Neo Geo Cabinet Power Supply Overhaul

We’ve moved on a little bit now on the Neo Geo cabinet project, the first step to take was to sort out the power supply module.

Electrocoin Golaith’s have a power chassis comprising an isolation transformer, switch mode PSU, an isolation switch, mains AC filter and fuses.  The one that came in the cab had been hacked out – the switch mode PSU was not present, the fuse holders had been put in wrong and the wiring wasn’t right.  Here’s what it looked at before:

So, the first thing to do was order a bunch of parts:

Pictured above is a bunch of AMP mate’n'lok connectors, pins, JAMMA fingerboards, edge connectors, de-soldering braid, solder, new soldering iron tip cleaner, arcade switch mode PSU’s (need one to replace in another machine) and various other connectors that’ll be needed.

So, work carried out on the PSU to make it usable again:

Trace and rewire the mains input through the filter, cherry switch to the fuse inputs.  De-solder the fuse connectors and remove and replace them correctly (they were being held in by the fuse holder rather than the flange around the barrel so weren’t making contact properly anyway).  Replaced all three fuses as a matter of course.  Replace a cut wire coming from the isolation transformer to the fuse.  Make a 6-pin mate’n'lok to a Hantarex 9110 power connector for the monitor.  Fit the switch mode PSU and ensure all earths are nice and snug.

Here’s the finished PSU:

At the lower right is a test-connector using a 3-pin mate’n'lok – on the Goliath cabinet the power is routed up to a switch on the top of the unit and then back to the power supply board.  The interlock switch has to be depressed by the back cover (or pulled out by the engineer) in order to let power flow through and for some reason, Electrocoin went a bit over the top and put fuses on both the live and neutral lines.

After testing, the isolation transformer is delivering 135volts AC which the monitor will use, 250v which will go to the marquee light and to the switch mode supply and that in turn is putting out a nice steady +5v, +12v and -5v all DC.

Job 1 done!

Next up is to get the monitor going, i’ve got a nice 25 inch tube I was given and the correct chassis for it but it’ll need a bit of tinkering to make it work properly.

Building A Neo Geo Cabinet

After seeing some nifty videos on YouTube from johnsarcade.com with the games he had in his games room, I decided i’d quite like a Neo Geo system too.  The system is fairly straight forward, you get a motherboard – they come in 1, 2, 4 or 6 slot versions, they are JAMMA wired but use some unused pins for the fourth button for each player and a select button for which game (if using a multi cartridge board) and hook up to a regular arcade monitor.

First job was to get hold of a motherboard – which one though?  I did some reading on jammaplus.co.uk as well as this guide from Arcade Otaku’s wiki and found that the 1 slot is the most reliable and the 6 slot is the most unreliable, I got to thinking about whether i’d want multiple games.

Of course, the answer to that was YES!  The whole point would be to be able to switch games quickly and I really wanted something like how johnsarcade.com has his with 4 slots and the marquee lights up for which slot is in play.  So I decided to go for a 4.

Why a 4?  Well, simple….. because! OK!  No, seriously, I could just swap the cartridges as a need for changing games happens but its so much more fun to have multiple cartridges – I can swap JAMMA game boards in my cabinets easy enough but when people come round they just see whats playing and never ask what else you have even though there’s a growing stack of PCB’s on the shelf.  So this will be a nice, player friendly addition to the games room.

As luck would have it, I found one going quite cheap on eBay but the postage was a bit outrageous, fortunately, I was over that way picking up a Defender machine from a friend so I contacted the seller and did the deal and picked up the board motherboard.

Below you can see a picture of it set up on my Vogatek Supergun MK5 on a regular 26″ LCD with a couple of games in it.  I can’t get a select button working but I think that’s more to do with where it is wired up on the edge connector rather than the motherboard.

4 Slot Neo Geo motherboard tested and working

There’s a bunch of things to do before I can get this into the games room, one of which is get hold of Puzzle Bobble and League Bowling which were my two favourites back in the arcade days of glory – I just never knew they were Neo Geo because the arcade obviously had them on a single slot board.

I need to:

• Find a connector for the remote adjustment board for a Hantarex MTC9110 chassis to go with the 25 inch tube I have.  The chasis works, it just needs the adjustment board plugging in properly.
• Clean up the Goliath MK3 that it is destined for – it needs a new loom, marquee light (well, 4 lamps actually), side art etc
• Control panel rebuilding or drilling – the MK3 has a bare control panel but needs sorting out and a bit of re-welding doing and then recovering.  I have a NEO GEO control panel that was donated to me, I wonder if it will fit the cabinet – watch this space.
• Get new or reproduction Goliath MK3 glass for the cabinet
• Physically mount the motherboard for the neo geo with clearance for changing cartridges.
• Wire up the select game switch and marquee lights etc.

Should take me a month or two and i’ll try and post updates regularly – watch this space!

 

New Acquisitions for RGP

Quick shot of two new machines for the RGP collection; Pole Position and Super Hang On.

Both immediately attracting a crowd at the JAMMA+ stand at Replay 2011.

Thanks to the play-testers!

Mini Star Wars Anyone

Very impressed with this little star wars machine. Makes me want a proper one even more!

