ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 3. HARNESS, CONTROLS AND SOUND

Hi Peepzilla's,

I've continued working away on my Arcade machine project and have made significant progress. :-D

Where I left it last time I'd gotten the TV in place inside the cabinet and roughly mounted the chassis in to place so that the cabling would reach where it needed to reach.

Well I had last monday off work so I thought I would spend a good chunk of it getting the Jamma harness mounted into the cabinet and get moving on with sorting sound and controls etc out. In the week between the last bit of machine work and monday I'd received my new Jamma Harness and I'd spent some time wiring up the video cabling to a Scart connecter I had in my box of wires. I made up some R, G, B colour potentiometers so that I could adjust the strength of colour coming from each game and mounted them onto a perspex holder I'd made.

While I was at it I made a perspex holder for my Jamma Test switch as well. This will live behind the coin mech door.

Full of confidence come monday I went to the farm and hooked up the harness to my power supply, flicked the machine on expecting a perfect image on the TV round the front. But what was on the screen was nothing but a diagonally scrolling screen of dissappointment. :-( There was a serious syncing issue!! The image was there, the colours looked nice and bright but the thing was scrolling at such a rate it made your eyes roll! This is an example of why you should test your wiring at home before going off expecting it to work. Darnit!

So I proceeded to try to problem solve the wiring while sitting with my knees up around my ears on the edge of the skate ramp. All the wiring was still attached from the trip from home so that wasn't the problem. I'd heat shrinked up my resistors etc to keep them in place, so I had to cut those away so I could triple check they were the right ones and low and behold the Sync resistor wasn't the right one! There was one colour on the banding that didn't match what my chart said. Unfortuntely I did have a replacement in my box so I had to go home to pick one up. On finding the right one I did a quick check and the resistor that was in the wiring was only a 56 ohm...it should be a 560 ohm! This has got to be the problem!!

So I headed back to the machine full of confidence again with the knowledge that this is surely going to fix the Sync issue. Soldering on a ramp is not easy I must admit so I think I will need to get a little fold up table or something for the future. Flick the machine on and POW! Sync issue is still there!! Officially I am stumped.

Instead of banging my head against a brick wall I decided to replace the control panel items and then head home. The original control parts are ancient! They definetly needed to go. Thankfully this step was a nice quick one and the buttons and joysticks look good in their new setting I think.

I pack up my stuff and head home and get thinking for the rest of the week.

Because I've been using up my holiday before our new allocation comes around in April I had Friday off work as well. So come friday morning I jumped back on to the Sync issue and decided to take off the scart plug as I remembered it was originally going to be a Sega Megadrive scart cable but I had issues with it so left it for spares.

I had a few spare PCB mounted Scart sockets so I got some new wire and hooked one of those up to the harness and BINGO! Worked first try! So my Syncing issue seems to be down to a dodgy scart plug. It must be the way I hooked up the ground links or something inside the plug, but for now that suckers being relegated to the back of the box!

Heres my little 'test area' I.E. my living room haha.

While I had the harness and game up and running I got my heat shrink heated onto the resistors and I hot glued the wires on the Scart Plug and Potentiometers into place. I decided to do it while it was up and running so I could keep checking that the wiring was still all in place. The last thing I wanted was to hot glue the wires etc and then come to check it all and when turning it on I'd glued a broken wire or something.

Full of beans I headed off to the machine and quickly hooked the power supply up to the harness along with my Supergun scart lead to the TV and KAPOW!! The thing is running perfectly now. Stable, bright image and full of awesomeness!! :-D IT. LIVES.!!!!

From here on out I got to work tidying up the harness in the back of the cabinet. Screwing into place the game power supply and finding neat ways to put the power strip into the machine and where to mount my RGB pots.

As I continued to work I took progress video's instead of photos so I have no more photos for this post but I've uploaded the videos to Youtube so here is my dorky voice walking you through the rest of my days progress.

PART ONE:


PART TWO:


PART THREE:


As you can see in the videos I've gotten sound working, the harness routed through the machine and both Players controls set up and working! A freakin arcade machine! :-D

I must admit that I feel very proud of my progress with this project! Never in my wildest dreams as a kid playing arcades every chance I could did I think I would have an arcade machine of my own! And here it is. :-D It still needs a lot of work to finish it off but the bulk is done, it works. So next is polishing really.

I'm going to be making a CPS2 compatible kick-harness next and then drilling the extra button holes into the metal control panel. Sorting out the marquee light and cleaning up the glass and coin door as well as mounting it back to the machine.

