Dreamcast-Talk.com

black flag nc wrote:Nice stuff guys! I always wanted to own some arcade cabs but I fear I lack the technical skill to keep them working.

I'll add to what Voldo said,

There are a few things a novice arcade buyer should know.

1. How much space he / she has in there house. This is very important because these cabinets are very large. If you have an easily accessable basement or roomy garage then you're set. As seen in my Youtube video I have them all in my living room but my situation grants me the pleasure of doing so, many people cannot do this for obvious reasons.

2. Make a decision to buy a refurbished arcade unit or build your own MAME cabinet. Now, I like to actually have the original cabinets. I have a computer already with tons of roms on it but the feel of the real arcade cabinet trumps the thrill of possessing millions of roms.

X-Arcade has a very nice pre-made arcade cabinet that is very well built and comes with a Keyboard draw, tank sticks, and track ball. If I had space I'd definitely pick one up if the shipping was right.

Remember, if you buy an actual cabinet you want to buy it from an well know arcade dealer. You want to buy from a place that specializes in refurbished units. It's going to be expensive, probably 1k a game, this turns most people off but I believe its worth it if you love the game and the arcade feel.

3. Choose a game that goes on forever. I own two cabinets. Crystal Castles and Special Criminal Investigations. They are both good games but Crystal Castles is point AND skill based. It goes on forever and is probably unbeatable. Similar with Pac-Man, Galaga, and many of the other retro cabinets. You want this. You want a cabinet that will continue on and continue to challenge you.

Special Criminal Investigation is good also BUT it only has 6 levels and the 6th (last) level is a 30 second get from point A to B race. So it's really 5 & 1/2 levels long.


If you or anyone else has any other questions about things just send me a PM or ask a question in this thread. I'm not a master of this stuff but I do know a few things. Hope this helps.

Sweet! I would probably want a vertical shooter like Raiden or Strikers 1945. Thanks guys.

Today I picture the plates I use to affix the Dreamcast joysticks on the panel







The P2 joystick miss a plastic thing that hold the spring in place, so I need to find it, or made one by myself.

Today I have extended the cables that goes from motherboard power sw, power led, h.d.d led etc to the button that turns the PC on and off, so that button is now placed on the right side when you open the coin door.

I have also solded (do you say so), together the RCA cable that was broken.

I will check up how to "hack" a keyboard so I can use ESC, ENTER and the service button in Mame (I think it´s the TAB button), with the buttons I want to use.

I will use the green button for ENTER, the red button for ESC and a blue Happ button that is placed on the left side of the cab.

The size of the buttons seems right cause my panel have very limited of space, specially for being a mame cab from now on.

Today I got ePSXe to run almost perfect.





And yes, you can play Bishi Bashi Special 3 with dancepads (I think the previous versions also have that support).

Long time no update.

Since last time I have done some things on the arcade machine.

I have installed two headphones outputs:



So the two outputs are connected to one cable:



That leads to a switch:



The purple cable goes to another switch and the brown goes to a stereo and I have hacked the switch and installed a headphone output (the green cable) that goes to the both headphones.

Here´s the other switch there I can switch between 4 devices, should this not be enough I can install another like this switch to the other switch and I got 8 outputs to switch between.



I have installed a DVD/cd-rom device on the front:





I saw in two Billy from IKEA to stands(?) to put loudspeaker on them.



Today, I´m almost finished with the holes on the panel. I used chemical metal to stop up the holes with and drill new ones so I could move the holes.

Wow, very impressive.

Thanks. I will upload more photos of my work when I arrive home again ( on monday).

I plan to put in purple disco lightsticks (don´t know what they calls but my friend knows everything about sounds and lights so he will help me), and have under the speakers. The lights will blink in tact with the music and I will have Plexi (do you say so?), glass in front and back of the stands. I have also looked for usb light guns for PC.

More to come on monday that is to say, bye for now.

I have been a bit lazy on the project lately, but hey, it´s summer and it´s not every day the sun will shine here in sweden and the sun have shine like three days in a row and that´s an amazing thing.

But it have been rainy days too, so some things have been done.

The one o two speaker stands have been painted:



The other one looks like this:



And waiting to be painted.

I have done some configuration in dos-box so everything runs in 320x240 resolution, that´s great.

the old classic digger.



and even Warcraft



Next picture are from the GBA emulation running Metroid Zero mission.



I have even configed the amiga emulation and use a 2 GB SD-card as a harddrive. here you can see the workbench, the meny above runs out of the screen, so I need to see over that and see if I can fix it.



Next we have Alien Breed running from the amiga emulation.



And we continue with Turrican II also on amiga emulation.



And the control panel looks like this right now:



And a overview of the front of the machine running Space Invaders.

have i ever told you i want you to have my children?