JAMMA SEGA MEGADRIVE 2 : PART FOUR

Howdy y'all,

It's been a little while since I posted last about a geeky project. Basically I've been caught up over the last few months with house / garden improvements as well as doing an RGB mod to the PC Engine I purchased from ebay a while ago. I was having a really hard time for some reason with getting the mod to work and finally got it figured out. Basically the best tip I can give is draw down the wiring locations your going to use and you do use on a piece of paper as you go. I didn't and kept mixing my wiring up like a dope.

Anyway, I've been of on whats commonly called a "Stay-cation" this last week and chose to use some of my holiday at home to finish up some retro projects I had on the go as well as play some games etc. The main project I wanted to finish was the Jamma-drive 2, which is what I did.

With the controls being finished in Part Three all I needed to do was possibly overclock the processor to a switchable 10mhz and finish off the casing. Tidy it up and paint it, then using printable water-slip decal paper make a decal for the casing.

After having a good play on the Jamma-drive2 I decided I was going to have a go at overclocking the processor, shouldn't take too long seen's I've done it before. I set about making my crystal circuit and then started the process of heating pin 15 and with the pick tool, slowly pull the leg out from underneath the processor. The legs on the processors for the megadrive 2 are curled underneath it to slightly raise it from the pcb, I guess for giving it some cooling. Anyway, I dont think I had the soldering iron hot enough and pulled the solder pad up with the leg of the processor!!! The scariest possibility happened!! Man I was cross with myself. This is the reason that not main people overclock the model 2's, its way easier to just cut the leg of the model 1 and work on that rather than threading the needle of the model 2. So, with the solder pad now pulled from the board and stuck to the leg what do I do? I try to take clean the leg up and get the solder pad off it and the leg has taken too much wiggling and snapped off! PERFECT!! >:-( Screwed processor city!

I put everything away and took the pup out for a walk to try to get away from the ruin I'd just created, I'd spent all this time making a Jamma-drive and then balls-ed it up overclocking it! Gah!

After an hour we got home and I started trying to see if I could fix it. Out came the pick tool again and I scratched away some of the plastic around the broken leg to expose some of the broken leg and got a little wire soldered onto it. From a video that has been taken off youtube I remembered something about a guy soldering to a point on the board next to a printed 10. So with a "what the hell!" mentality I soldered the wire into the "10" location and went to see if it would work. And what do you know? I blumin' fixed it! :-D

So lesson learned, don't get cocky when trying to lift leg 15 when overclocking and if you do end up snapping the leg off or pulling the solder pad from the board, you can wire to location 10 that is just below the processor. This has fixed the megadrive and its clocked as standard 7mhz. I think I'll probably attempt to overclock it now I know its working but I think It's going to stay at 7mhz so I can play it for a while :-)

Here you can see location 10 that I wired too. I don't have a photo of the wire from the processor to it but you can see it in the video below. You wire from the processor leg into 10 to make the link work.

Now that the thing actually works again (Phew!!) I set about finishing the rest of the project.

I stripped the Jamma-drive 2 out of the case and started finishing up the new expansion port. Sanding it and trying to get it as flat and blended as I could.

Here you can see the milliput holding the expansion port to the case and hopefully see it smoothed into the original case so that once painted it should look pretty stock.

Next step is to masking tape the little spongey feet of the case so that they don't get caked in paint as well as the sticker telling you what serial number etc your megadrive is. Then it's off to the painting stage.

I gave the case a quick coating of grey primer over the new expansion port area and then painted the whole of it with Halfords Matt Black car paint. I've found that it gives a finish that is very close to the way the plastic looks on the original Megadrive's. So once its dried it will get a coating of a Matt Varnish so that it keeps its plasticy look rather than being all glossy. In the photos it looks glossy but that is because its still drying. You might also have spotted the Neptune case having another coating of paint. I did a bit more work on it on my holiday but that is for another post ;-)

So, The case has been painted and now is dry. So, what does it look like?!

Pretty good to me, I know it could be a little smoother but to be honest this project has been taking too long, so it gets a tick from me. And in certain lights, as you'll see in the video, you can't really see the join. :-) Overall Im really please with the look of the expansion port. Especially with how sturdy it is, It has no wobble or flimsy-ness to it.

And here is how the hot glue and milliput is covered inside the case. you can see the kind of "welding" I did with it to fix the new expansion port in place. And its solid, doesn't feel at all like it will crack or break.

Time to put it all back together again and get the switches set into place.

And here's how the case and new side expansion looks with everything all built back inside the casing.

