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Ond has lost his mind, he's covering his cabs in contact paper.

Hopefully not blue marble contact paper.   

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20070321030425/http://www.wickedretarded.com/~crapmame/3.html


Scott

  Ond has lost his mind, he's covering his cabs in contact paper. You are thinking about the cheap stuff.  It will be fine. Before I get to aesthetics I have structural stuff to address for internal hardware placement.  That will be next up.

Oh yeah, nearly forgot I'm replacing the real stained timber veneer curves with wood-grain contact in the style of the actual Pac Man cocktail cabs. The wood-grain contact is nice stuff though not rubbishy. The overall look should be more arcade machine and less furniture vibe.

Ummm.......Why?

I've restored several cabs with timber veneer shells and feel it is both totally arcade authentic & beautiful. The furniture vibe is cool.

An advantage of the veneer is it that minor to moderate scratches are easy to fix. Even large gouges are recoverable. I've got a really good technique sorted out (involving acrylic putty and a smidge of hobby paint) but won't go on (unless you want me to). With contact, once it is scratched or holed there is little you can do except replace it.

Other people like it too. Back in the "good-old-days" I restored some old wood veneer cabs, some I got for free because they were so scratched to hell. Fixed them up all shiny and they were attractive, popular, always sold for top dollar. One I made into a custom cab for a guy, he specifically wanted the woodgrain furniture vibe feel as it was going into the living area of his house.

Can't say the same feeling exists for contact woodgrain, but maybe I'm just thinking about cheap stuff. I won't go on. What kind of contact are you thinking of using? If you know of something that is good and affordable, I'm interested too.

Yeah thanks Zeb. This build definitely needs some time spent on documenting GreenAntz place in the video chain. I also must acknowledge the nudge that all the GreenAntz development has given this project lately. It wouldn't be the same without it. I'm going to spend some time on the FE Attract Mode Plus, developing some nice artwork for it for a 320 x 240 CRT optimized layout. Hah that sounds so low-res but I know it's going to look glorious on the Sanyo TV CRT! Yup, no Arduino, no complicated crap, just careful attention to the GroovyMame based build. I've ordered a new PS2 KeyWiz for the project and a few other bits and pieces. Send that GreenAntz 2.3 whenever you are ready, I appreciate it!

I had mixed feelings about continuing this cab. It is an art piece pretending to be an arcade machine, the screen is overly large and not really optimal. But guess what? Playing on it is really indulging in everything anyone loved about CRT based gaming. If you remember that era then you know what I mean. I've been tinkering with the new look concept. Nothing locked in, but I like to test render and give it the stare test for a few days. The artwork is just low-res stuff I cobbled together, but it's a start. I think I'm on the right track...

Not so much yellow. Oh yeah, nearly forgot I'm replacing the real stained timber veneer curves with wood-grain contact in the style of the actual Pac Man cocktail cabs. The wood-grain contact is nice stuff though not rubbishy. The overall look should be more arcade machine and less furniture vibe.

ATS

Genuinely looking forward to this   I think this is one of your more exciting projects. Maybe not the most technically challenging thing you've done, but I love it as an "artistic interpretation" of a classic games cocktail cab.

You'll be able to use a new GreenAntz v2.3 in it. It has an onboard 15.7khz video filter which will greatly help you to eliminate boot loading screens. So you can boot up directly into games or FE. I know you were originally planning to manage some of this with an Arduino, but now you won't have to!

Anyway, I can get the new GreenAntz to you whenever you are ready for it, just working out some enclosure details (BTW thank you for your help with that  ). 

FWIW, when posting on BYOAC I always cut/paste to notepad and save before clicking post/preview. I hate spending a couple of hours on a great post only to see it blown away because of a DDOS spam attack or something.

Priming this project for updates.  2+ years since I've looked at it.  Re-reading the entire project is a bit of a cringe ha hah. That's ok things change, we change. I'm not going to use the overly complicated game select system I had in mind just a FE new to me. More in the next few days.  If you haven't seen this project before have a look! My revised plan for this will have some different look and feel.  A months leave is coming up for me, so get ready BYOAC, OND is back.     Assuming I can bring up the forum in browser, that's a bit hit and miss these days...

Slow down and take a few breaths between sentences. Hard to understand, and I'm only vaguely familiar with the UIO. That being said...

Looks like you should run those LED strips from a separate 12v power supply.

If you move from a 12v supply to a 5v supply for the same load, then your amps are going waaaay up. Pulling over 2x the current through the same wires. It is just simple Ohm's law W=V*A. If W stays the same and you reduce V then A has to go up.

Also LEDs require a fixed voltage drop to operate. Reducing the supply voltage signficantly reduces the overhead available for the LED to operate. If you have a blue LED that requires 4v drop then a 12v supply gives 8v overhead. If you use a 5v supply then your overhead is reduced to 1v. As noted above, reduced voltage means that to get the same brightness you're going to need to ramp up the current quite a lot.

