CAPCOM CPS2 ALL-IN-ONE BLACK MARVEL VS CAPCOM BATTERY CHANGE

Hey guys,

I've finally done it! I've finally grown the balls to tackle the battery change on my Capcom CPS2 All-in-one black metal case Marvel VS Capcom game. I've done a battery change on a regular CPS2 board, the plastic cased A board which you can do without the game connected but when it comes to the All-in-one games their different...

....you need to change the battery while the game is on!..

...WHILE IT'S TURNED ON!!!

haha, yeah that's why I've been putting off doing it. You need to keep the game on while you desolder the old battery and then solder in the new one. I mean, the process of changing the battery is super simple but doing it while the board is propped on its side so you can get easy access to the top and bottom makes it a lot more delicate. If you press too hard on anything the board will move, potentially slide and you can touch other parts of the board by accident with the soldering iron or your hand and short something. Or cause it to lose power, which while the battery is disconnected will just brick your game and it's phoenix time. Which is what I didn't want to happen.

So I set myself up as best as I could and did everything methodically and checked my work at each stage just because I wanted to be super careful and I love this game and really don't want to knacker it up.

Here you can see the offending battery, which to be honest was still in good shape. No leaking or bloating or anything. But it's been in there since 2011 and I wanted to get a fresh one in to help prolong the life of this game in it's original form.

Sorry this image is a screenshot from the video I made documenting my progress with this swap (see bottom of this post for video). I forgot to take a photo of it propped up as I was psyching myself up to go for the desolder haha. So this is how I had the game propped up. I electrical taped both sides of the edge of the board that's touching my hobby mat so that the game couldn't slide out from under itself. That would be pretty disasterous! And you can hopefully see its leaning against my plastic main soldering box. It's pretty heavy and with it leaning towards it the game can't fall forward as I work. And you can see the Jamma edge on there too.

And SUCCESS!!! Here you can see the game working with it's fresh new battery in place! WOO!! The actual swap was a simple job in the end, I was just super careful with how I put the solder sucker on there etc to desolder the old battery. I did have a little bit of a heart attack when I was cleaning the last bit of solder of one of the pads that looked like it might be obscuring a bit of one of the holes and it might make pocking one of the legs through a little tricky. I didn't realise but the games music had stopped! I looked over to my TV and the screen was frozen with the small Capcom logo in the middle bottom bit of the screen and the rest of the screen had a Patent number, Patent number text written all across the screen. I thought for sure it's dead and I'd moved the board too much or something. I was gutted. Well I finished putting the new battery in and trimmed its legs. Then I turned it off because I'd have to turn it off at some point to put the game away. And when I turned it back on the flippin' thing worked!! Man I was so happy! haha

So I did it! The battery change didn't take very long at all in the end and now I'd done it it's not that scary anymore. I must admit that I couldn't find much at all about changing the batteries on these boards just comments about doing it while the game is on. The only real posts I did find ended up being from a Blog written by the guy who owned this game! I bought it off him via Arcade Otaku. I recognised the scratches on the metal casing. So this game seems to be the poster boy for the battery swap :-P

Below is the video I made of the battery change each step of the way. Except for the actual battery swap. I was too scared to do that on video in case I messed it up worrying about talking on camera or if the camera was in focus or had fallen over etc.



So there you go, I wanted to post up something about the swap I did as information is fairly scarce on swapping out the batteries on these boards. And hopefully it'll help if you have an All-in-one and want / need to change the battery on it but don't really know how to go about it.

Good luck and see you soon

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 4.5 - videos

Hi peeps,

Here is a small update for the last progress report. I finally managed to upload the video progress reports to Youtube over the weekend so I thought I'd post them up here while I carry on working on the cabinet.

I know you can see the progress in the photos but I always like to see arcade machines in action with the game up and running and yelling out of the way too loud speakers! haha :-P

Capcom CPS2 button demo:


Neo Geo MVS button demo:


catch you on the next update!!

