Monthly Archives: January 2016

Arcade Upgrade

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Update:arcade controller again

I was working on the arcade controller board again tonight.  I was having problems reading from one of the inputs, so I resoldered the DFN just to make sure that everything was ok.  Alas after pulling my hair out, I realised that the pin that I could not read was set up as the data line to drive the ws2811’s grrr.

After that realization, I hooked up the leds to make sure they functioned.  This part is mostly out of the way now,  The audio amp arrives tomorrow, so It will be time to crack the machine open soon.

 

 

Well Christmas was fun.  My cocktail cabinet packed it in, many ways over.

  • First the 400MB HDD stopped spinning.
    • ok so no problem dig another one out of the parts bin.
    • reimage it using vmware (it was dos. tons of setup, but I got it done)
    • reinstall.
  • Now the Mother Board is giving me post codes.
    • Pull everything apart.
    • Clean contacts
    • Re-seat all cards
  • Things seem to work, but cocktail mode isn’t sticking.  I must have an old version of MAME in my backup image… shit.
  • Getting ready to update the image, and the CRT blows chunks…. shit shit.

Ok so a CRT is nice. but I’ve got a few LC Panels kicking around, so I’m taking this as a cosmic hint that I need to either stop playing video games, or rebuild my cabinet.  I’ve got most of the parts on hand, so the build is now starting. It’s going to be a while. The things to do now are:

  • Build up an arcade controller board. This is much like an iPAC board, but way cooler, because, well,  I built it.  My last kick at the can had WS2811 support to drive leds for an “attract” mode. This will be wired to the buttons.joysticks,coin slots, and output USB HID keycodes to mame.
  • Put retropie on an RPi. I’ll have to overclock this, since my original P90 played rygar better than the pi does at 900Mhz, go figure.
  • The Pi will drive an old LC panel through an hdmi to VGA converter for video.
  • The old cabinet audio was powered by a soundblaster. I’m sure the old farts reading this remember this stuff well. (Dirk?) I even has a reveal 2x cdrom hanging off this card, in the cabinet (ha how 90s).  Now I’ve got to replace this with a single board audio amp. no biggie, $16 on amazon. (i’ll update this post with links and vid later on if I get bored)
  • The biggest issue will be cutting the table top for a the new display. It’s a fair bit larger.
  • On the upside, the power consumption will be much lower, no CRT and no power hogging MoBo, and I’ll have an attract mode (cool)

I’ll update this post with some build photos, old machine teardown, new build up parts etc.