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MAMEP3.KID The Dreamcast
So you'd think the 3000+ games that are playable with MAME and a dedicated Killer Instinct would be enough for me in my cabinet, right? Wrong! I had long been a fan of the Virtua Fighter series as well as some more recent arcade titles - House of the Dead 2, Dead or Alive 2, etc. Well, in my perusings of the Internet and general MAME info, I came across the DC2JAMMA project. What a great idea, I thought, making a state of the art console game playable in an arcade cabinet. And guess what, Dreamcast played all those games I had enjoyed in recent years. The Dreamcast would end up becoming the "D" part of my cabinet. Even thought the Dreamcast is no longer being produced by Sega, I was able to acquire all the necessary items from Ebay - Dreamcast system, new controllers, light guns, games, VMU cards, etc. Now I was all set to bring my cabinet to its full capacity. I proceeded to make a control box similar to the one I had made for the PC. I knew I would only be using 2 players on the Dreamcast so this simplified the process somewhat. For control, I hacked two Dreamcast controllers and mounted them neatly inside the box. This would allow me to use the standard arcade controls on the Dreamcast. The cables from the controllers come out the side of the box and are retractable so they'll be just the right length to get to the Dreamcast. The input to the controllers are wired to the front panel connectors which attach nicely to that interface cable I made from the JAMMA connector.
Coming out the opposite side of the box is the AV connector for the Dreamcast. This is part of a SCART cable that has RGB as well as stereo audio outputs. A sync stripper circuit was required since the Dreamcast doesn't output a separate sync signal. This circuit is outlined in the DC2JAMMA project. And since I had run +5 volts from the JAMMA to the video connector, I had the proper voltage to power the circuit! So on the box below, you see the three cables that plug into the Dreamcast. The video and player 1/2 controls connect to the JAMMA cable I had made earlier. And the stereo audio plugs directly into the surround subwoofer system!
Here's the system installed. The subwoofer provides a perfect base for the Dreamcast
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