 
Looks pretty sweet I think !!! :-D Im very happy with how it's fitted together, and when its sitting on the table you wouldn't even think there was anything going on underneath the case. A real Street-Sleeper :-D

So, for the finishing touch to this little project. I want it to look stock but I also want it to still show a little hint as to what it is. To achieve this I bought some water-slip decal paper from the internet so that I can make my own "Jamma-drive 2" logo to replace the megadrive 2 logo thats already on the case. To start I measured up the height of the existing logo and got onto illustrator, and with a Sega typeface I layed up my logo. Logo all made to size and its onto the printer to get the water-slip decal printed out. Once its printed you have to spray some Matt Varnish onto the decal to make it waterproof and then onto dunking it in warm water.

And with a little bit of wiggling here is what the finished decal looks like on the case with a megadrive 2 underneath for comparison. :-)

Im super happy with how the whole project turned out. I don't think the case could have come out any better, the waterslip decal really puts the cherry on the cake as it would make you look over the jamma-drive and think its standard but make you do a double take and go "what!?!"

And here are 2 videos I made of the Jamma-drive 2. The first video showing you the insides of the Jamma-drive2, including the overclock repair.



Here is the second part which show's the Jamma-drive 2 playing some games. :-D



Man I'm happy this project is finished now as it was meant to be a nice quick and easy one, but with the RGB problem and then having to figure out the controller pads it dragged on a bit. But the finished 'drive has come out great I think.

Catch you all later guys

Porl''

JAMMA SEGA MEGADRIVE 2 : PART THREE

Hi everyone and Happy New Year! :D

I hope you've all had a great chistmas and new year holiday.

Rightio I've just about finished my Jamma-megadrive 2 and thought I'd post up the next part of my build. This post is about the trickiest part of the build, hacking up the pad and getting it all wired up to work with the Jamma fingerboard and through that, your arcade stick.

I found that when I tried doing google searches about the pad-hacks all I could find were guides / pin-outs for the Megadrive 1 joypad. I wanted to use some Megadrive 2 pads as I had a few of those and with them being newer pads they should last longer. Should be easy enough to match up the guides with the MD2 pads, they can't be that different right?....wrong!!! They seem to have changed the PCB layouts and possibly manufacturers through the years. With the wiring switched around and not very well marked out.

Undetered I opened up one of the spare MD2 pads and got desoldering the cable from it so that I was left with just the pcb. Then comparing up the pinouts hopefully got the solder points matched and started soldering wire after wire to the megadrive pad, the fingerboard and to the joypad solder points on the Megadrive 2 pcb.

Rush off to test and hey, the controls work in a fashion! ... up is left, left is down, start works and only B does anything. Bugger! That didn't work then.

I decided to dig out my MD1 pads and check out the pcb's inside them and see if they match up with the pin-outs from google. Well, only 1 of them did. I guess that during the MD1's life they changed the pads manufacturer and/or design.

With the pad that matched up I desoldered and re-wired the pad to the Megadrives joypad solder pads and to the fingerboard points marked out on my Supergun wiring guide.

I was really hoping that I would do the wiring a lot neater than it is in the photo. The wiring is like a rats nest because of me having problems with the original pad. As you can see I wrote wiring numbers 
onto the pad so that I could easily match up the points to the solder pads on the joypad connector. You can see that I've wired from the non-ground side of the button area to the jamma edge connector. This sends the signal from your arcade joystick through the game pad which then gets transmitted to the Megadrive which then tells the games what the hecks going on :-P. To get the ground from the pad to the Jamma fingerboard you scrap away some of the green colouring to get the bare copper and solder a wire from there to a ground on the finger board. 9 wires from the fingerboard to the pad and 9 wires from the pad to the Megadrive 2.

Bingo! This pad worked straight away! Up, down, left, right all work! A,B,C, Start all work too! :-D

Onto the next pad...

I couldn't find another pad in my collection that matched the working MD1 pad so I checked my non-sega 6-button pads and found this one which had auto fire and slow-mo. I wouldn't be needed those as I wouldn't really be able to set them up easily enough on my arcade joystick. So I just soldered it as a normal sega 3-button pad. Thankfully the top left wiring points were numbered which made it easy to match up again.

And this time I routed the wiring a lot neater :-P I wish I'd done it this way with the first pad but as it works and its for me I will keep it as is for now. Again you can see the wires soldered to the input side of the button area rather than the common ground side. These are soldered to the fingerboard.

And here is the underside of the Megadrive 2 joypad socket area.

Again you can see that its routed a lot neater. Also, I found that if you soldered directly to the pins for the connector then the arcade stick completely took over the controls and you couldn't plug a standard MD pad in the port anymore and get it to work. So, to keep it so the Megadrive2 could still be used with pads you have to solder to the little solder points along the traces rather than the pins.

