SNESNESCUBE64

On 6/26/2023 at 8:20 PM, Murray said:

Just snagged myself a ticket. Thanks boys!

Blind Gaurdian is one of those bands I would love to see but have to travel. I am super jealous that you get to go see em.

4 hours ago, Sumez said:

@SNESNESCUBE64 are you seeing this? We are finally getting an official HD render of fat yoshi!

Yeah I saw yesterday and was the first thing I said. They showed us Yoester but not fat yoshi, those cowards.

I'm workin because I don't get the day off. Maybe next time.

If I had the day off I'd be cleaning and doing housework.

So a few months ago, I bought a Nintendo arcade board on Yahoo Auctions Japan called Head On N. It is a Nintendo counterpart of Head On by Sega. Unfortunately I don't know the story behind this one, but I figure it was just licensed to Nintendo by Sega. The main difference between the two games is that the Nintendo version is meant for a vertically oriented screen where as the Sega one is for a horizontally oriented one. 

Anyway, I got this thing as a converted mess. Someone had converted it to play (according to the listing) Heiankyo Alien, even modding the sound section with a weird hand built daughter card. Unfortunately I could not confirm this though, since all of the ROMs were missing on the back. So basically I had to remove everything and fix all the cut traces (there were plenty on the front and back). This was also used as a parts board at some point as well, as it was missing a lot. I did document the hacks, but I have to do a proper writeup on that.

After populating everything in the sound section, I ran into the issue of ROMs. They use 2708 tri-voltage eproms, which are hard to program with modern hardware. My solution was actually to design a PCB to condense all 8 ROMs into one 2764 ROM, mapped with a 74LS148 encoder IC. It just fits into the original sockets.

From there, it was time to fix the boardset, I was having graphics issues, but fortunately that was a fairly quick fix. You can read more about it on my repair log:

The TLDR is that the chip that serializes graphics was faulty. After getting that replaced, I was able to actually see the game. Head On N, like with other Nintendo arcade boards, does indeed output inverted video. For this I just used a Sanyo 20EZ. It seems to be working just fine.

The next step for me now is to do two things: Make a proper reset circuit and test the audio. Unfortunately I don't have a power supply in my test setup that does the -12V that it requires. I also have to hook up controls so I can actually play it. One down the road thing that I would like to do is modify the ROMs so it can just be used on an upright cabinet. It seems that it is meant to be used in a cocktail table, as it will flip the screen. It's been a fun project so far, I hope to do a custom cabinet for it one day, but that is down the road. I have to just get this board fully working first.

I always eat the fries first. They never reheat at home well if for some reason there are leftovers, burgers however reheat just fine.

I don't have a whole lot of books these days and most of them are in boxes as I don't have a real bookshelf, and even so they are just kinda thrown on top of my parts shelving (grouping similar books). I would sort by category then alphabetically, which is how I sort my electronic parts. I do this form of sorting of all my physical copies of arcade manuals and schematics.

It is a very OK kind of game. If you like puzzle games you might like this one. Tetris Attack is a much better Yoshi themed puzzle game.

Oh wow I am sorry for being so late, but I have fixed this issue several times for work. There are two versions of this cabinet, the full upright and home version (you can tell by whether or not the coin door is just a sticker). Both suffer from similar problems but the full upright can have additional issues. Before you check anything, try adjusting red drive on the monitor, typically found on the neckboard. Be sure to remember where it was. Tubes wear out, especially if the cabinet is on location.

Odds are it is not a gameboard issue here, but rather a monitor issue. So if you are uncomfortable working on monitors with high voltage or do not know alsafe practices, perhaps find someone local to help out.

First things first, check your connections. Validate that the video signal is actually getting to the monitor (no broken wiring and whatnot). Secondly, wiggle the video connector. Cold solder joints are super common on the monitors used in there (going off memory WG K7200 for the home use, WG K7400 for the full upright). If you partially get your red back or there is flickering of the red color, you have bad solder joints, easy fix. If that is not the issue and you know the gameboard is working, I would try replacing the drive transistor on for red on the neckboard if it is the larger wells gardner monitor. Drive transistors ran REALLY hot on the K7400, U2000, and U5000 monitors by wells gardner, so they are a VERY common failure.

21 minutes ago, FireHazard51 said:

@SNESNESCUBE64would you by chance know what kind of connector these are that are used in SNES controller ports?

They were custom as far as I am aware. In the past when I needed something like that I always took parts from third party controllers. You might be able to find the pins, but I don't know the measurements. I do know you can buy the console end on ebay...

Forgot this title screen

I'd love the beta yoshi one. It's my favorite out of the batch.

On 10/26/2022 at 5:13 PM, Kzaker12 said:

The Lynx monitor that I have has the intermittent audio issue that most people have. big thanks to @SNESNESCUBE64for their write up on capacitor replacement. Will be doing that in the near future. I've also noticed a faint 'striping' when watching anything on the monitor. It's definitely not panel damage so I am hoping replacing the capacitors helps with that as well.

Glad that it helped you out. Those capacitors are all terrible in there, so perhaps that is causing your horizontal lines issues.