I'll be putting up another update on this project soon :-D

catch you later

Porl''

SEGA DREAMCAST INTERNAL VGA MOD

Howdy!!!

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. :-)

Catch you later

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 2. MONITOR

Hi Again ;-) time for another update! 2 in the space of a week!? What's this craziness?!

Well, we were at the farm on sunday so I took my tools with me and thought I'd make a start on getting the TV out of its casing so I could see what's what. I'm really hoping that it will fit the frame otherwise its going to take some figuring out to make new fixings.

I took the back of the TV and had a nose around the cabling of the chassis as well as what looks like a grounding loop that sits behind the tube. All looked similar to the existing broken monitor which is a good start :-)

Then I attempted to discharge the tube in case it was still holding any deadly volts in the there. I hooked my wired up screwdriver to the grounding on the cabinets frame and poked about under the rubber cap. All seemed good so off came the Anode cap and I started stripping out the chassis from the casing.

With the chassis and the screws undone I could take the TV out of its front casing. And here comes the moment of truth, offering up the TV into the housing to see how it fits........and it fits perfectly!!!! Absolutely spot on alignment with the mounting holes. Hot Dog!! :-D

I was really hoping it would at least be close so this is a great result!!

The next step is to mount the chassis into the cabinet in a place where all the wiring is within reach of the anode area and the tube neck etc. I've realised that the TVs chassis is bigger than the old monitor so I will have to put it somewhere differently. It won't fit underneath the tube assembly like the old monitors. Doh. Shouldn't be too much of a problem though.

Last night I did a quick modification to the chassis and extended the I.R. sensor from the front of it so that I can mount it underneath the tube at the front of the cabinet. So when the whole cab' is powered on I will be able to switch the TV on with its remote. Hopefully it will work when I get to testing it in the cab :-P Normally in an arcade the monitor will turn on and off with the main switch on the top of the cabinet but I can't really do that. So a little modding was in order.

I think the next step is to get it all wired together again and take my Supergun and a game so I can test that the TV is powering up and displaying the imagery okay while I wait for the harness and controller stuff to turn up.

Catch you on the next update. Hopefully I will have made more progress :-)

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION

Hi peepzillas!! :-D

It's been another long time posting and I miss it actually. Posting meant that I had projects on the go and I would always like posting up progress with learning new things. Well the only projects I've been working on recently have been reflowing PS3's. My sister's housemate months ago asked me if I could fix his YLOD on his PS3 so I looked up how to reflow and got ready to try it when his mate said he would have a go. Month's later I still wanted to see if I could 'fix' a PS3 so I bought a 40gb PS3 phat for £12 from ebay and had a go and it worked first try. Man I was stocked! A PS3 for £12! Hot dog! I posted on facebook about it and peeps started asking me to fix some for them so I've basically been doing that. And when I haven't been fixing PS3's I've been playing through Halo : Reach on my xbox or playing Resident Evil 5 / Uncharted 2 on my PS3 or Metal Gear Solid : Peace Walker on my PSP. :-D Playing through my games list has been awesome!

Anyway, the Arcade machine!! If you've read my old posts you will have seen the arcade machine I basically inherited. The monitor on the machine is Fubar'd though so I've left it be.  Recently my girlfriends brother has an old CRT TV that he's getting rid of which looks like it might be the same size, so I've started thinking about seeing if I can switch them over today.

I've been thinking of the things I would need and what I have already for the machine and I think I can do it quite cheaply. I need to take the monitor out as well as all the wiring as its a non-jamma loom in there. You need a converter to hook up a jamma game and I'm not 100% where every wire is going, so I'm going to re-wire it so I know what's what.

I already have an Arcade switching PSU and the donor tv so I just need a new Loom and possibly some new controller bits and bobs as the ones in the machine are super old-school.

Here is the kit I took with me :

I thought that I would mainly be cleaning out and stripping down today but I took my soldering kit just incase I hit any snags.

Here is how the machine looked after I cleaned it all down with the brush and the wood polish. I wanted to get a good look at what needed to be done with the machine. Yes that's me in my scruffs looking like a dork in the reflection :-P

It's a proper old-school chip-shop / taxi rank machine and it brings back tonnes of memories of using my pocket money to play games as a kid. So I don't like the thought of it going rotten and unplayed.

