Thanks for coming back and checking on my blog. Some of you guys might have been following / found my blog because of my EPIC Neptune project I set myself a few years ago after seeing the awesome Longhorn Engineer's tutorial on creating a Neptune using a 32x and a Genesis / MD2.
My idea was to learn soldering by making one of my spare Megadrive 2's into a working Neptune. But rather than leave it there I was going to use the skills I'd picked up making designer toys to make a replica outer shell for the mod and create an actual Neptune.
Well my project started with the hunting out on ebay of a 32x and then getting as many Neptune Prototype shell photos as I could and comparing them with my MD2. I'm pretty much 100% convinced that the Neptune prototype shell is a modified Genesis 2 shell. The bottom certainly makes me thing this as the lower square pan is exactly the same as a Gen 2 shell.
I documented the process of making my Neptune replica shell at most stages of sculpting. I thought I would make a slideshow so you guys can see what the steps are to make a Megadrive/Genesis 2 shell into a Neptune shell.
To finish it off I back painted the perspex LED 'window', glossed the buttons and applied the waterslip decals for the logos so that it looks like the prototype photo's I've seen on the web.
I've placed a few photos on the page as well as making a gallery for you guys to look through.
As you can see from the above photo I've finished the internal modular setup of the Neptune for when I eventually get a 32x. I really wanted to make sure that I would not need to destroy the 32x to make the Neptune. I will simply just have to take the 32x apart, fold it under itself and plug it in. Well I'll actually have to desolder the choke and resolder it on its side to lower the profile of the edge of the 32x so it will fit in the Replica case.
Again I made a slideshow of the progress I made with the mod and if you've followed my blog you will have seen all or most of them.
And to finish this post off which is a little shorter than I thought it would be. Its more photo heavy as I've basically posted most of my progress as I've gone along. I also made a Youtube video showing the shell and the internal mod.
Hopefully you guys like my replica Neptune shell. I'm so happy that its all finished off, and when I get a 32x I'll make it even more finished off. :-)
A bit of a late Happy New Year! but there you go. :-)
I've been quiet again on the old blog front, the time keeps flying by which is a little worrying when you think about it. Over christmas I don't get much time to do many geeky projects as we're out busking with the kids Brass band that me and my wife volunteer for. Always good fun getting out there and playing the classic christmas tunes!
Well its a new year and I want to get cracking with a couple of Sega based projects and 1 arcade game project.
Currently the 2 Sega projects are on the go which I will no doubt make a post about when they are all done and finished. I'm just waiting on an ebay purchase to finish the larger of the two projects wiring then I will be onto the final touches for it. I'm really pleased with it so far, mysterious huh? :-P
I also have an arcade game project which I made a quick video intro for which is at the bottom of this post.
While I was working on one of the Sega projects I was watching some of the arcade and retro console repair videos that I subscribe to on YouTube and I started getting the urge to have another go at repairing an arcade game.
So off I trotted to one of the arcade forums I go on and snagged myself a board with some issues. Mainly this games problems are in the sound department. The game is WF SuperStars :-D I used to play this loads at Mr Man's video shop on Rosliston Road when I was a teen so its got a great nostalgic feeling for me.
Its going to be fun to tackle issues in the sound area of a Jamma board as I've not poked around those areas yet.
BUT, I need to get some of these other projects finished first before tackling WF. :-P
So catch you guys on the next post which will hopefully be a nice completed projects post.
I’ve not had much time this past 2 weeks to play with making my Neptune hook-up wires unfortunately and I’ve been getting myself down with doing ebay searches for Sega 32x’s on there and seeing how expensive they are now. The prices of them have really shot through the roof and they seem to be becoming more and more unattainable which sucks. I’m still searching though as I need to get a working one to finish the Neptune off.
Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. Its about a little mid-week recycling project that I’ve been thinking about. I like most megadrive owners / collectors have a couple of spare Sonic the Hedgehog 1’s knocking about that no-one wants and I’ve been feeling that its such a shame that such a great game is just gathering dust getting absolutely no love as there are so many of them about.
Well I had the idea that the cartridges are around the same kind of size as some usb portable HDD’s so I thought I could use the casing to house a HDD and make a geeky drive to carry around. Getting one of my spares out and looking over it I saw that they are a bit too small so I did some research on the internet to see if people have made retro game USB drives and saw that some people sacrifice some awesome looking Nintendo games to use the cases to house the drives. And when I saw this I actually thought its such a shame that the actual game, the physical chips and board are just getting binned so that the cases are empty enough to make room for the HDD’s to fit in. So I opened up my Sonic cartridge to see if there was anyway I could keep the game in there and hopefully make it playable still while also being a USB drive.
Once opened you can see that the actual game board doesn’t take up all the room inside the cartridge and the space available is just a bit bigger than a USB pen drive with some room to spare around the sides. This is a pretty good result as I have a spare USB pen drive knocking about that I don’t use as I always end up losing them seen’s they are so small. And it was also free as I got it in a promo goody bag gift.
I found some sticky back velco strips as I thought that I might get a larger capacity pen drive in the future and if I glue gun the pen drive in place it will be stuck there forever. A rare bit of forward thinking from me haha. I also quickly ordered up a usb extension wire from the interwebs to give me a wire that can connect the cart / usb to my computer. I don’t really like the look of just the USB connector sticking out of the sides so wanted to go the dangly wire way.
Here you can see how the insides of the cartridge will look with the USB pen drive in place and the extension cable hanging out the side. Looking pretty neat.
And here you see how it looks with the little security screws put back into place and the cartridge all closed up.
When I was brainstorming how to have the USB extension cable and have the game playable I thought that if I have the cable coming out of the top of the back alignment groove the cartridge should still fit into the Megadrive 1 and 2 and not crimp or squash the cable. And it was a bit of a relief when I tried it after screwing it back together and it still fit into the cart slot and switched it on! :D
WOOP! Now I have a retro styled backup USB drive which has given a dusty unused cartridge some new life AND the game is still in there and working. So if there is an emergency situation where I see a Megadrive and heaven forbid there isn’t a game available to play then POW! USB Retro pen drive saves the day!
Hopefully this little post will inspire some other people to give their spare cartridges a new lease of life without sacrificing the actual game itself as that seems a big shame to me too.
I’m going to be making some time to make the hook-up wires for the Neptune next so hopefully there will be a post on those soon.
Been a little bit of a break between posts again I know but not as long as it has been in the past haha. We've had a chock-a-block-a couple of weeks and I'd been struggling to get some time in on the Naomi project with helping to setup for summer concerts (indoor and outdoor) practicing for playing in the concerts as well as helping to organise our wedding and our stag + hen do activities. So getting to posting some updates has been a little tight like a tiger. But! Hopefully we have a nice couple of weeks of summer holidays now and a more leisurely pace.
Well, As you probably read in my last post I had a real lemon of a monitor in the Naomi, and from some reading around on the forums I frequent I think it had been a problem for the owner at least a year before I won it on eBay. Bit crap really but I guess that's why I ended up getting it so cheaply. Anyway, nothing to it but try to get the sucker up and running.
So at the end of the last post I had my Naomi up and running via my Dreamcast and had a great time playing some Street Fighter 3 : double impact and Giga Wing. But the pin cushion controls weren't working so you couldn't get it to full screen without it pinching inwards from the sides quite a lot! Pretty annoying and obviously another fault on the chassis.
Well, the chassis lasted until I played on the machine again after having a good nose round it. It started looking like it wanted to scroll and then POP the line came back. I guess some parts of it gave up the ghost, again. So back onto the repair dude for thoughts and ideas because he'd been slowly eliminating problems as he went with my chassis.
Because I'd replaced the transistor already and it had gone again it had to be something else and Grant started thinking it could be a faulty Yoke or fly-back. Well I know what the parts of the monitor are now from doing research on them for the Naomi project but haven't got the first clue with how to diagnose and fix them. So off my chassis went again down south for Grant to do some more inspections and to soak test the chassis again on his spare tube to see if it would hold out. And if it did that would mean that I had an internally sparking Yoke or something.
I had a nose around the Yoke area after I sent the chassis off and found a piece of plastic that encloses some copper wiring was loose and flapping about so I mentioned this to Grant and super glued it back on. He said that this wouldn't be the problem though, so I glued it up so that it should help stop moisture getting into the Yoke area through that avenue.
The coiled up copper wiring on the white cone is the Yoke area. It was absolutely filthy around this area so I gave it a good ol' clean down to see if anything else looked a little suspicious.
The chassis was posted off and received and I waited to see how it would hold up to Grant's tests and started trying to do some internet research on getting hold of Sanwa 29" tubes or even worst case senario, 29" tv's to sub into place. Both lots of research basically came up bust though and it would seem I would need to drop a couple of hundred on a complete monitor and chassis if it show's up as my tube is faulty as spares for them seem to be non-existant anymore. :-(
The weekend comes and I get a PM and its good news, well for me. The chassis popped again on Grant's spare tube within about 20 minutes. This ruled out my Yoke being the issue which made me have a huge sigh of relief!!!