@dewisp02

Can my name be removed from the list? I sold my kiosk (for sale link below) to the user Anthony on this site.

On 10/30/2022 at 12:17 AM, Jeevan said:

i think @SNESNESCUBE64 would kill you both

 

IDK, about that. Zeldafreak I think is better than me at this point. Wish I coulda joined but unfortunately I had saturday night plans for some reason.

On 10/26/2022 at 9:11 AM, fcgamer said:

I'm still curious how @OptOutand my Saturn smash and what not FC carts are coming

Haven't done them. If you have questions shoot me a PM.

Youtube has some neat functionality so you don't see a user's content. Being mad at someone who makes content online is a waste of your time. Time you can effectively use to make a sandwich or scream at the squirrels chewing through the top of your garbage can in order to get to the delicous garbage.

On 8/31/2022 at 8:19 PM, Reed Rothchild said:

But the one game that may take the cake is Call of Duty World at War on Veteran.  I don't know what they were thinking with that shit...

Oh my god, this might be mine too. That was ABSOLUTELY BRUTAL. The problem was that enemies would keep spawning, so you would have to get lucky and just push through. The last two missions in particular took me forever because of the respawning. Well they say the German soldiers were on Meth during the second world war, perhaps they were making the AI like that...

Isn't it great when you are having a terrible week and you get a "gimme"? When the fix is super easy or super silly? I had that happen yesterday with an Asteroids Deluxe board. Currently I am just starting a restore on an empty Asteroids Deluxe table, it was empty so I am currently sourcing everything for it. Well I got to the game board after rebuilding a junk AR1 supply I bought years ago on the cheap and building a little test harness that just runs power. Well at first I got nothing. So I pulled the board out to inspect it, see if there was any damage. Sure enough, the crystal had broken off at some point in the past.

I borrowed a crystal from another board that I will have to repair at some point, and it fired right up it seems. Now it's hard to tell of I am going to run into any issues because I didn't hook up the Z axis, hence why everything is connected. But this is a good sign that this board is working at least from a video perspective.

What was your favorite "easy one" story? Doesn't have to be an easy one. Just could be a guess you made that ended up being the issue.

That's a lot of money for something with no board pics...

For thanksgiving, mashed potatoes are better for logistical reasons. Kind of a pain to serve a bunch of baked potatoes.

Baked potatoes are better in every single way otherwise and I will die on that hill. A nice baked potato with sour cream, green onions, shredded cheese, and bacon bits is great.

1. Beating the shadow queen in paper mario and the thousand year door. This game was a childhood favorite of mine but I was never good enough to beat the game. I finally did it some 5 years ago and it was such a good feeling because I was finally able to see the ending. It was also super close, almost didn't win.

2. Fixing my Atari Millipede cabinet - it was my first real arcade repair that required in depth troubleshooting.

3. Not really a particular moment, but playing games with my mother as a youngyin. Those moments and her constant emphasis on the importance of utilizing technology to not only have fun, but also work hard and help others with it helped define myself as a person especially later on in my late teens and now young adult life. I owe a lot to those times playing games with her. It gave me a career path and goals to work toward.

It's an interesting thought. I've never had goals, just passing "hey this is interesting". For myself and many, when you are done with one thing you move on to the next. For me I moved to arcade stuff I moved on to arcade collecting and reproducing boards and other boards because I found I enjoyed it more.

What do I do when I ultimately grow to hate everything electronic or can't do it anymore? Travel and enjoy something else.

19 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

I don't even know what Gorf is, so that must explain why my post in the picture seems to convey my confusion between it and Golf.

Gorf is an arcade game released in the early 80s by Bally Midway. It was a very neat game with speech synth and featured a very appealing cabinet for the time. The gameplay was also nice because it featured variety in the saturated space invaders genre of the day. It was based off of similar hardware used in the Bally Astrocade console (I don't know which came first) and was fairly high tech for what it was.

The reason I hate the hardware so much is because of the astrocade part. It used custom components that fail often. These components are a pain to source now and have gotten to be pricy (something I had to deal with when I was working on my Gorf cabinet). Midway also cut corners whenever possible with electronics as well. Super fun game, just not a fan of the hardware.

Being that there was a shooter theme in the image, I just made a guess...

23 hours ago, CasualCart said:

 

We can talk about how much fun gorf is but how much the hardware sucks. Words cannot describe how much I despise astrocade arcade hardware.

Sell them so I can live in the woods with all my gold and gasoline. No need for plastic toys made for babies in an end of the world scenario.

I use alcohol and simple green for everything consoles. Basically I just go "oonga boonga" on it with cleaner until it is acceptable to me.

For arcade cabinets I take different approaches. Lots more "fun" stuff with that. My super punchout was a good example of this, it had mice problems! Gloves and mask are required for this kind of stuff. For cabinet interior, I use Scrub n Bubbles + a scrub brush after running a shop vac. It won't damage the wood and it good at disinfecting and removiny odors. I am unsure how this effects paint, I used simple green for the exterior as it won't destroy the artwork or exterior gel coat. Everyone cleans the PCBs differently, but what I do is wash it with distilled water, scrub with simple green, then rinse with distilled water again.

Before:

After: