Sega announces Monster World IV is getting an English release!

Posted Friday, 13th May 2011 under New old games
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Read this over at Silicon Era – Sega have announced they’re going back and translating Monster World IV, previously only available in Japanese (though a fan translation exists that can be patched to the Japanese version), and are releasing it on Wii, PSN and possibly XBLA.

This is phenomenal news given the age of the game and the perceived lack of mainstream interest. This is is the stuff of fanboy dreams and legends, and it is amazing to see Sega leading the way.

From here, my only hope is that they get M2 to develop the emulator for the PS3/XB360, as previous emulators have been absolutely terrible on the machine in comparison to M2’s work on Nintendo’s Virtual Console and the Sega Ages collections on the PS2.

You can check out the full release over at the Sega Europe blog.

Adapting the “Penny mod” for Rock Band drums in Australia

Posted Wednesday, 11th May 2011 under Hardware modifications
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I was recently fixing up my mate McAdam’s 1st generation Rock Band drums after a session resulted in his green pad becoming unresponsive. Cue the illustrious “Penny mod” and adapting this for Rock Band players in Australia, or the return of the humble 5c piece 🙂

This one’s pretty simple – the following two videos off YouTube show how to perform the Penny mod:

If you’re after the software to test out the end result as seen in the video, you can get it at the Drum Machine website. I used it in my case, and it worked a treat.

For me, I found that a 5c piece was a good substitute for a penny. I used two for each of the outer pads (green and red), and one for each of the inner pads (yellow and blue). The end result was a much more responsive drum, which was great.

The other thing to keep in mind is if the actual solder connections have been killed, either through the solder breaking or the wire snapping. If either of these greet you when you check out the sensors, OXM Online have a guide.

Overhauling the Sega Astro City – Part 9, customising the JAMMA harness

Posted Monday, 9th May 2011 under Arcade cabinets
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Because of the number of molex connections in the Astro City, and my desire to make this overhaul modular, I gave the JAMMA harness a hefty session or two with the soldering iron to get my desired outcome. The following is a full-length shot of the completed harness:

Audio mod

To fit in with the control box, the JAMMA harness takes the audio-out and puts it into an RCA connector. The positive or center pin takes the source from pin 10, or speaker +. The shielding/outer connection is actually a ground connection from any of the ground points on the harness. Astute observers will notice in the title pic that I have cabling coming from pin L, or speaker -, which I originally used in this mod, which was a bad idea! Had garbled audio and resetting PCBs. Thanks to Hewitson and the community at Aussie Arcade for that one, they steered me back in the right direction 🙂

-5v, ground and fan connections

This molex connection takes the -5v, ground and fan 12v output from the control box and feeds it into the JAMMA harness. This fan connection is another molex connector (2-pin) so that a fan can be connected if necessary, and as all the power comes from a separate connection to the PSU, it’ll remain constant regardless of the setup.

JVS to JAMMA power modification

The PSU in the cab is a SUN PSU, so the power connections are JVS standard. To accomodate this, I hacked a spare JVS extension cable and connected the +5v, +12v and ground to the relevant connections, and beefed up the wiring on the harness. By default it only had a single wire for each of these connections, so I added three additional wires to the +5v to help with the load for power-hungry games. I terminated the 3.3v wires on the extension cables with heatshrink tubing to keep it electrically safe.

Test and service buttons

The test and service buttons are pushbuttons mounted underneath the control panel on Astro City cabs, so I terminated these connections along with a ground feed from the harness to allow easy connections. At the other end, I rewired the existing switches and cleaned them up so that they connected accordingly.

Coin slot connection

Similar to the service and test switches, the coin slot connection uses molex connections at either end. Inside the cab, the coin slot is also wired in parallel to a push button so that credits can be added without having to use coins. Handy, as I don’t have any ¥100 coins!

Controls

This was the biggest and scariest job – I chopped off the old molex connector after I manually used my multimeter to go through and check every connection on the molex connector, and its corresponding connection on the JAMMA harness. After doing this, I re-wired everything to the new JAMMA connector. The Astro City has every connection running through a couple of molex connectors, which then feed to a master connector that goes to the harness. The system worked, even if it was a little anally retentive, so I wanted to preserve this. This one connector took ages to put together, but I was really happy when it all worked 😀

Existing connections

This is a long shot of the wiring mounted underneath the control panel – the metal bracket holds three molex connections – one for player 1 controls, one for player 2 controls and one for the JAMMA+ (buttons 4, 5 and 6) for both players. On the bracket are also mounting points for up to three small push buttons, labelled for test, service and degauss. As the degauss switch is on the external panel from the chassis, it isn’t used in my setup.

That final image is the female molex connector for the controls – a scary prospect to wire up! This feeds the P1 and P2 controls into the Astro.

The only other change I made was to have button 4 off the JAMMA harness for P1 and P2 be re-added into the master molex connector, and then have the female connector run extended lengths with quick-connects on that allow me to re-wire the control panel as required. This allows for quick and easy button changes when playing Neo Geo titles, for example.

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.

Minitroid looks amazing

Posted Wednesday, 4th May 2011 under New old games
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The Minitroid tech demo was only recently brought to my attention – it’s a miniaturised take on Metroid (I’m seeing more Super Metroid in there, but it’s probably taking general inspiration from the series) running in a tiny pixel resolution. The thing’s an amazing piece of homebrew talent, retaining gameplay elements, charm and detail despite the limited window and sprites. There are a few enhancements compared to hardware generally associated with such low resolutions, including alpha blending and some great camera movement to emphasise the missiles, and the animation is top-notch.

You wouldn’t think you’d be able to achieve so much with such limitations. Necessity is the mother of invention though – see it for yourself:

It’s designed to run on Windows, and you can grab the tech demo from Metroid Database. Props to elvis at Aussie Arcade for the tip, and to the original source, Tiny Cartridge.

I picked up a PC Engine Duo-R :)

Posted Monday, 2nd May 2011 under Collections
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Last year I became a member of the nerdy PC Engine fanboy community with the purchase of a PC Engine Duo-R pre-modded with RGB for super-awesome video output 😀

Admittedly it’s a bit late, but here are some pics to enjoy!

Unboxing the Duo-R:

Angled shot:

Front shot:

Rear shot:

NEC Avenue Pad 6 and cables:

All these and more images are up in the PC Engine gallery.