Random thought: You can pretty much trace where the lion's share of tech R&D money was going at any given point by following the nature of arcade hardware.
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Why? Because Sony happily licensed the PS1's chipset out to arcade manufacturers to basically do with whatever they pleased. Graft on a ROM board and security IC? Can do. Faster clock rate? Easy. A hard drive? Yup. DVD, CD, *and* an HDD? No problem.
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These aren't just hypotheticals. In order of what was previously mentioned: Namco System 11, Namco System 10, Konami GQ, Konami Bemani Twinkle hardware. All of which (and more) can be looked up on the aptly-named http://system16.com/ .
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By the end of the 90's, it wasn't just Sony getting in on the action: The Sega Naomi arcade platform was more or less a Dreamcast with double the RAM and the option for either a ROM cartridge or a GD-ROM reader.
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Then, just a few years later, you see the Sega/Microsoft Chihiro hardware, based on the Xbox. Sega/Namco/Nintendo Triforce hardware, based on the GameCube. Namco System 246 and others, based on the Sony Playstation 2.
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Midway, by contrast, saw the lay of the land earlier than most. Hydro Thunder (1999), on the "Quicksilver II" platform, was based on a commodity PC running Windows 98 or Windows 2000. By 2005/6, the PC was R&D king, with a corresponding explosion of PC-based arcade platforms.
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From Sega Lindbergh, to Namco N2/ES1, to Konami's later Bemani games, to Taito's Type X and up, the majority of arcade platforms are now little more than commodity PCs with a hardware security dongle and a JVS interface for easy wiring to a cabinet.
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Anyway, I just thought you all might find that interesting.
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