And with this happening it got Grant's head scratching again and he would have to really start delving into the chassis. This could take a while, so awesomely! This is a true example of the Arcade scene's helpfulness and friendliness. He offered to send me his spare working, repaired chassis to use while he spends some time diagnosing and repairing mine so that I have a Naomi to use and play on while he gets into the nitty gritty with my faulty chassis. What a dude!! :D
So while I waited for the spare chassis to arrive I started working away on my Mame PC setup. I've played Mame before on my desktop PC but I've never set up a machine just to play Mame on an arcade machine before so I had to do a lot of reading up on what to use and how to set it so that the resolutions are fixed so they don't damage my fragile monitor and so that there isn't screen tearing etc. The last thing you would want is to give the game away that it wasn't running real arcade hardware inside with crappy looking screen tearing!
I follow a guy on YouTube called Exmosquito who does 1CC runs of some of the hardest arcade games and he runs Mame on his arcade machine and thankfully he did a video a while ago explaining his Mame setup. It looks like it runs absolutely smoothly so I wanted to copy his setup so I could have a spot on machine.
He uses GroovyMame which is a modified version of Mame and he also uses the CRTEmu drivers which are designed to work on ATI graphics cards. So I set about sourcing all the parts for making up a small PC that would run GroovyMame out of my spares.
Typically I didn't have very many parts left over at all. Since I was a teenager I've been into PC's with my Dad and whenever we'd upgrade parts I would generally keep them as spares incase anything went wrong. And over the years I've kept doing this and whenever anyone's PC's needed replacements I've popped these spares into their machines to help fix them. So when it comes round for me to want to make another PC I couldn't as I've given all the spares I need away! haha blumin' typical!
So I went on the scrounge a bit. I remembered my Brother might still have his old motherboard and processor still from when we upgraded his machine a few months ago so I gave him a call and thankfully he did! So I nipped over to pick it up. A good start! I have a mobo and processor. Next I need an ATI graphics card, which no-one I know has so I sourced a nice looking ASUS Radeon HD4350 512mb Silent PCI-express card that's compatible with the CRTEmu drivers and some memory from the local CEX. Im trying to get this little machine running on the cheap cheap if you couldn't tell. Next thing is a Power supply which is easy as I have my spare modular Corsair HX520w psu which will work a treat. And the final thing, a hard drive. I recently had a PS3 Phat 60GB that I reflowed which lasted for a very short time before it was properly bricked so before I binned it I took the HDD out of that and hooked the sucker up. Perfecto! A nice little Mame PC on the pretty cheap.
I mounted it all to the Naomi wooden board so that I knew it would fit within the bottom box of the arcade machine and it ended up looking like this :D
Not too shabby I don't think haha. I set up a switch so that it could be turned on from the front and all the ports are easily accessable from the door of the Naomi and the power cable routes out of the back of the machine.
Next step is to get GroovyMame installed and a load of games loaded and wait on the chassis to return.
It's been a little while since my last post. I've been itching to make posts about my new toy but I've been having nothing but trouble with it from pretty much the off so much so that I haven't gotten it to a stable position enough to make a post about it haha.
And the weird thing is I bought this under the impression that I could just plug this sucker in and play. Unfortunately that hasn't been the case.
Here is the beast, my very own candy cab! I must admit, I didn't think I would ever own a candy cab because they are so expensive!
Unfortunetly this isn't the view I had when I first got it home.
Right, how did I end up getting hold of a Naomi Universal cabinet in the first place?
Well, obviously I kept watching how the auction was progressing and no more bids came for a while and I was winning and thinking "crap! Im actually going to win this and I have no where to put it!!! what was I thinking!?" but it still had time and any arcade machines I normally watch for curiosities sake have a blitz near the closing time and shoot right up. Well finally another bid came but I was still winning. Then Wednesday lunchtime comes and Im watching for the Blitz like a hawk on my phone and .....I won it! I only went and blumin' won it and for the princely sum of £64!!!! £64 for a candy cab! And the description said that all I would have to do after collecting it was to plug in a Mame set up PC and it's ready to go! Wowzers!!
I had a bit of a panic about the whole situation to Roz and being awesome she got on the phone and sorted out with her family that I could keep it at their farm until we eventually end up getting a bigger house and I can take it home then. I had the idea that it could go up into our hobby room (this was before I saw how big it actually was and how heavy it is. jeez is it heavy!) but the floor wouldn't be able to hold this kind of machine as its an old place. So I have to store it and work on it at the minute.
