For some reason recently I was thinking about what I could put in an empty slot in my entertainment center if one were to open up.
And out of the blue the idea hit me to take one of those old PC cases that laid horizontal, do a bit of rejiggering and coding, and make a system that would play the CDs from the following: Sega CD, Sega CD 32X*, Saturn and Dreamcast.

I know nothing about wiring or programming, or hell even the "e" word that we're not supposed to talk about.

How hard would this project be?







*for completeness' sake

Id say impossible if you dont know any programming. You would probably have to code entire banned "e" word software from scratch, since as far as I know, they dont have any for those systems.

Yoshi from Tech TV's The Screen Savers did something similar. He put an X-Box, PS2, Nintendo, Atari, and I think a Gamecube and maybe one other system into a desktop. You can read about it here So it's possible. However since you have no experience doing that kind of thing you should probably wave the white flag now.

Maybe you can get an old PC and run MAME or it? Thats considerably easier.

http://www.pike.uaivip.com.br/

how can they possibly get away with selling those? There is no way that is legal.

Sega CD and 32X exist and work well.

Saturn is weak. I haven't tried Dreamcast.

http://www.pike.uaivip.com.br/en_faq.html

lol

If you wanted to build something like Yoshi's Boxx, I don't see why you would need to know anything about programming. Wiring, soldering, yes, but not programming.

It sounds like you want to somehow use a single CD drive (well, GD drive actually, since you mentioned Dreamcast), but have all of the electronics necessary inside so it could act as all those different systems. I don't think that's possible.

What Yoshi did was take different systems and pack them together in one box with a video switcher to switch between the signals coming out of each system. Each system had its own disc drive or cartridge slot-nothing was shared. I don't think it would be possible to put together something like that for the systems you described and still get it to fit in your entertainment center, especially since all of the systems you mentioned are top-loading CD systems. (The Gamecube was the only top-loading system in Yoshi's machine, and of course it didn't take up that much space since it's smaller than the drives in the systems that use full-size discs. The other systems like the Xbox, PS2, and PC had trays and could be stacked together.)

Maybe you could put a small PC in there and use emulation to do what you want, but Dreamcast emulation is just getting started and I don't think the Saturn has really been emulated yet. (The Saturn had 2 processors and is a complicated beast.)