As you can see the control set up is just standard Jamma and would need to be set up to play street fighter style 6 button games. Or at least I would like it to be able to play those types of games on it. It gives you more options hey? :-P

And thinking about it I should be able to re-wire this sucker as I've done a few Supergun's now and basically the arcade machine is just the Supergun - TV and controllers all in the one container

Here is the back of the machine. You can see its a bit of a rat's nest of wires but in a logical way if you know what's connected to what. And you can also see the bit of the machine I was the most scared of working on. The Fly-back on the monitor. Its the lead connecting to the back of the monitor with the rubber plunger. The monitor can store charge in it and unless its discharged correctly you can get a big shock from it and it can be really dangerous. So I've been putting it off cus I'm a wimp :-P haha.

Well I grew some stones and had a go at discharging it and from what I could tell there was no charge left in the monitor. Woop!

Onto the disassembly of the machine so I can clean it out. :-)

 Here is the black out paper / card from around the monitor. It had to come out so I could get around the monitor to have a better nose and it got damaged. Not a big deal though, its only card so I will re-fit a nice new piece when I'm rebuilding it.

Here you can see the monitor in situ with the old-school control panel open. Check out those hockey pucks for the control sticks. Ugh!

To remove the monitor you have to unscrew the 4 screws around the monitor and if you un-hook the chassis it just slides out the front of the cabinet. I snipped all the wires from the monitor to the chassis as it was already broken and I don't know how to repair them. It just made it easy for me to remove it.

I also gave the front area a good brush down when I got the monitor out.

Here is everything out of the cabinet leaving it just a bar cabinet now. On the left is the power supply for the cabinet. This runs the game as well as the monitor and the top light. I don't have that kind of power supply and as I'm using a TV as a replacement I'm going to put a 4-gang power strip in the machine which the light and the TV will run from as well as the switching PSU to run the game. Essentially a Supergun set up.

Next to the PSU you can see the loom wiring that I stripped out. The Monitor and the chassis sitting on the black card surround and then the marque light sitting next to the front glass. 

Here is the cabinet empty of monitor, loom, PSU and light. I'm hoping that the replacement TV will sit nicely in the monitor frame. Fingers crossed!! :-P

And here is the replacement TV I've been banging on about in this post. :-) I've half taken the casing off the TV as I wanted to check that it was going to have the tabs on the corners as the monitor does in the background. Thank fully it does, its how its held into the plastic casing. Phew! And from a quick measurement using some wire it looks like its the same width.

The next step will be to get the TV out of the plastic casing and get its chassis mounted in the chassis casing and see if it will all fit in the cabinet.

Catch you all on the next update :-)

Porl''

CAPCOM CPS-2

Hi again,

I thought I'd make a post about the Capcom CPS-2 or Capcom Play System II for Jamma. Its the arcade board tech from Capcom that bought you the Street Fighter 2 Alpha's, Super Street Fighter 2's, Dark Stalkers, Aliens Vs Predator, Xmen : children of the atom, and the starts of the Capcom Vs fighting games from Xmen Vs Street fighter and Marvel Super Hereos Vs Street Fighter. Basically the best fighting games from the hey-day of the arcade. Well for me anyway ;-)

I was lucky enough to find a Japanese CPS2 motherboard and Street Fighter Alpha (Phoenixed) and Vampire Hunter : Darkstalkers Revenge being sold by a dude in Swindon at a great price. We had some email correspondents and one Sunday when we were heading down to gloucester to visit some friends we nip a bit further to Swindon and picked the games up.

The first thing I noticed was how big the game cartridges are! And how awesome they look! :-D They are you basic JAMMA PCB's but enclosed in a nice looking plastic casing which you press onto the A-Board or motherboard. When all pressed together the game system itself is as big or bigger than your normal console. It looks the business set up.

Above you can see the CPS2 cartridges I got with a nice surprise. The guy found the moves list and some artwork for Vampire Hunter when he was sorting the games out and chucked them in with them. Really cool cus I haven't got a clue of the moves for Vampire Hunter haha.

After getting the game you want nicely pressed onto the A-board and grinning over how cool it looks the first thing you notice when you turn the Supergun on is how loud the A-board's fan is. Man its loud!!! Like a hoover. The A-board has a small PC cooling fan mounted to it to keep the game boards cool. Because of them being enclosed in plastic, which is great for keeping them dust free they don't get air to them and will easily overheat after a couple of hours of playing. So they put a fan in there to blow air over the PCB. When you have the game running, tucked away inside an arcade machine with the speakers turned up, in an arcade environment with loads of other loud games trying to get your attention you really don't hear the fan. Put it in a home environment hooked to a Supergun you do notice it. But saying that, you turn the speakers up a little bit and start playing you forget all about it. You get zoned in on the game and the hoover sound disappears!