Well, we borrowed the Discovery and headed off to Birmingham to pick it up and hope that it would fit in the back. We met up with the seller and had a good ol' chat and nose around his lock up which was packed to the gills with other arcade machines and spare parts. Pretty awesome! And the 3 of us, lifting with our legs, managed to get it to fit quite nicely in the back of the Discovery without any disassembly other than taking the top marquee out. Phew, that was a worry! I really wish I'd taken a photo of the machine in the back of the Disco but with all the excitement I didn't get my phone out. Oh well!
Off we trotted carefully back home in the Disco in rush hour traffic and got the machine out and across the yard to where I'll be working on the machine.
Super excitedly I looked over the machine, got my Dreamcast out of its carry case as the Dreamcast (VGA modded) should be able to plug straight into the Naomi and play straight off and plugged it in. Turned all the power on and I get an image on the screen but it is rolling like a maniac!! Vertical sync isn't working! The image filled the screen from what I could tell but it was scrolling really really fast. I switched off the Dreamcast and tried it a few more times checking the cable was sitting correctly but no go.
I tried my laptop set to 640 x 480 but got the same result :-(
Here you can see the Dreamcast image rolling and rolling and rolling.
So I gave up for the day and headed home and onto the Forums and google to get a hold of a manual and do some research.
The next day I went back to the Naomi with an idea that I'll take the back hood off the machine and hunt down the vertical hold / sync and get it adjusted to settle it down.
Unable to find a V Hold pot I started adjusting the H hold and got the image tuning in and out like you get with an Old TV tuning a station in. I got all the way to the left and got a vertical thin line. This must be the left hand side of the adjustment so lets turn right and see what happens when we get going. Turn......nothing......turn.......still nothing. I got a very cold feeling go down my spine with a realisation that it had just broken big time!!!! Oh man!! This was meant to be an easy plug and play system.
See the image to the left. This is all that happens when tried with either the Dreamcast or the laptop. Oh, and the thin vertical line is still rolling without Vertical sync.
So I got back on to the forum and I got chatting with a guy who is the go to man for repairing the chassis in Naomi's and he's confident that he can repair it.
Of I headed to take the chassis out of the machine and send it off for repair and he found a multitude of things that had gone wrong on the chassis. Cold solder, capacitors gone as well as the vertical transistor and safety resistor. I think I'd been sold a bit of a dog of a monitor set up within this machine. The machine as it is is sound even if it needs a little bit of work to tidy up but the main bit being the monitor seems a bit boned!
Anyway, after a week Grant sent me back my repaired chassis and I installed it into the cabinet and I get a full screen view but its got a twitch to it. It seems like its trying its hardest to roll but something is holding it back. You could really tell it was itching to roll. I adjusted the image with the control panel break-out board and had a quick go on Street Fighter 3 double impact on the Dreamcast. This go was without sound though as the speakers are mounted within the rear hood of the machine. So I got up and headed over to get the hood so I could plug the sound in and I heard a really loud SNAP!!. I quickly turned round and the thin, glowing vertical line was back! Flippin eck!! :-(
After some further PM's Grant really nicely sent over a replacement Transistor and resistor as he thought that the transistor was faulty. The next weekend I replaced the components and BINGO!! I got a steady image! Its on a slight tilt but not so much that the lay person could see without being told. I've got weird pincushion squeeze that I can't adjust out but I'm able to finally play some games on it using my Dreamcast and my Dreamcast arcade stick as I haven't got any pad hacks done yet.
Check it out! That's me playing some Street Fighter 3 Double Impact on the Naomi :D It's stripped down because of fitting the repaired chassis but its working and MAN IS THAT SCREEN BIG!!! It's like sitting in the cinema on the front row, you actually have to turn and really look around the screen or you'll miss something. Its awesome!!!
The pin cushion pinch is a bit anoying though as you can't get the image full screen without it pushing in at the sides so this needs to be adjusted (see right) but the next main job is building a Mame PC from as many spare parts as I can find so its nice and cheap as it's going to sit in the lower part of the Naomi perminantly and only play games. So it doesn't need to be any kind of real power house! And once the PC is working I can get the control panel hooked up via the iPac thats installed in there. :-D
Here's a few shots of the Dreamcast running on screen :
I've also made a video explanation of the progress so far so you can see it actually playing Street Fighter 3 Double Impact.
It's been a couple of weeks since my last update so I thought I would post up a quick update on the Jamma arcade machine resurrection.
ITS FINISHED!!! :-D
Yep indeedy. I've been over to the machine over the last weekend and finished up the last little touches I wanted to do to it so I can call it done. And its a pretty great feeling to know that I've taken a machine that was basically sitting and rotting broken and unusable and its now a tidied up and rejuvenated arcade machine that can be used to run both Jamma and MVS games.
