Getting Virtua Fighter 3 running in my Astro City

Posted Wednesday, 30th March 2011 under Arcade cabinets
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This one’s very retrospective, as I did this back in… late 2009 I think, or early 2010. It’s a response to the issues I’ve blogged previously with getting VF2 and VF3 to run on my cabinet.

I grabbed an AT PSU with some hacked wiring to a DIY power distribution panel. It was crude, but very effective – with some jiggling around and by using the power supply/connections in conjunction with a Model 3 – JAMMA harness I had from a previous order, I was able to get VF3 running on my cab 😀 Made me a very happy little nerd, I can assure you!

Angled shot of everything:

Power supply:

Squeezing everything inside the cabinet:

Success!!

The whole lot (and then some) are in the Arcade stuff – cabinets gallery.

Retro Core is back!

Posted Monday, 28th March 2011 under Video game shows
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Sure, it’s old by now, but I had to share my enthusiasm – favourite British ex-pat Yakumo has started doing mini episodes of Retro Core for 2011. I’ve waxed lyrical over my love for his work in the past, so it’s great to see him squeeze in some new videos for 2011. They’re only small episodes now with a narrower focus on the Saturn (hence the new title, “Retro Core SS”), but it’s all good as far as I’m concerned.

You can check out the back catalogue as well as the new episodes at the Retro Core page.

While you’re over there, you should check out the rest of Segagaga Domain, as it’s packed with videos, writeups, scans and retro gaming guides for Japan.

The 2010 C64 haul

Posted Wednesday, 23rd March 2011 under Collections
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The images have been in the gallery for ages but I just realised I hadn’t written anything on it!

Last year I picked up a great haul of C64 stuff from a local who was clearing out their old gear. Included in there was a Commodore 1802 monitor, Commodore MPS1250 dot-matrix printer, boxed C64, Commodore 1541-II disk drive, 1530 C2N tape drive and a fair whack of games, including some blank disks (which came in handy when I got my XM-1541 adapter). All up, it was a great haul from a nice local who was happy to see them go to a home that would give them some TLC.

The full roundup is in the C64 collections gallery.

Overhauling the Sega Astro City – Part 7, working on the MAME PC

Posted Monday, 21st March 2011 under Arcade cabinets
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As part of the Astro City overhaul, I wanted to recycle my old P4 hardware and use it on the Astro City. To get there, I’ve installed WinXP since I still had the license valid for this PC, along with MAME 0.128 that I had handy, and will use GameEx as the frontend. The following are the hardware specs:

CPU: Pentium 4 Socket 478 3.2ghz CPU with Hyperthreading
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-8S648FX
GPU: Gigabyte ATi Radeon 9600XT w/256mb RAM
RAM: 1gb DDR-400
HDD: 40gb Seagate IDE HDD
Network: 10/100mbps LAN NIC

As you can see, it’s nothing terribly powerful by today’s standards, but it’ll have enough juice to run classic sprite-based games, which is what I wanted. The beauty is that with the LAN card, I can remote into the machine once the initial install’s done for maintenance and setting up programs.

To interface the PC with the cab, I’m going with a J-PAC interface, which takes the VGA and PS/2 sockets from the PC and puts them into JAMMA standard so you can simply connect the PC to the cab via the JAMMA harness. You need to push the video card into outputting a 15k signal though, which can be done on most ATi cards by using Soft15k, and it worked fine for my setup.

Special note to all J-PAC users though, be sure to set the jumpers on the J-PAC PCB to 15k – I was getting a rolling picture when I first booted and thought something was wrong with the video card or the chassis. I powered off the PC and set the jumpers as per the below, which also happens to be the configuration Ultimarc (the manufacturer) suggest you use 😛

… and it worked fine after that 🙂 The only other issue is audio, but since I’ll have an amp in the cab as part of the overhaul, I’ll just have a 3.5mm headphone socket to stereo RCA cable ready to plug in and run it that way. Sorted!

As noted before, posts on the refurb are being done ad-hoc, so to keep track of the whole project, just use the Sega Astro City Overhaul tag, as the whole series will be added to it over time.

Replacing a broken button on the Amiga mouse

Posted Wednesday, 16th March 2011 under Hardware modifications
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Sorted this out a while ago – I had an Amiga mouse where the left mouse button wasn’t hitting anything when I pressed it. Opened up the mouse and found that the entire switch for the mouse had broken off at some point in its life and hadn’t been fixed. Since tactile micro switches are cheap and abundant (I grabbed a spare off a dead DVD-ROM’s open button), I thought I’d fix it. Here’s what I did:

1. Flip the mouse over and remove the two screws
2. Flip it back over and remove the top of the case to reveal the mainboard/PCB inside. There are another two black screws holding the assembly to the bottom case – remove them, and take the board out of the case
3. Use your multimeter to determine which ends of the tacticle switch join when pressed and make sure the ground and signal portions of the board aren’t connected when the button isn’t depressed. Once you have it sorted, place the switch in the holes accordingly
4. To keep the switch in place while you work from underneath the board, use some electrical tape to hold the switch flush to the PCB
5. Flip the board over so you’re working from the solder-side, ensure your soldering iron is heated and flow the holes with solder and trim off any excess from the pins to keep it neat and tidy
6. Test the connection with your multimeter, then put everything back together again

And that should do it – a very easy fix, and one that’ll probably work for other computer (or console) mice as well. To give you a hand, I’ve also added an image gallery, or you can just check out the images below.