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 4. CONTROL PANEL MODS

Hi everyone,

I've made some more progress on "the Machine" this friday afternoon and it's starting to get there now :-D

The aim for the control panel was to get 6 buttons for each player so that I can play my Street Fighter games on there no problem. So I set about drawing out the positions for the new buttons on the control panel so that I could figure out if they would all fit. What I've found is Player One's part of the panel had more than enough room around the existing 3 buttons to get the others to fit. But Player Two's area is really cramped. It's like they ran out of room as they worked along from left to right. So between the 3rd button and the cigarette area is rather cramped. So this part of the panel is going to have to be a bit of a compromise.

Last weekend I'd tried to make a start on the control panel and thought that I would be able to drill out the hole like a little pepper pot with the largest metal drill that I had and then cut out the linking bits of metal with my Dremel. Well let me tell you, that isn't the way to go about drilling the holes out of a metal control panel. To get the one hole done it took me an hour and a half and I went through 2 grinding wheels on my Dremel. This way would take me forever and I would be buying new grinding tools every other button hole.

So I left it there last weekend and during the week I picked up a Holesaw along with the corresponding drill bit from Wickes and set about the control panel again. What a change using the proper tools makes! The holesaw made short work of the control panel and I breezed through this time.

Here is the second player's control area. You can see that button 6 has had to be squashed up to get it to fit. And I've had to fit the extra buttons a little closer to the original holes because of available space. It doesn't feel too tight to use.

 Here you can see the holesaw I used. Its a 29mm holesaw and the buttons fit perfectly into the space you drilled. I thought it might make holes that are a little too big but they are spot on.

One thing to remember though is take out the existing buttons when you start to do your drilling. I didn't do this and buggered up one of my buttons. :-( The holesaw generates lots and lots of really little metal flakes and they can go down the litte gaps around the buttons and jam them up a treat! Because the plastic is quite soft the metal seems to dig in really well and it doesn't feel like it will come un-stuck.

So I'm going to have to order another one to replace the stuck one.

Below you can see the backside of the control panel all wired up. It looks a little bit of a mess but it's as neat as I can get. I can't pull the harness wiring through any further because its pulling the jamma edge up too high for my smaller game PCB's to sit on the bottom of the machine.

You can see that Player One's buttons are laid out more traditionally than Player Two. The spacing is still not exactly how you would normally have it if you were to make the control panel from scratch. But its nice enough I think.

Once I'd gotten all the buttons wired in and tested I started working on a little idea I'd had during the week. One thing I found out from making my first arcade stick for my Super Gun was that if you make an arcade stick that is just 6 buttons you won't be able to play Neo Geo MVS games that require 4 buttons. This sounds a little daft but when you make a 6 button stick for CPS2 Street Fighter games your top row consist of A, B and C from the Jamma harness. And the bottom row are Light Kick, Medium Kick and Heavy Kick which come straight from the CPS2 kick harness. Neo Geo MVS uses button D from the Jamma Harness. So when I made my second arcade stick I made it have 7 buttons so that it had D on there as well.

The problem with the arcade machine is that the control panel has very limited space but I still wanted to be able to play Neo Geo MVS games on it. So I decided to see if I could wire up a switch so that I could convert button 6 to either by Heavy Kick or Neo Geo Button D.

Here you can see the Conversion Switch held in place via Cable ties mounted on my new bases.

The center of the Double Pole Double Throw switch leads to button 6. The left hand tab comes straight from the kick harness and the right hand tab comes from button D on the jamma harness. So if you flick the switch over to the left your hooked up for CPS2 games, and if you flick it to the right you have button D for Neo Geo games. :-D Im really pleased that such a simple switch works a treat! Probably very simple to most people that mess about with electronics or wiring stuff up but being new to this I was quite proud that it worked. woop!

Here you can see the finished control panel all working with the glass window in place. I've got Samurai Shodown running in the machine using my Neo Geo MVS 1F board.

For some reason when the Neo Geo is running in the machine the TV is keeping the channel panel up in the top right corner of the screen. Im a little unsure why its doing this as it doesn't do it on normal Jamma games. I'm pretty confident that when I get hold of the remote for the TV I can get that to turn off though so it's not obscuring so much of the screen.