Jamma+ 8th Birthday Party Video

On 1st October 2011, the Arcade Video Game Collectors forum, JAMMA+ (http://www.jammaplus.co.uk) celebrated their 8th birthday, thanks to the organisational skills of one member, bensonrad, a group of specially selected members congregated at the UK’s premier place for retro arcade gaming, Arcade Barn in Exeter.
Some 30 members and 20 on the sunday, ate dots, battled the invaders, drove down roads, threw discs, drank coffee, digged and blew up things in a gaming marathon.
One member, rogueio (Martin), gave the high score tables some serious punishment as well as claiming bragging rights by showing us proof on some of his major, and well deserved achievements from back in the day.
I was lucky enough to be a part of that group and as well as thrashing Pac-Man and Mr Do, I shot some film of the weekend.

Hope you enjoy.

Arcade Barn Video Imminent

Been franticly trying to edit together all the footage from the JAMMA+ 8th Birthday party at Arcade Barn on 1st/2nd October but been having some major headaches with Final Cut Pro 10 – it keeps crashing.

You zoom in, cut a piece, zoom out, click something else and the program freezes about 1 in 4 times and as it is progressively saved, it sometimes doesn’t remember where you were upto when you reopen.

Hoping to do the last few tweaks tonight then watch my MacBook Pro crawl to a halt while it renders the 10 minute piece.

Fingers Crossed!

Hardcore Gamers Till The Power Switch Gets Thrown

The birthday bash was going well all day and we were strong in numbers but around 5pm many took to the dark side and were seduced by the pub. A select few remained true to the rebellion and returned to the barn for more night time gaming.

The atmosphere changed, the lights came down, 80′s music projected from the speakers and a disco ball lit up – we had recreated arcade nirvana.

The Streetfighter machine got the board ripped out and R-Type made a momentus appearance and once again we set to war with the invaders.

Above are the survivors of the night, there till the end, until the power switch was thrown and abruptly, the sounds ceased!

Arcade Personal Hi Score Update - Part 2

Managed to upgrade a couple of my live personal bests over the weekend, Managed to get 128,350 on Mr. Do! and 139,590 on Pac-Man.   The Pac-Man score certainly isn’t the world record, but it’s my personal best on an arcade machine in public.  It’s also one of the higher “non-stoodley” scores at the barn.

Arcade Barn Personal Hi Score Update

Just got my own personal best on an arcade machine playing Pac-Man, exactly 100,000 points.

Mostly freehand play but it won’t be my last score on this game this weekend

MAME delights - driving cab version

Following on from the outrun cab arriving, a bunch of work was done to make it usable which amongst a lot of different things, included wiring up the Ultimarc A-PAC board to the existing cabinet loom and squeezing a PC neatly into the back so it could easily be removed.  It had always been my intention to make it into a MAME driving cabinet until the official PCB works again.

This prevented us with two problems which i’m sure some other people have come up against.  Firstly, MAME emulates games very well but isn’t initially designed around real-world controls like steering wheels and pedals, it implements them as analogue joysticks just fine but the developers put in a toggle switch for Hi/Lo gear shifter.

OutRun’s gear shift is built almost identically to Pole Position’s in that a microswitch is open for Lo gear and closed for Hi gear.

Second, I wanted rid of the awful hi/lo indicator from the screen, the developers of MAME put this in a while back – again, I guess it makes it easier to see what gear you’re in on a screen with just a keyboard to play with but in my case, i’ve got a nice big cabinet with a proper gear shifter so I can tell when i’m in Hi or Lo gear – I don’t need an onscreen display to tell me that.

There was one other problem, albeit minor, if this is going to have a front end on it, I didn’t want to have to include a bunch of buttons just for the sake of being able to bypass the game info screens and so on.  This would have made the machine into somewhat of a frankencab monstrosity – something I want to avoid at all costs.

So I set about figuring out how to compile my own version of MAME to patch the code to my evil and dastardly needs.

This wasn’t particularly difficult to achieve, the developers have packaged all the tools you need and the instructions are reasonably easy to get to grips with, it’s just the way they’ve laid the code out that made what I wanted to achieve a little more difficult but we got around it in the end.

I found a patch to get rid of the ‘nag screen’ as it’s known and the bonus side of that was a hi-score save routine which means my top scores on the machine will be nicely recorded.

Patching the drivers took a little time as I wanted to be able to pass a flag to the compiler so I could build a ‘driving cab’ version or a standard version with the no-nag and hi-score save.

So, I present the first working compile of MAME 0.143u5 and MAMEUI which has the following games patched to start with:

• OutRun
• Turbo OutRun
• Pole Position (overlay still present)
• Pole Position 2 (overlay still present)
• Chase HQ
• Continental Circus
• WEC LeMans

It can be downloaded from the two links below.  If other game drivers need patching, just let us know and we’ll do our best to update the build.

Note that on Pole Position, Pole Position 2, Top Racer etc, the hi/lo gear shift patch is working but for some reason the compiler refuses to accept my command to not use the overlay, this will be investigated and fixed shortly.

Download MAME-0.143u5 For Driving Cabinets (MameUI Version)
Download MAME-0.143u5 For Driving Cabinets (Windows Command Line Version)