I bought a cabinet off of facebook marketplace, it is custom made. It came with a Sony Trinitron hooked up to a Sega Dreamcast and an adaptor for the Dreamcast that connects it to the buttons and joysticks. I’m unsure if its an xarcade tankstick or not, the layout I’ve seen online is very similar, but it seems like the guy took this one apart and put the buttons and joysticks on a piece of wood.

Anyways, I had it working one night, all buttons except down on the joystick. I tried replacing the switch and wiring but it changed nothing, as of now I can’t get any buttons to work.

I hooked it up to my computer and using notepad I found the buttons are mostly unbinded to anything. Like, player 1 button 3 moves the text cursor to the right and thats it.

I was trying to reprogram the buttons using my computer and a ps/2 keyboard, however, I don’t have a program button. From what I have seen online I need to move my switch to the left and press the program button so the red led turns off. The switch is wired, but not the program button.

I have located a random button on the top of the cabinet, maybe this is the programming button? I have no idea how or where to connect it to get it to function properly, as the wires are currently dangling and disconnected. Any advice on that or maybe what control stick and buttons I have will be extremely helpful as I am alone on this project.

Would reprogramming the buttons even affect the dreamcast? Or is it only effective for using the buttons on a computer? I have many questions, I will be very appreciative to any bits of information no matter how small.

I have tools at my disposal and I am more than willing to get what is needed to make this project work. (It took five people to get this thing up a flight of stairs so I am not giving up!)

TLDR: I bought an arcade cabinet with no knowledge on the subject. Wiring issues, any advice will be very appreciated.

(Using my girlfriends account for this post, she told me the cat tax was mandatory)

Hi everyone!

For the past year to year and a half, I have been developing a project called ArcadeStudio. It has become a very large solo project, but it is finally approaching the stage where I need to test it outside my own development environment and arcade setup.

I was thinking it might be time to try to release it but I would need to get it properly tested first.

What is ArcadeStudio?

ArcadeStudio is intended to bring many of the tools and configuration tasks involved in building a modern arcade cabinet into one coherent system powered by data that help you get the right information/configuration at the right time in most scenarios.

The project consists of two main parts:

ArcadeStudio is the visual authoring and configuration application.

ArcadeServer runs on the arcade cabinet, applies the published configuration, monitors the runtime, and controls the connected systems.

The basic idea is that you configure and verify the cabinet in ArcadeStudio and then publish a validated configuration bundle to ArcadeServer. The server detects what is running and applies the correct controller, lighting, overlay, marquee, and automation configuration.

Rather than replacing RetroArch, MAME, Dolphin, or existing frontends, ArcadeStudio is designed to coordinate the systems around them.

What can ArcadeStudio do?

The project now includes, among other things:

• Hardware discovery and cabinet hardware inventory.
• Visual cabinet layouts and logical control mapping.
• Controller profiles for gamepads, arcade controls, spinners, trackballs, lightguns, wheels, pedals, and other devices.
• Controller routing and emulator-specific configuration.
• Automatic detection and identification of running games and emulators.
• Per-game and per-system profiles.
• Launch profiles and reusable launch variables.
• LED layouts, mappings, effects, and runtime control.
• Support for network lighting and integrations such as WLED and OpenRGB.
• Marquee configuration and automatic media selection.
• An overlay editor and runtime overlays for DirectX 11, DirectX 12, OpenGL, and Vulkan.
• Asset and metadata management for screenshots, videos, marquees, and other media.
• An automation system for creating rules such as: “When this game starts, activate this controller profile, LED scene, overlay, and marquee.”
• Downloadable data packs for hardware definitions, rules, layouts, launch configurations, and future extensions.
• A unified publishing system with validation, diagnostics, and rollback if a configuration causes problems.

As you can see, I went a bit overboard but I wanted to make sure I could play around without having to micro manage everything on my arcade cabinet.

I would love some feedback if I am the only one that felt the need for something like this? I have done a lot of work to ensure that users can create data packs and share so that led configurations, controllers, graphic packs etc. can be shared.

Anyway, let me know what you think.