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''

CAPCOM CPS-2

Hi again,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Porl''