The main finishing touch I wanted to do was re-fit the blackout card around the monitor so that you couldn't see into the machine while playing it and it just makes you focus on the game your playing. When I was removing the card to do the cleaning a part of it got torn so I had to tape it back together.
You can see the join if your looking but Im pretty sure if you didn't know it was torn and repaired you wouldn't spot it. It needed a little trimming and adjusting to get it to fit the new monitor shape nicely but in the end (with some stapling and then re-stapling) I got it to fit how I wanted and closed up the front of the machine and clamped the latches down so its all secure at the front.
On the left you can now only see me and the wall behind me reflecting in the glass rather than seeing straight into the cabinet.
Below you can see a kind of POV of how it looks when your playing. You really just see the game now.
The next step was to tidy up the dangling wires inside the coin door area so I got some of my cable tie bases stuck to the inside of the wood and cable tie'd the wires out of sight. Nice and easy.
I also wanted to mount the Test Switch within the coin mech area on the back of the coin door but the wires weren't long enough so I got a pair of off cuts from the jamma harness and extended them so that I could neatly route the wires along the inside of the cabinet and out to the coin mech nicely. So now when you open the coin door to get to the remote to set the TV to AV so that the picture is perfect the Test switch cabling is no longer pulling on the harness wiring and the door swings freely. :-)
And that's it! :-D I wanted to make a new marquess sign for the machine which I might still do at some point but It all still works and fits and is how the machine was last set up so I think its good for now.
The machine now needs some games played on it so it can be used again. At the minute I've gotten my Jammadrive 2 in permanent residence so that I can get blasting some of the amazing Megadrive arcade conversions I have. Golden Axe really plays nicely in the stand up cab set up even though its still the megadrive version.
Here is the arcade machine in its new location for a while. As you can see I had my trusty assistant with me helping me out. Unfortunately he's too short to reach the Player 2 controls. haha :-P
As I said numerous times Im really stoked out with this project and how I've managed to bring an actual arcade machine back to life from the dead! Its been a project where I've learnt a lot and gained a lot of confidence in this area of retro games electronics / wiring etc.
I have another arcade machine project on the go at the minute, yes I know! Another! But this project is very different to this machine so again its a neat learning experience.
So expect another post up here soon. Hopefully I get a major component for it back tomorrow (fingers crossed) so I can really get to work on it.
Last week inbetween working on things for my arcade machine (fixing the blackout paper and making extension wires etc) I started work on something I've been wanting to make for ages! A Scan Line Generator for my dreamcast! :D
As always I headed over to mmmonkey's awesome modding website www.mmmonkey.co.uk and started reading up on how you make them and what sort of bits and bobs I would need to get. Well, as it turned out I'd had some fore-thought and bought some of the required IC's and some matrix board last year when I was thinking of giving it ago. So All I would need to get would be the male and female vga ports and a little project box to house it all in.
With this in mind I started out on monday night with my soldering iron and started following mmmonkey's photos and write up. I found it a little confusing at points to follow along and know what was going on but after some cups of tea (and one hot chocolate with all the trimmings) I had a finished off matrix board. Awesome!!
I couldn't try it out though because the next step was to make a VGA extension cable (female - male) so that I could hook the R,G,B, V sync, H sync and Ground up to one end of the cable.
Fast forward a couple of days and I headed over to Maplin in Tamworth and picked up the sockets and project box so I could carry on with my little project. Fast forward to thursday and I get soldering again and the cable is made up and the SLG is soldered up to one end of the cable.
Cue excited running upstairs to plug it into my Dreamcast and check out the kick-ass scanlines!!!.......no scan lines! :-( There was a picture but five wiggly bands of what looked like interference. Darn it!
I looked over the matrix board again and noticed that one of my ground links wasn't hooked up so I bridged that and replaced a resister leg bridge with a small bit of wire. Cue new test and the same result!
hmmm
I got the images of the SGL progress from mmmonkey's website on the Tablet and got a fresh cuppa to ponder where I'd gone wrong.
I couldn't spot any differences until I went to the start of the article and looked at his original sketch. Could I have the chips in the wrong way round?! Could it be that simple?! I popped out the 74 and the 125 IC's giving myself a mental High Five that I'd had the forward thinking to solder in sockets rather than soldering straight to the chips themselves. If I hadn't it would have been pretty much starting from scratch if I'd have to desolder both the chips to flip them.
A quick check on the main TV downstairs and whats this?...could it be? SCANLINES!! WOOO! It took a little bit of head scratching but it's worked in the end!