And as a last little picture, here is how the CPS2 cartridges sit in the bottom of the machine. You can see how the Edge connector is in the back and how smaller boards will just end up hanging from it. Which isn't a good way to have them connected. So I'm going to be making a little box that sits in the bottom of the machine so it raises the boards up a bit.


So what's next for the machine? Im going to be cleaning up the glass window and trying to get the marquee light working. Tidy up the coin door a little bit and remount it to the front of the coin door area. Sort out the back panel of the machine. Repaint it or something as birds have been pooping on it a bit. Ugh!

Catch you on the next update :-)

Porl''

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''

STREET FIGHTER 2 CHAMPION EDITION BOOTLEG

Hi everyone,

Sorry there's been a bit of a delay between posts on here. I've been meaning to make a post on the new Jamma Supergun I made last month but I've gotten caught up playing it haha, going to Revival and since then trying to get the nerve up to start trying to repair the Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition bootleg I got from there.

Basically I've had crap luck with bootleg boards so far and I now see why peeps in the forum I frequent steer clear of them really. The two I've had now have had weird problems where all the proper original games I have had no problems at all. Oh well.

I was really excited to get this game back from Revival and then during the next week spend an evening playing it to death with my mate Glynn. See if I could win a few matches against his 4/5 hit dragon punch combo's :-P

Well I get home and had about half an hour to check it before going out again. So I ran upstairs and excitedly hooked my Supergun up and fired the sucker up. Well, it runs but man is it dissappointing! The graphics are all glitched out!! Ryu's sprite is flickering around constantly on the screen and the KO sign keeps moving about. It run's but it looks poop!

I decided to make a video of it the next day and put it on Youtube and the forum I go on to see if anyone on there could point me in the right direction to diagnose the problem.

Here's the vid of the board in action.

Two comments I got on the video were to check the voltage on my internal power supply. I had the +5v set to run my CPS2 boards which is a little higher than normal, I think +5.2v. So I got my mini screwdriver out and started to slowly crank the +5v to see what happens.

Well when you get the voltage nearly up to +6v the sprite glitchiness starts to go, well Ryu's sprite goes anyway. That's good to know that it will get rid of the sprite glitch kind of but I really shouldn't have to crank the voltage up to that high. And it still hasn't fixed the problem really.

The next problem I noticed was on certain stages the screen seems to bounce about, like its losing sync. Its not rolling, just moving about up and down and slightly left and right. But if you go all the way over to the left on some of the 'bouncing' levels it stops moving and plays as it should. Very weird!!

I've started trying to play through the game and through the bouncing to see which stages are fine, some are, and which bounce. Its got me wondering if its one of the Mask Roms which holds the game information is slightly 'bad' or something. Maybe one of the Mask Roms holds 7 stages and another Rom holds the other 7? Or it could be bad Ram that the rom's pump the stage information into? Like one or two Ram chips hold 7 of the stages and one or two other roms hold the other 7? Its the next route to check really.

I have noticed that one of the Mask Rom sockets is wonkily soldered in so Im going to replace that to see if it helps at all.

Another issue the game had, which was a very minor one, was that player one had no heavy punch. Player 2 was fine. So I started looking around the edge connector and tracing back from the player one A button connector into the board. The trace seemed to come into a small bank of 3 LS245's not far from the edge, and one of them was socketed which makes me think its been repaired in the past. So I switched that socketed chip out for one of the LS245's I had but it didn't change anything. So I re-traced and then cut out and socketed the 3rd in the bank. Without the chip player two has no movement or punches. So I put a new chip in and he worked again. Well, there's only one chip left in that bank, number 2. So I snipped him out and player one had no movement or punches. Popped a new socket in there and new chip and BINGO! Player one has all his punches now! A small victory!! The first bit of game repair I've done, albeit a very minor one. It's a good sign though that I might be able to get to the bottom of the graphical issue.