Here you can see the actual size of the CPS-2 system against my Supergun and the Sega Saturn in the background. Its pretty big hey!? But looks pretty darn cool and something thats not in everyone's console collection.

As you can see from the previous photos both the game cartridges are in green cases. With the CPS2 system there are several different coloured game cases. The colours tell you what region the game is ie: Asian, Japanese, USA etc. This helps you make sure your getting a game that will run on your A-board as you need to match the game to the motherboard otherwise it won't run.

The colours for the system are : Green - Japanese, Blue - USA/Canada/Europe, Orange - South America, Grey - Asia (china, korea etc), Pink - Brazil, Yellow - Region 0 and were Capcom rental games, Black - Region 0 and are the motherboard and game board joined together.

The good thing with having a Japanese motherboard is that both Green and Blue games work on them. The same with having a USA A-board. So it gives you a little bit more flexability and freedom with getting your games. More options when scouring ebay haha.

A quick word of warning when you first get a CPS2 A and B board and hook them up to your Supergun for the first time. You will no doubt hear the fan kick in but the game will not boot if you have the Supergun set to running normal JAMMA games. The thing I found out about the CPS2 from the forum I go on Arcade Otaku is the CPS2 needs slightly more +5v from your power supply. So you will need to slighty tweak up your PSU to give the CPS2 A-board enough power to get everything booting nicely. Having an arcade PSU with an adjustable +5V dial on it is quite essential I would think when using CPS2 stuff.

The next think you will probably notice when you get the game running is that the colours are all weird and all bled into each other. As you can see from the picture below its all red and there is no depth in the colours. They are very flat. (ignore the weird vertical lines, these are from me breaking a pin on the A-board when I first got the system but I've since then repaired it which I will post about soon).

The reason for the weird colours is because the CPS2's colour signals it produces are super high! Here you will need some adjustable Red, Green and Blue dials on your video output from your Supergun so you can turn the suckers right down. When I use other JAMMA games I have the RGB turned up quite high but when you get the CPS2 going its cranking out such a powerful signal you really need to turn it down and play  with the dials a little bit.

Below you can see what the same level should look like when you have your dials tweaked down. It looks a lot better now hey and how its meant to look :-P A lot more depth in the colour and not all boosted out.

Above I've added some photos of the 2 games running on my little telly. Proper arcade classics on your home TV is a really geeky feeling I must admit haha.

I've made some videos of the games running on my Supergun so you can see what they are like running at home.

Catch you later, I'm of to play some Street Fighter Alpha :-P

Porl''

JAMMA SUPER GUN - PART 3

Hi again,

I'd left the last post with a working Supergun, well working with video and sound and I was waiting for my front panel components to arrive.

Here is Part 3 :

I'd ordered my front panel components (as well as my Scart port) from Rapid Online and they turned up pretty quickly.

The first thing for me to do with my front panel was to fill in the holes that were cut for use in the cases's previous life. I put electrical tape across the holes and then filled in on top of the tape so the Milliput wouldn't fall through.

The old front of the case filled in

After the Milliput had dried over night I hit the front of it with some heavy grit sandpaper to smooth it out. I layed masking tape out over the panel and then sketched the layout of all the components ready for me to dremel all the holes out.

The components all laid out ready to be cut

I spent a bit of time sitting outside in the garden with my dremel (and Guinea Pig girls for company) trying to get the holes as neatly as I could. Rough cutting and then sanding the holes and then offering up the components each time to see if they would fit smoothly.

After about an hour I had all the components snapping in and out smoothly. I then spent the rest of the evening giving it some grey primer so it can eventually become nicely Matt Black when done.

The next night I eagerly got home from work and started mounting in the front panel components.

After popping the momentary switches into the front panel and screwing the 15-pin sockets in I measured out the JAMMA harness wiring so I could make sure it would all reach okay with some slack for soldering and still be neatly track-able.

The momentary switches for the player 1 and 2's coins the JAMMA test, MVS test and Service were easy to figure out because they each only need 2 wires. A signal wire from the harness and then a ground wire. The good thing about Supergun's is that you don't need to have individual grounding wires to everything, you can daisy-chain them along to save on trying to solder multiple grounding wires to a single point. It would be a right mess I think if you did it that way.

