Thanks for coming back and checking on my blog. Some of you guys might have been following / found my blog because of my EPIC Neptune project I set myself a few years ago after seeing the awesome Longhorn Engineer's tutorial on creating a Neptune using a 32x and a Genesis / MD2.
My idea was to learn soldering by making one of my spare Megadrive 2's into a working Neptune. But rather than leave it there I was going to use the skills I'd picked up making designer toys to make a replica outer shell for the mod and create an actual Neptune.
Well my project started with the hunting out on ebay of a 32x and then getting as many Neptune Prototype shell photos as I could and comparing them with my MD2. I'm pretty much 100% convinced that the Neptune prototype shell is a modified Genesis 2 shell. The bottom certainly makes me thing this as the lower square pan is exactly the same as a Gen 2 shell.
I documented the process of making my Neptune replica shell at most stages of sculpting. I thought I would make a slideshow so you guys can see what the steps are to make a Megadrive/Genesis 2 shell into a Neptune shell.
To finish it off I back painted the perspex LED 'window', glossed the buttons and applied the waterslip decals for the logos so that it looks like the prototype photo's I've seen on the web.
I've placed a few photos on the page as well as making a gallery for you guys to look through.
As you can see from the above photo I've finished the internal modular setup of the Neptune for when I eventually get a 32x. I really wanted to make sure that I would not need to destroy the 32x to make the Neptune. I will simply just have to take the 32x apart, fold it under itself and plug it in. Well I'll actually have to desolder the choke and resolder it on its side to lower the profile of the edge of the 32x so it will fit in the Replica case.
Again I made a slideshow of the progress I made with the mod and if you've followed my blog you will have seen all or most of them.
And to finish this post off which is a little shorter than I thought it would be. Its more photo heavy as I've basically posted most of my progress as I've gone along. I also made a Youtube video showing the shell and the internal mod.
Hopefully you guys like my replica Neptune shell. I'm so happy that its all finished off, and when I get a 32x I'll make it even more finished off. :-)
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
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!
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
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. :-)
I thought I'd make a post on something that had been playing on my mind for a couple of months. And the thing that had me thinking and questioning was "why does no-body overclock the model 2??". Sure I've seen the Screen Savers video on youtube where they describe how to do it by pinching the clock speeds from the cartridge slot. But I was never convinced with this way of doing it and the guy in the video doesn't get it to work that way. And the way they show the overclock is on his model 1, which is what you find all the overclock info on. Overclocking the model 1.
Well, the way described in the video involves using quite long wires to do the overclock which from my understanding would cause problems because of the length of them. In the model 1 overclock video I've followed Damomonster explains that wires longer than 3 inches will cause problems with the overclock.
Last week I managed to find a very rare video on youtube of someone claiming to have overclocked their Genesis 2, and the way they did it was the same way I'd overclocked the model 1. Using a 10mhz crystal on some vero board mounted on top of the processor. But since then they have taken the video down, so now there are none. Except mine now I think :-P
I've been thinking that if you know which pin to lift on the model 2 processor then in theory you can do the overclock the same way as the model 1. You'd just have to know where to tap your +5v from and where a nice close point would be to get Ground.
Well its pin 15 that you want to lift on the processor, just like on the model 1. The processor is the same as the model 1 but in a smaller form factor. Now we know which leg to use we can begin ;-P
Right, I think I'll write this point for point.
THE GUIDE :
(1) -- first thing to do is to make the 10mhz overclock 'package' described in Damomonster's great step-by-step guide :
A thing to remember is keep your wires nice and long to begin with so you can trim them down to size when you come to mount it and hook it up to the processor.
(2) -- now you've got the 'overclock package' made and insulated up with electrical tape and some nice long trim-able wires we can go to the Mega Drive 2 (Genesis 2). Open the sucker up by removing the 4 screws underneath, then remove the inner metal shielding. For me I find it easier to take the whole motherboard out of the case so you can rotate and investigate it easier.
(3) -- Now the board is out of the case you need to find the processor, which is the square chip in the back right hand side of the board behind the cartridge slot.
The next step is to find Pin 15. I've marked this on the photo in pencil. Sega have been nice to us and have numbered the pins on each corner of the chip. You can see Pin 10 on the bottom left of the chip, so we count across to the right and find Pin 15.