I also made up a quick CPS1 kick harness from an old sega megadrive pad's connector and an old header connector from a digital tv box I salvaged for parts. Worked first time which I was rather surprised at haha and all kicks work on both players! :D

So the next steps for this repair is to start using my Logic Probe a little more and get to grips with using it and understanding how it works. The datasheets for TTL chips on these boards are COMPLICATED!!! haha. But Im sure I can learn how to read them.

Im going to keep 'shotgunning' the board and see how I go. Its all experience in messing around in this hobby anyway. And its interesting seeing what happens when you take a chip away and see what's changed. :-)

Right, this was just a quick update really as it's been a while because I've had my head down. I'll try to get a load of photos of my new Supergun and make a post on that as Im really really pleased and proud of how its turned out. It's a 100% nicer than my first Supergun.

Anyway, catch you later

Porl''

CPS-2 All-In-One Black : Marvel VS Capcom

Hi everyone,

I thought I'd make a little post about a new arcade game pickup I have. Its something that you don't see all that often when you search for Capcom CPS-2 games. Normally the CPS-2 setup is an A-Board mated with a B-Board which is the game. This version of the CPS-2 is different because you don't need an A or B board, its all on the one PCB in a nicely shaped metal case.

When the game turned up in the post I was very surprised at how small it was compared to a normal CPS-2 board. I was expecting it to be of similar size to the A+B setup but the whole Black board is shorter in length than the standard CPS-2 and also thinner height-wise than a single CPS-2 B-board.

As you can see in the photo its got some nice curving to is on the edges. When you think of metal casing, or when I do I think of just a box. But this has some nice shaping to it. The problem with it being painted metal the wear and tear to it shows up and there isn't really a nice way to clean it up. Other than sanding it back and repainting it. I won't be doing that though :-P

Also, you can see from the photo that it has the standard CPS-2 connections to it. Jamma edge, Kick-harness connector and the 2 QSound ports. The volume and setup buttons are different though. The hole you see in the top of the casing lets you twiddle a PCB mounted potentiometer which controls your volume rather than the 2 UP and Down buttons on the side of an A-Board. And the Setup button is a PCB mounted mini button set a little bit back from the Jamma edge rather than the button thats on the side of A-Boards.
 

The 2 photos above show the size difference between the standard CPS-2 setup and the Black All-In-One boards. Also you can see the venting that is in the back of the Black board. As there is no fan in the All-In-One boards it has venting at the back, the volume hole on the top and the Jamma edge connector area are all used to let heat out. And I assume that the metal casing will work as a bit of a heat sink as well.

These boards also differ from the normal CPS-2 setup in its Suicide battery replacement. With the normal CPS-2 B-board you can just switch out the battery with the game board all opened up and just on your work bench away from your Cabinet or Supergun. The Black All-In-One's need to have power to them while you change the battery otherwise they will suicide on the spot apparently. So you need to have the game connected and running (I guess so you can see that its still working when you disconnect the battery) the whole time, being extra careful that you don't short anything as you do it. A rather scary process I would think. Thankfully this game has had its battery changed last year so it has a good bit of time left on it.

Also I've had to have my Vampire Hunter CPS2 board phoenixed recently and the guy who did it for me said that he could more than likely bring the black board back to life too if I mess it up. And he's local! Brilliant! :-P

As well as the board itself being a little bit of an oddity in the CPS2 world as the plastic A+B setups are more readily available the game itself is brilliant!

It has one heck of a character roster! A good selection of the greatest Capcom characters VS most of your favourites from the Marvel world! With the great art style of Children of the Atom and the other VS's series. The Sprites are massive and so well drawn. Its really a work of art!

Here are some images to show the first stage of the final boss, Onslaught. If you thought that The Hulk, Zangief and Venom were massive then check him out!!!!

The first few photos are from me testing out the game on a CRT TV hence the slight doming to the photos. The final three photos showing Onslaught are from my little Flatpanel LCD TV I use my Supergun on.