I ended up giving all the momentary switches 1 grounding wire which was daisy-chained from one to the next. And then I routed a seperate grounding wire for the player 1 socket and daisy-chained that over to the player 2's grounding point. I believe the term for the daisy-chained grounding is "common ground" if you run into that phrase.

The trickiest bit of soldering for the front panel was the Neo-Geo wiring for the controller sockets. Mainly because of close proximity of the pins, and making sure your soldering the correct wire to the correct point.

The cool thing about using the Neo-geo pin-out for the socket is it will work with any Neo-geo arcade stick. And it also leaves 3 pins available for the 3 kick buttons needed for 6 button arcade sticks.

Here is the player 1 port wired up to the neo-geo pin-out standard

Once I got the player 1 port wired up and the switches sorted I thought it was probably the best thing to nip the Supergun up to the Hobby Room to check that I'd got the sucker sorted or not. A quick setup with my 1 game and Ding Ding Ding, 3 coins were registered! pressing Start on the arcade stick and the game started. Up, Down, Left, Right worked, as well as A and B. It worked!!!! :D I was well happy!

I unplugged the connections then nipped back down to the kitchen and wired up the 2nd player socket to finish it off.

The front panel completely wired up, switches, sockets and LED mounted

A quick solder, a quick test and boom! 2nd player works too!

I HAVE A SUPERGUN!!! Some self high-fives, massive grins and several games at trying to figure out how Teki-Paki worked later and I was done. :D

The completed Supergun's internal wiring. A little messy looking but easy to follow.

Teki-Paki playing with 2 player's and 7 credits

The JAMMA Test screen working

The finished Supergun as closed up showing how the JAMMA games connect to the harness

The finished Super gun showing how the games and controllers hook up

All that's needed now is the Matt Black paint on the front and rear panels and my friend said he would do a cool paint job on the outer casing for me. He does great stencil canvas's which we have 2 of and I think his style will look sweet on the Supergun.

A dream fulfilled! I own an arcade machine!! And one I can keep in my house because it doesn't take up the room a full cabinet does. :D

The next step is to make a Kick-harness adapter for hooking up the extra kick buttons for games like Street Fighter 2 etc. And wether to buy a pre-made CPS2 kick-harness or make one. ;)

Porl''

JAMMA SUPER GUN - PART 2

Hi all,

So I left the last post where I'd mounted the rear components ready for the JAMMA harness to be soldered to it all.

Here's Part 2 :

I'd been thinking a lot about what I wanted my Supergun to be like. For me it needed to have the colour channels adjustable, scart connection because I'm in the UK and don't have to mess about with using video encoders which I was extremely pleased about. I don't like the idea of using a video converter processing the signal to make it S-Video or something. Its not the same signal by the time it gets to the TV that the arcade originally produces, and what I wanted is the closest to the arcade experience that I could get.

I took my time scouring the net for a cheap harness but not too cheap and that it would be as fully loaded as I could get. I did contemplate making the whole harness myself with an edge connector but I couldn't be bothered to sort out what wire I would need and getting it all ordered.

I ended up getting my harness from Ultra Cabs. They have a harness that's wired to the Neo Geo MVS standard, which I didn't realise at the time and it comes with a neat edge connector cover.

When it arrived I took an evening seperating and organising the harness wiring so it would make it easier for me to get it all wired into the case. None of the wires come labelled and some of them are bunched in a way I didn't really want them grouped. So it was a matter of seperating all the tie-wraps that were around the bunches and then re-grouping them all and labelling them for easier recognition when I came to building it all up. The Edge connector is also all in chinese so you have to do some counting of pins and figuring out which side is the Component side / Solder side so you can start figuring out which wires go where.

The nervous system of the Supergun

I think the JAMMA harness looks like the nervous system of a human with the brain being at the top. Which in essence is what the harness is. The game board is the brain which connects to the top and it distributes signals to all the components around the Supergun.

Because the harness came wired for Neo Geo MVS it didn't have a line for the -5V voltage which I had to add in because I wanted it to be JAMMA compliant. It was also missing the JAMMA service and Test switch lines as well which I added to the harness.

I really wanted my Supergun to be as compatible as possible with the different types of 'standards' available in the arcade world. The main 2 being JAMMA and Neo Geo MVS for me as these are the systems that ran the games I loved the most as a kid. So adding in these extra lines to the harness were a must.

Once I got the harness sorted out I began feeding it into the case through the hole I made for it in the rear of the case, and started measuring up how much cable would be needed to reach all the components comfortably. I've seen a load of Supergun's on my research searches that look a complete mess, like the person has just jammed all the wires in there and slammed the lid shut. I really didn't want it to be like that if I could help it and wanted it to be easy to route the cables around and find any potential problems if I got any. The neater the job the better I think in a project like this.

