Blog

I’m moving. Actually I already moved in April, but the process has been ongoing for a while, since January to be exact. There have been no posts or updates to projects since I don’t have a lot of time to focus on that at the moment.

The new place is about 4 hours away. It’s on old home with some history and charm. I took it on as a project too. It’s got great bones and lots of potential, although it has been neglected the last few years and needs a lot of TLC. It’s taking most of my time but I am really enjoying doing something different for a change.

Once everything is settled and more organized I’ll be able to dedicate more time to my projects again. More space means a new lab and rec room. Hopefully that means no more working on the floor and dining room table, and pissing off the wife, but we’ll have to see about that.   

I live in Canada. Unfortunately the arcade market in Canada is pretty weak most of the time, so to get all the good stuff I have to buy games from the US every so often. 

Most eBay users that sell internationally from the US, are “encouraged” into using Pitney Bowes’ GSP program for shipping abroad. 

Ebay users pay for shipping to the Pitney Bowes GSP hub in Kentucky, which is cheap. What they don’t realize is that the cost that they see for shipping is only a fraction of what GSP will cost the buyer.  As an example, a $100USD PCB may cost around $10USD to ship a typical PCB to KY, but a Canadian user will likely pay around $35USD plus about $15USD in customs fees. A similar package to Canada via USPS direct, would cost about $16-20USD and it would most likely avoid customs fees.

The benefit to the sellers are pretty obvious though. There is no need to fill out customs forms and GSP shields the sellers from negative feedback as long as the item arrives at the hub in one piece.  

Upon receiving the items Pitney Bowes will typically repack the items to save on the remaining shipping costs. This is where my story begins. 

A few months ago, I ordered a Sega ST-V motherboard and Die Hard Arcade cart. The package arrived in a crushed box. There was very little protection in the box, basically only the anti-static bag and the PCB itself.

I connected the PCB and turned in on and got nothing… black screen… DOA. Upon closer inspection I noticed a long, deep gash on the PCB that ran across at least 2 inches in length. It looked hopeless. The cut went across several small pitch IC legs knocking them completely off. It severed many, very thin traces, it damaged vias, and appeared to be deep enough to penetrate at least a couple of inner layers of the PCB.

I contacted the seller. Seller swears the game was tested and worked before he sent it. I check the packaging and sure enough, the gash appears in both the anti-static bag and the box iteself.

I became curious, and went through all the boxes that I still had from previous purchases, and sure enough, similar cuts appear on those boxes as well.

I contacted eBay about the situation. They made it very easy to get my money back for this purchase, but I was made to feel like they’re doing me a favor and in the future this favor may no longer be available. Strange, because I’ve been seeing lots of similar problems from other eBay users, and you’d think they would take more ownership of something that seems to be a pretty widespread problem.

This item was easily replaced, but what if you bought something that’s one of a kind? What if Ebay or Pitney Bowes deny any wrong doing and you are stuck with a broken item? They obviously don’t care about your items to begin with if they’re willing to slice the packaging open in this manner and remove padding to save a few bucks.

You may want to keep this in mind the next time you chose to use eBay’s GSP program.

While I haven’t made any recent updates for a while, there is actually a lot of stuff going on. I put aside some of the long term projects (probably a bad idea) in favor of some quickies.

I spent the last few weeks working on RGB modding Sony Trinitron TVs. I ran into some issues with that but in the end was able to overcome them. As a result I made a Sony modchip board that can be used to enable an unused RGB input on Sony YC Junge chips inside of their TVs. I’ll put up a page with more details soon, but in the meantime here’s a link to the Youtube videos I made on the subject.

RGB Modding a CRT TV for Retro Gaming part 1

RGB Modding a CRT TV for Retro Gaming part 2

While working on the videos I decided to make a small dongle boards for testing TVs and monitors. These dongles will be battery powered and will output various signals to allow you to quickly test the equipment. Mainly this is for people that go thrifting and need to make sure the gear is working as expected. The vga dongle will output a 15khz test signal to help you find those elusive 15khz capable lcd panels.