I can't really think of anything else to write about the game. I'll try to get a little video tour of it recorded and put on my Youtube channel and linked here.

Catch you later

Porl''

CAPCOM CPS-1 : THREE WONDERS

Well my last post was about my lucky haul of CPS-2 games and A-board and for this hopefully quick post I thought I would write about the CPS-1 game I have. One I was really excited to make a trade for!

When I was a kid there was an arcade just on the outskirts of the center of my town in Burton in a side room of a newsagents. Well this Newsagents had 2 side rooms, the front smaller room was rented by a guy who ran it as a computer games shop and it had ace Ocean and US Gold posters in the window and was where I excitedly bought Street Fighter 2 on the Commodore 64 which was ultimately a disappointment, but that's another story.

The Second side room was still rather small but on all three walls, kind of arranged in a horse-shoe shape were about 6-8 arcade machines. All 10 - 20p a credit and the games were regularly updated every month or so.

Well one month this wonderful Capcom 3 in 1 game turned up in one of the machines. A really cool platform shooter called "Midnight Wanderers - Quest for the chariot". The artwork grabbed me straight away. I loved the characters and the graphical style! And I remember it being rather hard!

The second game which I didn't play too much because I was always popping my 10's and 20p's into Midnight Wanderers was called - "Chariot" which was an R-Type style side-scrolling shoot em up. This game was essentially Midnight Wanderers 2 as it continued the story of Midnight Wanderers

And the third game which I never played, which was a shame because I have now found out its a very cute and fun puzzle game called "Don't Pull". You play as a cute little animal, a rabbit and a squirrel I think it is running around a level with a similar look to bomber man and you push the blocks around to squash the enemies and to find bonuses.

So, CPS-1....whats that mean then? Well the CPS-1 stands for Capcom Play System-1 and was Capcoms way of moving away from creating a dedicated game board. Where they have to manufacture 1 be-spoke board design per game. The CPS-1 was a way of making a board that was more like a console in a way. You have several parts to the game PCB, A, B and C boards. And changing the B and C boards (with the appropriate ROM chips) you can play different games. This I'm sure saves on manufacturing costs on producing the PCB's. Also the CPS-1 is JAMMA standard so you don't need anything special with it, just plug in your JAMMA connector and your away. That is unless your playing Street Figher 2 :-P where you'd need the kick harness to get all the 3 strengths of kick working.

So if your CPS-1 board stops working you can sometimes repair them by replacing the different boards. Also, you can change the game by flashing different ROM info from Mame onto the chips and play say Final Fight or something like that on the 1 CPS-1 setup. But I'm sure that's a bit of a pain in the bum to do all the time.

Anyway, I had a Sega Rally Model 2a complete board (in cage) but couldn't do anything with it because Model 2a doesn't run on Supergun's. Well, its a big job to get them to work apparently and then I read that you need a certain frequency monitor for it to run, and obviously steering wheel, gear changer and pedals. Something I'm not going to get any use off.

I'm on a great arcade forum called Arcade Otaku and I got chatting to a dude about half an hour away from where I live who has a Sega Rally machine that he was willing to test my game out on. So I knew it worked, and if it worked and I was interested wether I would trade it for his 3 Wonders CPS-1 game. Well I jumped at the chance to have a nose at someone elses arcade collection and man was I impressed!!

Once I saw the CPS-1 board and how blumin clean it was I snapped his hand of to trade for it. Its the cleanest looking PCB I've ever seen and couldn't wait to get home to play it on my Supergun (after I had a quick go on it on the guys Capcom Cute cab).

Does it still grab me like it did when I was a kid? Yep it sure does! The art style is still fantastic and it's still rock solid! I've since completed all 3 games but I needed to add credit after credit to do it! And without my girlfriend being player 2 on Don't Pull I don't think I would have completed that! haha.

Next is to challenge myself to complete the games on a limited amount of credits. I think it will be 5 credits a go. Take it back to when I had limited credits due to pocket money rather than eliminating the challenge by constantly pressing the credit button on the Supergun. :-P

Porl''