ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 6. FINISHED!

Hi all,

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.


Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 5. MARQUEE AND JAMMADRIVE 2

Hi All,

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.

Catch you later

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''

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''

HOMEMADE NEO-GEO MVS STEREO CABLE

Hi everyone,

I showed you my Neo-geo MVS 1 slot motherboard in my last post which is pretty awesome! And one of the awesome things about it is the MVS system produces stereo sound from the motherboard. Normal JAMMA games are mono only, but Neo-Geo broke the mould a bit by adding in a second speaker into their MVS cabinets and gave all us geeks stereo. So if you have the corresponding connection and cable you can have 2 speakers wired up and get some left to right speaker action going on!

My Supergun is wired for Jamma Mono as it's wired to the JAMMA standard except for the controller ports, so an option to have stereo sound from the MVS motherboard is pretty cool.

There's a problem though, the stereo connector on the motherboard isn't just a coax jack or anything as simple as that. Its just 4 pins, and that's it. What do you do with that if you don't have an MVS arcade cabinet that has all the required wiring inside it to set up all the stereo etc?? You make a connector that's what you do! haha

Well I couldn't think of how wire up a phono jack to it off the top of my head but one saturday morning last month I woke up early with a brain fart! I must have been thinking about the 4 pins in my sub-concious because I woke up with the idea going round my head that a floppy disk power connector from a PC PSU might fit that kind of 4 pin arrangement!

I jumped out of bed and went to our hobby room and stared bleary eye'd scrutinizing the 2 FDD connectors on my spare PC PSU. I got the MVS motherboard out of its box and offered up the connector...... it didn't fit! Dang it! It was really really close but the pins wouldn't go into the connector. Trying not to be disheartened I tried the other connector on the PSU just to eliminate all the options and guess what? That one fits!!! :D

After quickly getting dressed and brushing my teeth I was off to the kitchen to where my soldering stuff is with my MVS manual in hand.

Looking at the MVS boards wiring diagram it shows the stereo jack being wired : pin 1 +, pin 2 -, pin 3 -, pin 4 +. So pins 1 and 2 are the left speaker and pins 3 and 4 are the right speaker. One of the nice coincidences with the wire colours on the FDD connector is the 2 middle wires are black which is a ground colour for me. So it will be easy to make sure pins 2 and 3 are going to be ground or speaker negative.

Here is a photo of my parts and the schematic in the background.

The red and white stereo ends are from the donor coax to phono cable I had lying around. I snipped them off and the idea is to solder the phono connector to the FDD cable. This will then be the stereo connector for my MVS.

I seperated the 4 wires on the phono cable and made them right and left and trimmed the insulation off the wires and tinned them. I put some heatshrink on the wires to insulate them once soldered. A quick touch with the soldering iron and all 4 wires are soldered together.

I quickly wrapped some electrical tape around the solder joints and went upstairs to check it all worked and ding ding! Stereo sound coming out of the MVS! YES!!

I unpeeled the electrical tape, slid the heatshrink over the solder joints and gave them some heat from the hair dryer and bingo bango, I had a completed stereo connector and can now enjoy my Neo-Geo games in glorious steri-eri-ooo.

Here is the new connector and speakers hooked up.

And here is the finished cable on its own.

It's a very easy cable to make and I recommend it if you have an MVS motherboard that has the stereo connection option on there. Its just a matter of getting hold of a donor phono jack and a spare floppy disk power cable from an old PC PSU and your sorted. :-)

Catch you later yo for the next thrilling installment in the 'making your own arcade cables'!! :-P

Porl''

NEO-GEO MVS ARCADE GAMES

Back in the day I used to go to a local video shop to spend my pocket money on the arcades there. After a short while of them having a single Jamma arcade ( I know now that it was jamma haha) they got in a 4-slot MVS machine. It was the first time I'd seen a Neo-Geo and the fact you could choose between 4 games was amazing to me at the time! It was the first time I'd played Fatal Fury, Samurai Shodown, World Heroes, Alpha Mission 2, Soccer Brawl, Puzzle Bobble etc. That machine ate so much of my pocket money it was untrue!

I used to love reading through C&VG and Mean Machines magazines and checking the latest Neo-Geo games in there and then hoping they would turn up at the video shop. And more often than not they would eventually end up on the game selection and I would be one happy geeky teenager.

About 7 years ago I bought a Neo-Geo CD and finally got some Neo-Geo action at home. That was a very happy day I can tell you haha. At last I could play real Neo-Geo games at home like Fatal Fury - Real bout, Samurai Shodown Spirits ( 3 ), Viewpoint (AMAZING), Mutation Nation and Last Resort. The real deal but the loading times really took the arcade magic out of the experience :-( I love the machine but its not the experience I had when I was a kid.

Trouble is, to get the home experience of the Neo-Geo I would have to rob a bank to afford an AES. A couple of hundred for the console, which does look amazing! And then a couple of hundred pounds for each game. I really can't afford that. So it seemed I would never get to play the real Neo-Geo experience........until now!!! :-D

Because I've made my own Supergun I can now get an MVS board and play the actual arcade games on my TV.

So that's what I did!! :-P

I went onto ebay and sourced myself an MVS MV-1F 1 slot board for a steal and excitedly waited for it to turn up at work. The MV-1F is a large board compared to the later MVS boards but it has built in controller ports and also has a Stereo / Mono switch which allows you to have stereo sound if you have the right adapter. And its also Jamma compatible and the way I wired up my Supergun it should work perfectly fine.                                                                                                                             

The only shame in a way is that the game that came with it is Super Sidekicks and I'm not the biggest fan of football but at least I can try out the board and check it all works.

One of the first things I noticed is how big the cartridges are!! They are massive and they are the first cartridges I've seen with 2 boards in them. Check the following photo to see a comparison with other well known games cartridges.

Check out the size of that sucker out!!! :-O That's the difference in the real arcade games and console ports. 

And here is the screen I was hoping to get when I turned it all on. 330 Mega Pro-gear Max! Woop!!

I can now get my hands on the real MVS arcade games that I played in my youth!! And at a fraction of the price of getting an AES. Those games go for hundreds of pounds where MVS ones can go from £10 - £60 depending on how rare they are. Some are a hundred quid but those are super rare and I won't be getting any of those haha.

The first game I sort out after getting hold of the MVS board was Soccer Brawl! Yes, another Soccer game on the MVS but this one is in the future!!! You have power armour shoot lazers and have super powerful special kicks. That's more up my street and a real favourite when I was in the video shop. And to prove the price point I got it for £12.50 including postage. £12.50 for an arcade original !!!! The game on Neo-Geo CD cost's £25 - £50 and that's with looong loading times. No way hosey, original arcade games for me!

If you make your own Supergun or buy a Voltek one that's made to run Neo-Geo's then get yourself an MVS board and get hold of some absolute classics at a fraction of the AES price. It's definetly worth it :-D

I've uploaded a video of a little tour of my Supergun hooked up to the MVS running Soccer Brawl. It also show's my home-made Stereo adapter which i'll probably write a quick guide on next.

I also did a quick vid of Samurai Shodown starting up when I got it from a forum member over at arcade otaku. Another steal at £10!

Check them out and catch you guys soon. I'm off to play some arcade games woo!!

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''