Check those suckers out! That's some retro viewing right there on a modern LCD TV :-D
With the scan lines all working nicely I headed back to the project bench and started finishing off the casing.
And here is the finished result in the project box. I got the VGA cable sitting nicely in between the 2 socketed IC's which will help keep it all snug in its box, even though the hot glue will probably do anyway :-P
With the box all finished off I popped upstairs and hooked the Dreamcast back up to my PC monitor and put the SGL inbetween the two and flicked the power switch. The image comes on for a second then dissappears!! NOOO!! I hit my odd / even lines switch and nothing, turned the monitor on and off and it again appears for a second then dissappears. Darnit!
So I tried it on my smaller flat panel tv in my games room and nice scan lines show up.
It seems that my PC monitor isn't compatible with my SGL. Doh! Im not sure why. Could be that I've left a few of the pin's floating rather than grounding them out but I've hot glued it all in place now. Oh well, it was only a mid-week project and it works properly on my TV's :-D So when I fancy some Dreamcast on the big TV I can have nice old-school scan lines running on there.
I have enough IC's etc to make another SGL if I fancy it at some point and I'll ground out the floating pins and add in another switch to alter the width of the scan lines. I went with the basic version to start with to see if it would work or not.
Im really pleased with the result in the end, even though it doesn't work on my PC monitor. Its a shame but not the end of the world. :-)
Looks pretty neat all finished. If you want some retro scan lines on your VGA modded dreamcast then I recommend checking out mmmonkey's guide. Its a nice cheap and pretty quick project to get some retro goodness on your TV.
Just a quick last minute photo. It turned out not too dissimilar to my drawing I made during the week :-) I was trying to figure out how the video signal would run and which way it would face inbetween the monitor / TV and Dreamcast.
Well, the weekend has passed and I managed to get a little bit of work done on the arcade machine while my fiance was planting trees with her mom in one of the fields. Shirking a little bit of manual labour I slinked off to my arcade machine to continue work.
My main aim for the weekends work was to try and figure out the marquee light and try to get that hooked up and working. I must admit though I hadn't got a clue how the thing hooked up to the power supply as it was just 2 wires and they weren't standard colourings to the wires. Hmm, surely one has to be ground and one live? There's a sticker on what looks like the ignitor? power block for the light that says 240v so I thought 'brilliant! I'll hook it up to a mains plug and see what happens'. Well, what happened was the bulb got really bright then a burning spot appeared at a part of the bulb and it switched off. Doh!! Burnt it out and my confidence with getting that thing working dropped through the floor.
I could try to get another bulb to fit but I might struggle and then it could just burn out like this one did because its not wired correctly, so I decided to head down to my local B&Q diy store and pick up some tree ties for Roz and her mom and picked up a small strip light while I was at it. While I was there I checked over all the lights and checked that the one I got was mains powered so I could just hook it up and I'd be away.
I had a good long piece of mains cabling and scrounged a plug and hooked up the light to check that it fired up and worked okay. And, bingo! It worked! Next step is to get it mounted to the marquee board and check again. Here you can see it mounted to the board before I routed the wiring down the back trunking of the machine and down to the power strip thats sitting in the base.
After I got it all cable tied to place and hidden in the trunking I go it switched on in its new home. :D
Check that glow! haha. Another tick on my list of things to do there. Marquee light, done!
Here's how the machine looks at the minute with the glass and marquee sign all back in place.
Looking pretty snazzy I think. I don't know what it is but when the light turned on it just clicked to me. This is finally an arcade machine, it just feels more right.
During the week I'd received some new Neo Geo MVS games so I thought I'd bring one of the cartridges with me to 'test' out in the cabinet. Metal Slug 2! :D
Its crazy how different the game looks compared to my little LCD TV I've got at home. Standing up close to the CRT monitor with the scan lines etc makes it feel a lot more proper.
I got a nice little stash of games and I'm really itching to complete them all but the one thing I'm making sure I don't do is credit my way through them. I.e. just pressing the credit button continuously to force my way through the games. One thing I've been doing with Metal Slug 2 is giving myself 3 credits and 3 credits only. Trying to recreate only having so much change in my pocket like when I was a kid. Man, is Metal Slug 2 a hard game though!! I can only get to the end of level 3 so far with my 3 credits. Its crazy tough even on level 4 difficulty settings. I'll get there though.
The Games I got (as I got side-tracked there) are : Metal Slug 2 (loose cart), Metal Slug 4 (full kit), King of Fighters 2001 (loose cart), Puzzle Bobble (loose cart) and Tecmo Soccer '96 (loose cart). I'll probably be selling on Tecmo Soccer as Im not that into football games but the others are definate keepers.