(4) -- The next step is to get the soldering iron out and get it warmed up. I don't know how much heat the legs can take on the processor as they are very small and fiddly to get to so I would recommend a lowish wattage soldering iron with a thin tip on it just in case. I used a 15w Antex for doing this with a small wedge shaped tip. A pencil shaped tip would be even better I think.
(5) -- Now the soldering iron is warmed up and we have Pin 15's location we need to warm the pin. I did this by pressing onto the side of the chip and the soldering pad area and got a thin Pick tool behind the leg. You need to be very careful here as the legs are deceiving! They aren't sticking out from the chip, thats the soldering pad that gives it that look. The leg is actually wrapped back and under the chip to raise it from the PCB. To give some ventilation I assume.
While heating the leg gently wiggle and bend it outwards. Remember, take your time so you don't pull the solder pad up at the same time!
You should end up with the chip looking like this :
You can see Pin 15 now lifted free from the board and the solder pad is still underneath.
(6) -- Well done!! That's the scariest part done! The next steps are delicate still but that was the hardest bit.
Now we need to cut 2 wires, strip the ends and tin them. The wires want to be just long enough to reach the back of the case.
This is the most direct and shortest route for the wires to go. We need to keep the wires as short as possible but still able to reach our Double Pole / Double Throw switch so that we can still switch between the stock speed of 7.6mhz and 10mhz. This way we can still use the Mega CD and 32x because we can revert back to stock speeds.
(7) -- Now we carefully solder 1 wire to the solder pad under Pin 15. Be very careful not to tug this wire too much or too hard. You could still pull the solder point up and that would be a pain.
(8) -- Next we solder the other wire to the leg of Pin 15. Add a little solder to the leg first so that all you need to do is gently press the wire against the leg using your soldering iron to get them to melt together.
(9) -- Now we are at a stage where we can follow the rest of Damomonster's overclocking video BUT FIRST we need to know where to tap the +5v and the Ground from as these are going to be different to the ones in the video as that is a Model 1.
In the above photo you can see 3 capacitors. There are 2 to the side of the processor, 1 to the left and 1 to the right. These 2 are the ones we will use to get our +5v and Ground from. They are really close which keeps our wires short and very convenient.
Again Sega have made it easy for use because they have marked the + side of the capacitor so we know which side to get +5V from (the + side) and the none marked side is Ground.
Here is the second part of Damo's overclock video to follow :
The main thing to follow from this video is the Double Pole / Double Throw (DP/DT) switch set up and the LED wiring.
(10) -- Now you've followed his video you should end up with a switch looking like this :
In this photo its the overclock wiring you can see on the top. Blue = 10Mhz, Orange = Pin 15 and Green = 7.6Mhz Stock speed. The row of pins below are Orange = Red LED colour, White / Blue = +5v from the Overclock package, White / Orange = Green LED colour.
(11) -- In the photos you can see that I've just electrical taped everything in place to test it out. You should now have something that looks like this :
(Ignore the mass of wires on the left, that is from my A/V port retro-fit)
Now we can go and test that the overclock works. :-D
Below is a video of my Mega Drive 2 showing the overclock mod and it working on Sonic 2. It was tough to film as I used my phone and I couldn't mount the phone so you can see me playing Sonic 2 (which might be a good thing haha) and excuse the sniffing and coughing as I have a cold ;-)
(12) -- Now you've tested its worked you can squeeze some hot glue over the Pin 15 area. This will make sure that the wires will not get tugged and pull the leg off the processor or pull the soldering pad up. You do this stage once you've tested it as this is a perminant step. Also squeeze some hot glue onto the top of the processor and stick the overclock package on-top. this will stop it ever moving around.
AND WE'RE DONE! :-D Your Sega Mega Drive 2 / Genesis 2 is now overclocked! You can enjoy Sonic 2 in all its none slow down glory as well as a whole host of games that push the stock clock speed a bit too much passed its limit of 7Mhz.
So there you go. I haven't been able to find any real guides on how to do this to a Mega Drive 2 especially one with photos and video of it working. So I decided to make one if this mod worked out, which it did, so I did. :-)
I hope you get it to work out if you give it a try. Just take your time lifting that leg up and you'll be fine. If you have any problems leave me a comment and I'll try to help you out.
