About to Puchase first Net City Cabinet, Help Appreciated.

[lacanian]

Hi Guys and Gals,

I currently live in Japan and am moving back home to Australia next month. As I am shipping a number of items back home, I thought I would live my child hood dream of owning a cabinet!

I have sourced a Sega New Net City cabinet. I like the look of these. My goal is to be able to run MAME, Dreamcast, and maybe even my PS3. I see a lot of people here buying system boards and cartridges although I am not sure if I will go down that path yet.

To connect a PC to the cabinet seems easy enough with the jvs-pac. http://jvspac.kirurg.org/

Can someone please describe what the I/O board connects to? what it looks like?
I am not sure if I need a system board inside, or if the I/O board just has a USB cable which connects to the JVS-PAC or a Naiomi system board. ( a little confused)
Do I need to buy a system board at all?

I will keep everyone updated with cabinet refurb.

Thanks for your time and help.

[FrancoB]

Hi lacanian, welcome to the forum

I'm no expert but I will give you what info I know.

I have a couple of Net Citys myself. I'm not sure about the New Net City but I imagine the wiring will be similar.

This is the IO board in one of mine:



The controls connect to the IO board though AMP connectors (those plugs at the front on the left). At the back left of the board you can see a USB port. That is what usually connects to the Naomi MB. If you are using a JVS-PAC (which I'm planning on doing) you just disconnect the USB cable from the Naomi MB (if there is one) and connect it to the JVS-PAC instead. Easy as that

Like you I want to have Mame, Dreamcast and Xbox 360 in one of the cabs. Mame is covered by the JVS-PAC. There are already two 360 pads hacked to the controls using AMP connectors for ease of swapping and I have just had two hacked Dreamcast pads sent over from the states to connect in the same way. For the 360 and Dreamcast video I have a VGA switch box in the bottom of the cab with the consoles. Both consoles have VGA leads which plug into the switch box and then there is a single VGA lead going to the monitor.



You could do the same with hacked DC and PS3 pads.

[lacanian]

ƒrancoB

Awesome! Thats a great help. I hope you don't mind me asking some follow up questions.

How do you switch between your dreamcast and X-B0x 360 controls? Is this an automatic or manual process?

Is there a reason why you chose to hack the dreamcast pads rather than using the DC arcade stick boards?

Did you ever consider purchasing a MGCD for dreamcast? I just read it only outputs a 15k picture. What exactly is 15k? Is VGA better quality than this?

For the PS3 controls, I could use the Toodles Cthulhu PC/PS3 Board - http://www.lizardlickamusements.com/pages/boards.shtml.
Although I just read the JVS-PAC has firmware to support the PS3, so all you need is an VGA cable.

For some reason I thought it was going to be very complicated. (It's all new to me!)
Appreciate it.