Don't attempt this unless you have at a bare minimum a soldering iron and the requisite skills, a crimping tool, and lots of patience as you'll need to source parts and put in the sweat. I would recommend that you just buy those available productions and support those developers outright. I recommend the Jammacon as the dev, @TheLastBandit, has been a really cool guy in my discussions with him. Personally, I am waiting for viletim to produce SCART2JAMMA 3.0 and will definitely pick that up as it has component video (YPbPr) to JAMMA video transcoding. I have multiple cabs and it would be nice to be able to hookup more than one console to different cabs at the same time. Also, I am impatient and don't know when viletim will release his new SCART2JAMMA, plus arcade projects are fun as long as you find the time to work on them =)
What I'll discuss here is interfacing the following consoles to a JAMMA arcade: PS1, PS2, Saturn, & Dreamcast. Eventually, I would like to interface the Wii to JAMMA arcade just for Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. If you have access to a PAL Wii, you should be able to follow this to accomplish the task (I think, as I am not sure how PAL resolution will look on a standard res monitor). But us poor American Souls have Wii's that only support component video (hence I am awaiting viletim's next SCART2JAMMA). My reasoning for only targeting those consoles is I see no reason to play an HD-capable console on a 15khz monitor's much lower resolution. Also, the consoles that came before the PS1/Saturn generation, I feel had compromised arcade ports. Of course, some ports of arcade games were reimagined on the home console and far exceed their arcade versions (Mike Tyson's Punchout, Rygar). It wasn't until the 128-bit generation that home console performance began to match or exceed the performance of arcade games; Tekken Tag Tournament and Soul Calibur being good examples of this. I wish to play games series that started life in arcades and finished on consoles (R-Type, Gradius, etc.). Or games that were inspired by arcade gameplay but were only found on consoles (Einhander), and finally games that are too expensive or hard to source in this hobby and so I'll settle for a good home console port over MAME (think Cave titles). Some games just need to be experienced on a cab with the faint glow of marquee light radiating on your face. The rest of the games in any console's great library I feel are best experienced with a gamepad from the comfort of your couch. You may feel differently and can certainly apply this discussion to interface other consoles to play whatever you like on your cab(s).
The key is to be able to do the four following things:
What I'll discuss here is interfacing the following consoles to a JAMMA arcade: PS1, PS2, Saturn, & Dreamcast. Eventually, I would like to interface the Wii to JAMMA arcade just for Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. If you have access to a PAL Wii, you should be able to follow this to accomplish the task (I think, as I am not sure how PAL resolution will look on a standard res monitor). But us poor American Souls have Wii's that only support component video (hence I am awaiting viletim's next SCART2JAMMA). My reasoning for only targeting those consoles is I see no reason to play an HD-capable console on a 15khz monitor's much lower resolution. Also, the consoles that came before the PS1/Saturn generation, I feel had compromised arcade ports. Of course, some ports of arcade games were reimagined on the home console and far exceed their arcade versions (Mike Tyson's Punchout, Rygar). It wasn't until the 128-bit generation that home console performance began to match or exceed the performance of arcade games; Tekken Tag Tournament and Soul Calibur being good examples of this. I wish to play games series that started life in arcades and finished on consoles (R-Type, Gradius, etc.). Or games that were inspired by arcade gameplay but were only found on consoles (Einhander), and finally games that are too expensive or hard to source in this hobby and so I'll settle for a good home console port over MAME (think Cave titles). Some games just need to be experienced on a cab with the faint glow of marquee light radiating on your face. The rest of the games in any console's great library I feel are best experienced with a gamepad from the comfort of your couch. You may feel differently and can certainly apply this discussion to interface other consoles to play whatever you like on your cab(s).
The key is to be able to do the four following things:
- Harvest console RGB video, then transcode/convert console RGB video to JAMMA 15khz standard resolution RGB
- Downmux console stereo audio to JAMMA mono, while allowing for audio level amping
- Optionally, allowing for both amped JAMMA mono, while at the same time allowing for amped stereo output or line level stereo output
- Interface controls to the JAMMA edge connector
- By-pass the arcade PSU, saving power, while still being able to power the console and monitor.
- There is also a need to preserve the JAMMA arcade's power connection setup to be able to revert back to JAMMA standards
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