Overhauling the Sega Astro City – Part 4, PC addition
Continuing on from part 3 of this series, let’s move on to part 4 – adding a PC to the cab.
This one came as a bit of an afterthought, but after upgrading my old workhorse S478 P4 3.2ghz PC, I thought it would probably be fine getting relegated to the cab. The cost adding this functionality is pretty minimal, as I still have the valid XP license and the video card’s an ATi Radeon, which have good rates of success running Soft15k. All I’ll need is a J-PAC, and I’ll be fine.
To simplify the procedure, I’ll keep the network card in the machine and administer the PC over the network, and run a customised nLite install to trim out all the unnecessary gear. I’ll rig a momentary push-button to take care of powering on the PC with one of the spare slots I have under the CP (or I’ll add it to the project box housing the switches for the fans, negatron, etc) and mount the PC inside the cab. Easy. I’ll have to customise the gamelist to suit the hardware and monitor since I’m only after 15k titles, but it shouldn’t be too tricky. As a bonus, it also means I can use my recently acquired XM1541 adapter to run off the machines LPT port since my new desktop PC lacks that kind of hardware.
So that’s part 4 – part 5 will note the summary, and the posts thereafter will be ad-hoc updates.
To keep track of the whole project, just use the Sega Astro City Overhaul tag – the whole series will be added to it over time.