OK guys, I have built a multi-player pedestal. I am in the wiring stages of hooking everything up. I started w/ the rgb buttons ( Ultimarc gold leaf ) and standard 5050 60pm rgb light strips / 4 RGB drink holders. The Idiot part is I way underestimated the load rating of the Ultimarc UIO's in regards to the High Current connectors. I believe I may have smoked the mosfets on the boards. I have 2 strips measuring 100", One Measuring 95". havent hooked up the cup holders as of yet. I am running 2 Ultimarc UIO's, I have 1 strip hooked to each High current Led port, with the High current turned on in the board configuration. I also have 25 RGB led buttons plugged into each UIO, skipping the first row of led plugs as they are for the high current terminals. I am running separate External power supplies, 5v - 20A - 100w, to each UIO for the 5v buttons. I have a similiar 12v power supply running the strips thru the UIO's as shown on the Ultimarc website. My 12v power supply never gets hot, all illuminate well in regards to the strips, but my 5v Power supplies and UIO boards get crazy hot, 1 of the UIO's smoked the barrel connector for LED power within just a few minutes. I realize My Led strips are way too long now, & I need to run Amplifiers, but would that have also killed my 5v section? If I could get some help w/ this I would really appreciate it! Been doing this for a long time, just have never played w/ led's $ the like.

I have been pulling arcade parts out of Japan for a while, and this summer I did the same thing for console hardware - a Saturn and a Dreamcast to sit behind a cab I am building. Writing down what I learned, because the electrical side nearly bit me and the money side was not what I expected.

Why Japan specifically

Two reasons and they compound. First the library: a large slice of the Saturn catalogue never left the country in any language, and for the games that did get a Western release the Japanese pressing is usually the cheapest copy in existence. Second, supply. Japan bought these machines in bulk, kept the boxes, and the domestic resale sites list them with far more condition detail than a typical eBay auction.

What it costs right now

Numbers I pulled off the Japanese second-hand market on 1 September 2026, converted at roughly 145 yen to the dollar:

• Saturn, power-tested, with cables - about 7,000 yen (~US$48)
• Dreamcast with two pads and a game - about 7,500 yen (~US$52)
• Boxed HKT-3000 Dreamcast - 18,599 yen (~US$128). Roughly 2.5x the loose machine; the box is the entire premium, so decide up front which one you are buying
• Mega Drive six-button pads, unused pair - 1,900 yen (~US$13)
• HDMI converter for the Sega multi-out - 2,100 to 2,220 yen (~US$15)
• Saturn discs - from about 600 yen

The three things that stop a Japanese console working at home

1. Voltage. Japan's domestic supply is 100V, 50Hz in the east and 60Hz in the west. The PSU is internal on these machines and expects that. 220-240V is not a compatibility problem, it is a fire. North American 120V will usually run the console while over-driving a thirty-year-old power supply by a fifth, which is precisely the component least likely to have aged well. Buy the step-down transformer before you buy the console - it costs less than the console and it is not optional.

2. Region. Dreamcast hardware is built to one of three regions (Japan, North America, Europe) and the Saturn checks territory in the same spirit. This only hurts if you were hoping to run your existing Western discs on it. If you are importing the machine to play the Japanese library, the lock is doing exactly what you want.

3. Video. Both output analogue over Sega's own multi-out. Panels sold in the last decade generally have no composite or RGB input at all, which is why converters are their own category in Japanese listings. Put one in the same order - sourcing it locally afterwards costs more than shipping it with the console.

Listing vocabulary worth learning

The condition wording on Japanese listings is consistent and load-bearing, so it is worth knowing the four terms that matter:

• dousa kakunin zumi - operation confirmed. The seller powered it on and tested it. Require this.
• janku ("junk") - sold untested or known faulty, no returns. It is an honest label rather than a warning about the seller, and it is why a junk console costs a third of a tested one. Parts only.
• hako tsuki - boxed. obi tsuki - the paper spine card is still with the disc.
• hontai - the console unit itself, as opposed to sofuto, a game. Useful for filtering out the software when you want hardware.

Search in Japanese, not English - the katakana spellings return the whole market, the English names return a fraction of it. (They are in the write-up linked at the bottom if you want to copy-paste them.)

Two gotchas nobody warns you about

The Saturn keeps its clock and internal saves alive on a coin lithium cell, and when that cell dies the stored data goes with it. On a console this age it is always dead or dying. It is a 200 yen part and a two-minute job, and it should be the first thing you do.

US buyers: the $800 de minimis exemption was revoked with effect from 29 August 2025, so the parcel is dutiable whatever it is worth. Worth factoring in before you compare the landed cost against a domestic retro shop - it still wins, but by less than the sticker price suggests.

Games are the light, flat, cheap part of the parcel, so if you are shipping a console anyway, load up on discs. Ten of them barely move the international shipping bill.

Links

The long version, with the sourcing detail and the current listings I priced this off: Sega Saturn and Dreamcast from Japan (2026)

I use OneMall as the Japan-side forwarder for this stuff, so for full disclosure that is whose listing pages these are - live Saturn listings if you just want to see what the market looks like today.

Happy to answer questions on the shipping and customs side, which is the part nobody writes down.