Bingo bango 2 working pads, and with a little wiggling the Megadrive 2 still sits in the case. Player 1's pad is underneath the main board sitting inbetween the mounting points and Player 2's pad sits on top of the Megadrive2.

Unfortunetly I didn't get a photo of the final joypad layout. I'll update the post when I get onto overclocking the Jamma-drive 2.

Which is the next step. Overclocking and finishing off the case mod. It needs a little bit more milliput to smooth the joins and then giving it a blast with some matt black spray paint.

Catch you later

Porl''

JAMMA SEGA MEGADRIVE 2 : PART TWO

Howdy pardnurs,

Well now that the Jamma fingerboard is securely attached to the Megadrive 2's PCB and it fits into the case with its new expansion port we'll move onto the wiring. Through the whole process I will keep dibbing away at finishing up the expansion port as I'm using milliput and it takes over night to cure really. So I add little bits here and there and allow them to cure without the chance of me poking them...cus I'll be asleep :-P

To start with I found a few guides on how to make Sega Megadrives into Jamma-drives and all had a similar starting process:
1) Tap the RGB, sync and ground from either the RGB encoder chip or the additional solder pads on the A/V connector under the PCB.
2) Tap the audio from the solder pad under the A/V connector.
3) Plug the Megadrive into the arcade machine / or Supergun's jamma harness with the normal Megadrive PSU and check that video and audio are working okay.

This allows you to problem solve any issues as you haven't made that many connections so far.

Seem's easy enough right. A few wires and your away. Well, thats kind of right.

I decided to solder directly to the RGB encoder chip as some people said that this may provide a stronger RGB signal. I googled the chip in my V01 megadrive 2 and found the pin-out and started trimming and tinning wires and soldering the sucker up.

Well what do you know?! I get picture!! But, the image seems to move, kind of clicks from one point to another and back again. Like its switching between either PAL / NTSC or aspect ratio. Also the biggest problem, there is horizontal bluring through the colours. Really distracting and causing weird colour clashes. Bugger!

The wiring is so simple where could the problem be?! I assumed that my soldering wasn't neat enough and i'd either bridged two of the suface mount points of the chip so I checked them out and they seemed fine. Hmmm. I unsoldered the wires and then looked up the A/V pinout for the port and wired to the solder pads underneath it. Maybe you can't wire to the chip?

I go upstairs and test and darn it! The same problem! This is frustrating!

I got a few more pinouts and did some google searches and couldn't find anything on the problem. Then it occured to me that its essentially the same as doing an RGB cable so maybe I need to add the 75ohm resistors and the 220uf capacitors?

I made up a little Vero board with the resistors and capacitors and wired it up to check. Same problem only this time its a little darker now as the resistors are lowering some of the signal strength. Stupid horizontal RGB blur!! Its a little harder to see in the Zombies photo but that mottling on the circles is caused by the blur and shouldn't be there.

Thinking that maybe the RGB encoder chip might be at fault I decided to make up an RGB Cable for the Megadrive 2. I'd been planning on doing one anyway and had the parts so I got soldering. Using the great guide from mmmonkey.co.uk.

Another test but with the Megadrive 2 hooked up as normal (no jamma) and the new RGB cable and BING, picture is perfect. Nice and sharp with bright colours. Awesome for the cable as that will be used on my other Megadrive 2 and Neptune but bugger because it shows that something is still up with the Jamma wiring.

Looking over the wiring guide for the RGB cable I noticed that its got Composite Video hooked up via the scart but no Sync. Comparing that with the Supergun wiring guide I noticed that the sync pin on the jamma board is hooked up via the Composite Video pin on the Superguns Scart port. Could it be that?!

I found the composite video solder pad on the A/V port area of the Megadrive 2 and moved my sync wire over to there. A quick test and WOOP! The video is perfect!! No horizontal blurring and everything looking like its using the RGB scart cable!

I know, it seems like such a simple and stupid problem to have with the A/V but when everyone says follow the Encoder pin-out and hook up the RGB Sync and Video ground as is rather than using Composite Video out for sync then your going to run into problems. This took me a week and a half of headscratching and fruitless searching to figure out haha. Yes Im that tentative with hooking wires up incase I blow something.

Now that the Video is sorted I hooked up the Mono Audio out from the A/V port area to the Jamma finger board and hooked the Audio ground up to the Jamma fingerboards ground. Thankfully this worked straight away and is super loud through my arcade speaker, so loud i might have to put a volume switch on haha.

Here you can see my testing setup with Zombies (ate my neighbours) running on the Jamma-drive 2 with the audio hooked up. Thank goodness that stage one is figured out!

