dreamcast sucks for emulating mame. its only 200mhz.
Hello Snaake,
I would kind of think so as well, but I did some reading and said that it could play the classic games like Pac-Man, Asteroids, Space Invaders. That is pretty much all I would be looking for. I know it would probably choke on more modern games, but then again that is the reason I would go with a Dreamcast in a cabinet for anyway, to play the games made for it.
The Dreamcast is an unusual console in that many games were arcade ports, thus out of all the consoles, it seems like this one is most suited for a cabinet.
I did mod a couple X-Boxes recently and one will eventually go into a cabinet, the other is mostly for a media system.
I was going to mod another Xbox, but then I decided to give the Dreamcast another look see.
a GOOD/recent build computer with a new dualcore cpu can emulator dc games full speed. with a good video card of course.
My current machine is an i5 650 3.2ghz with 4gig of ram...so I know it will run on this machine. But for a cabinet, I am looking at a dedicated machine based around a 1.8ghz Atom processor. Intel makes ITX motherboards with the Atom built in. So this would be my contender for for a full on Mame cabinet. If it can emulate the Dreamcast as well, then I would be killing two birds with one stone.
otherwise you can just buy a dreamcast. there are many arcade friendly dreamcast games and you dont even have to mod it. backups just play as is and you are not hurting anyone. its been dead and buried. so $20 dc and free games sounds good.
That is a bit of interesting information to know. So what you are saying is that asking for Dreamcast rom sites wouldn't be breaking the forum rules?
there is no hard drive for dc so you gotta swap the game.
Yeah, I did some reading earlier and came across that tidbit of info as well. Unlike the first version of the PS2 and the Xbox, the Dreamcast didn't have a hard drive system available for it. Thus in a cabinet situation, it would be kind of a pain to constantly swap out the discs instead of just selecting the game from a menu. But I could see that if one put together a sit down driving cabinet, then I can see the Dreamcast shining in an application such as this. I have found out (through much reading) that Mame is problematic when it comes to mimicking driving arcade games. You would have to set up multiple arcade controls. When dealing with the Dreamcast, all the arcade ports to the console would just need one set of controls. It is for newer driving games (18 Wheeler, San Francisco Rush, Outrun, F355, Hydro Thunder, 4X4 Thunder) that I was considering a Dreamcast project. But I was curious as to what else the console can do.
The Dreamcast controllers seem to have less buttons and I am thinking they should be easier to hack than a PS2 or Xbox controller. The key to the project would be the ability to hack the analog controls.
The amazing thing about the Dreamcast is that it seems like it was a console ahead of its time when it was released. Even a few years down the road, the graphics seem to be superior on the Dreamcast than many ports of the same game on the Xbox or PS2.
I just don't know if I should go the full 9 yards and go with a full system or just go with a PC and emulate.
Anyway, thanx for the info!
Geo