in the future.
3) A Dig Dug. I built an adapter so I can plug my Galaga PCB into it when I feel like playing it, so it's not exactly dedicated...
4) A Battle Zone. It's dedicated, of course.
5) An OutRun. This one is dedicated. I suppose I could theoretically plug in a Turbo OutRun boardset, but I don't have one and currently have no plans to acquire one.
6) A Lethal Enforcers. It's currently being returned to original from a Police Trainer conversion. Once it's back together, I'll be able to plug in other gun PCBs I have, such as Police Trainer & Sharp Shooter... so it's not exactly dedicated.
I play MAME on my laptop. Although I don't really "play" it so much as use it for testing or learning about other games. I once had plans to build myself a MAME cabinet (maybe 10 years ago), but now I don't really have the urge. My desire for a wider variety of classics is satisfied by my ArcadeSD board with about 15 games enabled.
Yes, I could play more games with a MAME rig... and many of them would work very well... they would look almost indisinguishable on the screen from an original if carefully configured. However, the big gotcha is the controls. Too many cool games require too widely varied controls to be feasible on a single cabinet. This exact problem is what led to the monstrosity control panels. I would take half-a-dozen different MAME cabs, with different control setups to be able to play most of the cool (raster) games without creating an acre-sized CP (i.e. double joystick, Defender/Stargate, trackball, spinner, analog stick, steering wheel). And vector & laserdisc games are another story entirely. As a result, I kinda left the idea of a MAME cab behind, and my collection focuses on games that DON'T do too well with MAME (vectors, difficult to duplicate controls).