The next step is to hook up two switches, one for the 50/60mhz PAL/NTSC mod and the other for the English / Japanese language mod. I followed the guide from mmmonkey.co.uk again as I've used this mod on my other Megadrive 2 and it worked a treat!

My aim for doing this project was to try and keep my wiring as neat as I could. This is a problem though when your trouble shooting and having to hack up wires for testing. Its still fairly neat and easy to follow though.

Here you can see the points I soldered the wires too for the language and PAL/NTSC mods.

Pretty neat wire routing for me I think :-) and with this mod the hot glue is definetly needed as the points your soldering too are very small and you don't get much solder on there and its very easy to pull and break traces if the wires get snagged or pulled.

And here is my wiring up for the A/V parts of this project. I used some ribbon cable from an old DVD player to try and keep them more neat but the problem solving caused me to seperate the wires out doh. Still, its not too un-tidy I don't think.

Here is the view of the top of the Jamma fingerboard with the Red, Blue, Video ground and Mono Audio wired up. Actually looking again it looks pretty neat still. Once I've completed it the wires will be hot glued into place on the PCB and hopefully routed away from the voltage regulators heatsink as I think that might start to melt the wire casings if used for a long time.

And here you can see the underside of the Jamma-drive 2 with the wiring going to the solder points of the A/V port. Still not too messy and once I'm properly happy they will be hot glued into place to make sure they don't come pulled or anything. :-)

The orange wires are the power lines to the underside of the voltage regulator which are supplying the Megadrive 2 with +5v from the Supergun's arcade power supply so I no longer need to hook it up using the Sega power supply. The Jamma-drive 2 is now A/V and PSU cable free! :-D

Next up is hooking up the first joypad so that I can use my arcade sticks via the Supergun rather than a pad out of the front of the Megadrive.

Catch you later

Porl''

SOME NEW PROJECTS - SEGA, NINTENDO, NEC

Hi all,

While waiting on getting hold of a resonably priced 32x for the Neptune ( Im not after a collectors condition but thats all that seem to be around at the minute...doh) I've got started on a few consoles all at the same time.

I've have one spare Megadrive 2 left thats not been tinkered with. I have one put a-side for the Neptune so that is all safe. This spare that is gathering dust is now going to be modified up to a Jamma-drive! That's right, a megadrive that can be hooked up to an arcade cabinet so that you can play the great arcade conversions on the 'big screen'. Alas I don't own a cabinet, just a Supergun so its a little redundant for me but the making of one seems like a fun little project to me.

I'm planning on making the Jamma-drive 2 a bit more stealth looking than the normal Jamma-drives though. These generally have the Jamma fingerboard sticking out the side of the case or hang out of the CD-rom drive area and look good for putting inside an arcade cab'. But for me I want it to still look good on the shelf and look stock but have hidden uses. mwuhahaha. Also its going to have the 50/60mhz mod, the Language mod and the Overclock done to it.

Im also going to keep it so you can use the normal pads and PSU for playing it as a normal Megadrive on the TV but if you want to chuck it in the cabinet you open the new Jamma edge cover and hook the harness up to it. :D

So I've hacked the case up (as well as a spare case for its expansion cover) and I've started to join the new expansion cover to the left side of case. Thats right, this megadrive is going to have 2 expansion ports!!

I now have the expansion cover and clasp all milliputted into the case so it's getting there. I'll be doing a write up on it once the project is all finished. I have the Jamma fingerboards now so soldering is about to begin this week. Woop!

While I have the milliput out I have taken my old SNES off the shelf and decided to restore it back to its former grey glory. Rather than the nicotene yellow that is now become. I have looked up the retr0brite recipes but with the weather as it is there isn't really enough sunlight for me to get a nice clean to it I don't think and I don't want to have a UV bulb on for 2 days solid.

So i'm going to be mixing a paint to match the original case covers and paint it. While I do that Im fixing a crack along the side from the plastic getting old and also doing the lock-out and 50/60Hz mods.

Going to be ace to play my Japanese version of Turtle in Time!!!!

And the last project I've got is a console I've wanted for the longest time! A NEC PC Engine!!! Oh yes!! I did some scouring of ebay last week and found a Japanese white PC Engine going cheap as it was listed as faulty. So I snapped it up to see if I can repair it and finally have the little console that could.

Im hoping that its fully working and the only problem is that its outputting video in japanese RF so the person testing it couldn't get it to tune in. For a start Im going to be doing the RGB port mod to it so that it runs off scart and will look super nice and sharp. I have Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition on its way so that I can test it all as there isn't a power light or anything on the unit to see if its working.

It looks pretty big in that photo but the base size of it is the same as a CD case. Its tiny!!

I'm really excited about all 3 of my projects! Going to be great to get some of these consoles up and running.

Update again soon

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''

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''