In addition to that I made a simple yet effective in system debugging board for value line msp430 microcontrollers. The idea here is to use your existing msp launchpad and connect it with an extension ribbon cable to your system. The board provides switches for the TEST, RESET and VCC pins to quickly go from programming to in system debugging.

This board design is available for free, but if you want to get a fully assembled kit I will make it available that way as well (coming soon).

Finally I’ve been working on more JAMMA adapters. The current batch consists of adapters for Exidy, Nintendo Playchoice 10, standard 8-liner pcbs with 72pin + 20pin edge connectors, Space Invades with virtual color overlay, and improved designs for the existing Nintendo adapters.

 

I spent the last couple of weeks or so testing the new JAMMA adapters, and updating this site. Most of the JAMMA adapter pages are now online and are complete.

According to what’s on the site, I have 30 game / conversion class specific adapters listed, 3 universal adapters listed, and 2 more adapters which are work in progress. The 2 unlisted adapters are the Orca Type B adapter (needs redesign for 2 button games) and the Space Invaders adapter which I literally just assembled and still need to write the code for.

I will also be working on a couple more adapters. One that I’m kind of excited about is a Sega Naomi to JAMMA adapter which will eliminate the need for a Naomi / Capcom adapter and will allow the use of a ATX power supply with your Naomi system.

I’ll post some news on this as the project moves forward.

I’ve been running low on existing adapter boards as they’ve been selling quite well. Since I had to reorder these, it made sense to expand the order to include alongside some of the other adapter types I’ve been working on recently.

I put aside the JAMMA TestCard and the Minigun work for a couple of days to finish up the design for these adapters, and while they’re in production, the plan was to  switch back and work on the code for the TestCard and the Minigun again.

This type of efficiency is so unlike me.

So now, while I wait for the order to arrive, I am back working on the TestCard again. Given how the libraries I’m trying to write will be reused in later projects, the TestCard makes it easy to test the code before it gets reused elsewhere.

The new adapters have now left the fabrication process and are on the way. In the new batch we have:

• Midway Space Invaders

This unique adapter will not only convert the composite video to JAMMA compatible RGB video but also create a virtual color overlay that simulates the original cellophane overlay that was used in the original arcade machines. This adapter is for the Midway board variant. I’ll create a Taito version as well as soon as I get my hands on a Taito SI board.

• Orca Type B

For orca boards like Espial, Vastar, Zodiack and others. This is a redo of an adapter that I made in the last batch which had the pin order swapped left to right. That’s what I get for not double checking my design!

• Data East Cassette

For Data East boards that used the cassette system pinout. This includes games like BurgerTime and Bump’n’Jump on either the cassette type boards or the plain rom based pcbs.

• SNK Type B

For boards like ASO, Alpha Mission, Gladiator and others. This is a different pinout used by the Rockola games and in Vanguard.

• Gallag

For the awseome and quite popular bootleg of Namco’s Galaga game. I believe there are a lot more of these than the original Galaga pcbs. At least I keep running into those a lot more.

There are also some redesigned adapters in this batch like the Namco Galaga adapter what just simply hell to assemble. I sold as many of the original Galaga adapters to break even, and then immediately redesigned it.

I think the new version will be quite a bit better, at least I’m a lot more happy with it.

With this batch of adapters, I believe this puts the total number of adapter designs to around 35. Not bad for about a year of spare time work.

With every new batch, I’m moving closer and closer to the end of this project, and at this point the next adapters in my sights are going to be for the Nintendo Playchoice systems and Exidy boards.

However, if you have any JAMMA adapter requests that you would like me to make, you can message me through here, and if the board is relatively popular I will likely put in on my list.

I now need to update the JAMMA Adapter project page which is quite out of date. For a more recent list, please check my Ebay listings here.