So that was Saturday's work and I thought I would be all done for the weekend but we headed back on the Sunday so Roz could help her mom out with some more tree's so I had an idea of what I could leave in the machine semi-perminantly as I don't want to be leaving my 'real' arcade boards in the machine when it's not at my house yet.
So I used the time in the morning at home to source out an old Megadrive / Mega CD base plate from my wardrobe to see if I could modify it into a PCB stand for my Sega Jammadrive 2 :-)
I found the base plate out but quickly found out that its not going to fit the Jammadrive 2 unless I take the rubber feet off the bottom of the casing (not gonna happen as I want it to look stock :P ) or modify the plate. So I got my metal saw out and started hacking away at the base. I got a little way but needed some proper equipment so I took it to the farm and used the saws there.
Here you can see the Jammadrive 2 next to where I was working so I could keep offering up the plate to it to see how it was fitting.
Right, a little disclaimer...I'm not going to show the finished off plate because its VERY embarrassing and looks like a torture device from Vlad the Impaler (and it actually did impale me at one point and cut my hand doh!) but it does fit nicely and work very well. I drilled out some holes and mounted PCB feet that I had spare so that I could then screw that into the internal wooden wall of the arcade machine.
And here is the Jammadrive 2 sitting in place on the wooden wall. The way I positioned it is so the weight of the console pushes downwards onto the mounts of the base plate so it will keep in place and it also has the Jamma edge at a nice easy to access position. I've also mounted it quite high on the board so that I can still fit other arcade games in there past it so I don't have to take it out all the time to put other game boards in.
Im really pleased with how it sits in the cabinet I must admit and really happy that the baseplate worked after all my hacking of it (and my hand).
And here you can see the machine running Streets of Rage from the Sega Mega Games 6 cartridge. A neat little fact about this cart is that it has the full version of Streets of Rage on it so much that if you flick it over to Japanese language you get the game Bare Knuckle instead of Streets of Rage :D A good cart to test your language switch mods on ;-)
I thought I could leave this cart in the machine and there are a few games to have a blast on when there aren't any arcade boards plugged in.
Also its inspired me to dig some of my megadrive arcade converstions out of my shelves such as golden axe and I know its not technically an arcade game but its pretty close to the original, Splatterhouse 2.
Oh, I also painted up the old coin door that I mentioned in one or two of the video progress reports. Well it turns out after I painted it up that it didn't fit and wasn't the correct door!! Double dang it!
But I scratted around and found the proper one which is chrome and only needed a quick brush down to look half decent again. I mounted it into place and quickly tie-wrapped my Test Button to it but I'm going to extend the wiring on that so that its neater when you open the door.
And that's the progress so far. I'll leave you until the next post.
Man I must be back into the blog posting big time haha! So many posts in one week!
Anyway, this morning I made a very quick video showing the Dreamcast I modded the other month. I'd been meaning to post about how I did it but thought this morning that I would make a quick video instead and show it working etc.
Its a bit of a rambling video as I did it as soon as I woke up this morning so excuse the stupid throat clearing. I was still drinking my morning cup of tea so I wasn't fully up and running yet haha.
I recommend trying this mod out if your thinking of running it on a monitor and don't want to splash out the cash for the VGA cables. The components really are so much cheaper. And use the Kynar wire that Mmmoneky uses as you will get the tight case to fit back together a lot easier. :-)
It's been a little while since I posted last about a geeky project. Basically I've been caught up over the last few months with house / garden improvements as well as doing an RGB mod to the PC Engine I purchased from ebay a while ago. I was having a really hard time for some reason with getting the mod to work and finally got it figured out. Basically the best tip I can give is draw down the wiring locations your going to use and you do use on a piece of paper as you go. I didn't and kept mixing my wiring up like a dope.
Anyway, I've been of on whats commonly called a "Stay-cation" this last week and chose to use some of my holiday at home to finish up some retro projects I had on the go as well as play some games etc. The main project I wanted to finish was the Jamma-drive 2, which is what I did.
With the controls being finished in Part Three all I needed to do was possibly overclock the processor to a switchable 10mhz and finish off the casing. Tidy it up and paint it, then using printable water-slip decal paper make a decal for the casing.