Figuring out which wires are going to go where

It really is quite daunting when you have all the wires in your hands and thinking you have to keep track of them all so you get it wired right as first go as you can get.

After putting the harness into the case I put the PSU back in and wired it up to get a real sense of the space available then set about measuring, cutting and soldering to the components on the back panel.

Rear panel from the inside showing speaker, scart and colour adjustment

Its quite tight in there but thankfully the rear panel slides out and gives you a bit of room to get the soldering iron around without burning the insulation on the wires. The scart socket is a little bit of a tricky solder (and working out) because of all the grounds needed to be soldered to the pins which are very close together and the 2 resistors. Again I tried to make the wires as neat as possible in the space I had available.

The rear panel wired up and ready to test

I wired up the rear speaker with an attenuation circuit shown on one of the wiring diagrams. If you are planning on routing the audio out through your Scart connection you need to make an attenuation circuit to lower the amped audio otherwise you will blow the speakers on your tv. Because arcades aren't the most graceful of technology and with the arcade cabinets having biggish speakers with no volume control the game boards output really loud, generally non-adjustable audio. So you need to lower the volume so it will not kill your tv.

For me I didn't want to run the risk of blowing my tv speakers but didn't want to mount a speaker inside the case, I opted for an audio out socket to connect some external speakers. Because I was a little worried I would blow my external speakers I made the attenuation circuit to protect them a bit.

The Supergun all wired up with audio and sound I eagerly ran up to our Hobby room and plugged in the one JAMMA arcade game I had to see if my wiring had all worked.

I plugged everything in, tentatively switched the power on and the standard scart channel blue colour on the TV switched over to black. Woo! The tv was recognising a video signal! But where was the picture?!? Crap! First thing I thought was, I'd done it wrong. I was going to have to re-wire the scart socket. I turned it all off and quickly checked over the JAMMA connection on the board, scart cable correctly seated in both Supergun and TV and flicked the power back on. Again, black screen. Poo! I slumped down to a seating position on the floor and out of the corner of my eye I saw some very very faint writing on the tv screen. What an idiot!!!! I'd turned my RGB adjustment dials all the way down, a quick turn on them and the screen burst into life and the game was playing! :D

Scart connection wired up first go! I gave myself a congratulatory High-five. It was a reality!

The Supergun's first test with my only arcade game, Teki-Paki

There was no audio though. That shouldn't be too hard to fix. I headed back to the kichen, cut the attenuation circuit out and wired the audio wires straight to the speaker output. Went back up stairs and what do you know?! Audio now works too!

Also you might be able to see on the last photo that there is a little green light on the front of the Supergun. I wired a green LED to the +5V output on the PSU with a 220k ( if I remember right ) resistor so that I would have some indication that the power was on and working when the rear switch was flicked. Otherwise there is no knowing the power was on and from the get-go I would be wondering if it was powering up or fallen down at the first hurdle.

For me this test was a massive MASSIVE achievement. A few months ago I hadn't got the faintest clue how to solder and was too scared to even try it. After a very short time where I've only done some console mods in my kitchen I'd now built an arcade machine that works!

I decided to leave it on a high and put the soldering gear away and wait for my front components to turn up for the next step of the Supergun's creation.

To say I was itching for the stuff to turn up was an understatement!! :D

I'll get writing up the next part in a few days.

Porl''

DREAMCAST UP AND RUNNING

I had a bit of spare time this evening and decided to get the pliers out on the old Dreamcast and see if I could get my arcade stick working again on it.

I've been reading a few bits of info on why and how the controller ports can tweak out on them. There is a capacitor on the controller board and a fuse that looks very much like a capacitor as well. Its a common problem apparently that using non-Sega controllers can cause a spike in the current through the board which blows the little fuse. The thing I don't understand is that none of my controllers are 3rd party so I shouldn't have gotten the unwanted spike.

Oh well, it might just have been down to the Dreamcast being old.

Anyway, I got the pliers on the fuse and gave it a few twists and the Arcade stick is now being recognised by the Dreamcast. :-D Woop!

Built the Dreamcast back up and gave King of Fighters 2002 a blast. Damn that Rugel though!!!! I got all the way through using Kim but the difficulty just ramps up a bit much for me when you hit Rugel.

Catch you soon

Porl''

Arcade stick, dreamcast and KOF 2002