After having a good play on the Jamma-drive2 I decided I was going to have a go at overclocking the processor, shouldn't take too long seen's I've done it before. I set about making my crystal circuit and then started the process of heating pin 15 and with the pick tool, slowly pull the leg out from underneath the processor. The legs on the processors for the megadrive 2 are curled underneath it to slightly raise it from the pcb, I guess for giving it some cooling. Anyway, I dont think I had the soldering iron hot enough and pulled the solder pad up with the leg of the processor!!! The scariest possibility happened!! Man I was cross with myself. This is the reason that not main people overclock the model 2's, its way easier to just cut the leg of the model 1 and work on that rather than threading the needle of the model 2. So, with the solder pad now pulled from the board and stuck to the leg what do I do? I try to take clean the leg up and get the solder pad off it and the leg has taken too much wiggling and snapped off! PERFECT!! >:-( Screwed processor city!
I put everything away and took the pup out for a walk to try to get away from the ruin I'd just created, I'd spent all this time making a Jamma-drive and then balls-ed it up overclocking it! Gah!
After an hour we got home and I started trying to see if I could fix it. Out came the pick tool again and I scratched away some of the plastic around the broken leg to expose some of the broken leg and got a little wire soldered onto it. From a video that has been taken off youtube I remembered something about a guy soldering to a point on the board next to a printed 10. So with a "what the hell!" mentality I soldered the wire into the "10" location and went to see if it would work. And what do you know? I blumin' fixed it! :-D
So lesson learned, don't get cocky when trying to lift leg 15 when overclocking and if you do end up snapping the leg off or pulling the solder pad from the board, you can wire to location 10 that is just below the processor. This has fixed the megadrive and its clocked as standard 7mhz. I think I'll probably attempt to overclock it now I know its working but I think It's going to stay at 7mhz so I can play it for a while :-)
Here you can see location 10 that I wired too. I don't have a photo of the wire from the processor to it but you can see it in the video below. You wire from the processor leg into 10 to make the link work.
Now that the thing actually works again (Phew!!) I set about finishing the rest of the project.
I stripped the Jamma-drive 2 out of the case and started finishing up the new expansion port. Sanding it and trying to get it as flat and blended as I could.
Here you can see the milliput holding the expansion port to the case and hopefully see it smoothed into the original case so that once painted it should look pretty stock.
Next step is to masking tape the little spongey feet of the case so that they don't get caked in paint as well as the sticker telling you what serial number etc your megadrive is. Then it's off to the painting stage.
I gave the case a quick coating of grey primer over the new expansion port area and then painted the whole of it with Halfords Matt Black car paint. I've found that it gives a finish that is very close to the way the plastic looks on the original Megadrive's. So once its dried it will get a coating of a Matt Varnish so that it keeps its plasticy look rather than being all glossy. In the photos it looks glossy but that is because its still drying. You might also have spotted the Neptune case having another coating of paint. I did a bit more work on it on my holiday but that is for another post ;-)
So, The case has been painted and now is dry. So, what does it look like?!
Pretty good to me, I know it could be a little smoother but to be honest this project has been taking too long, so it gets a tick from me. And in certain lights, as you'll see in the video, you can't really see the join. :-) Overall Im really please with the look of the expansion port. Especially with how sturdy it is, It has no wobble or flimsy-ness to it.
And here is how the hot glue and milliput is covered inside the case. you can see the kind of "welding" I did with it to fix the new expansion port in place. And its solid, doesn't feel at all like it will crack or break.
Time to put it all back together again and get the switches set into place.
And here's how the case and new side expansion looks with everything all built back inside the casing.
Looks pretty sweet I think !!! :-D Im very happy with how it's fitted together, and when its sitting on the table you wouldn't even think there was anything going on underneath the case. A real Street-Sleeper :-D
So, for the finishing touch to this little project. I want it to look stock but I also want it to still show a little hint as to what it is. To achieve this I bought some water-slip decal paper from the internet so that I can make my own "Jamma-drive 2" logo to replace the megadrive 2 logo thats already on the case. To start I measured up the height of the existing logo and got onto illustrator, and with a Sega typeface I layed up my logo. Logo all made to size and its onto the printer to get the water-slip decal printed out. Once its printed you have to spray some Matt Varnish onto the decal to make it waterproof and then onto dunking it in warm water.
And with a little bit of wiggling here is what the finished decal looks like on the case with a megadrive 2 underneath for comparison. :-)
Im super happy with how the whole project turned out. I don't think the case could have come out any better, the waterslip decal really puts the cherry on the cake as it would make you look over the jamma-drive and think its standard but make you do a double take and go "what!?!"
And here are 2 videos I made of the Jamma-drive 2. The first video showing you the insides of the Jamma-drive2, including the overclock repair.
Here is the second part which show's the Jamma-drive 2 playing some games. :-D
Man I'm happy this project is finished now as it was meant to be a nice quick and easy one, but with the RGB problem and then having to figure out the controller pads it dragged on a bit. But the finished 'drive has come out great I think.
