SCOPE FIEND, HACK HEAD
Made a small program to generate IC pinouts that can be stuck on a chip for easy pin identification. The difficult part here is to get the image to come out the correct size.
Information on this can be found here.
I may end up putting together a online tool to make these and to generate these for the common chips on arcade PCBs.
People have been asking me about the current projects that I’ve posted about here. Here’s a more detailed look at where things are with the projects that are work in progress or not currently available:
Major Arcade Projects:
JAMMA Adapters – Here’s a list of the adapters that are work in progress and status:
Miscellaneous Arcade – Projects for the modular supergun or misc arcade boards.
Video Testers:
Logic Analyzer Probes – I have had difficulty manufacturing these while making them reasonable priced. As a result I am not selling these at the moment until I come up with a good strategy on how to do this. May involve gettin a pick and place machine and making them myself.
Other Electronics:
As you can see I piled a bunch of outstanding stuff with the goal of wrapping up most of these at the end of the year. While most of these are completed and ready to be released it will take the next few weeks (January and February) to document everything and get it out there. Stay tuned for more info.
I ended up buying a few arcade cabinets recently. These were a bulk purchase that were sitting in a barn for too long. I’ll spare you the details.
This was in preparation for setting up my gameroom in the new place, and to give me something to do over the winter and spring. In the end, I ended up trading some of these cabinets and plan to restore the rest. In the process I made a video on a Wei Ya Chinese monitor chassis that decided to put into one on these cabs.
I also pretty much perfected my monitor testers (featured in the video) that I’ve been working on for the last few months, and I think these are ready to go. The last hardware updates have been sent to the PCB fabrication place and I’m just waiting for the boards to come back to start putting the final product together.
I’ll update this page with more information soon. There has been a number of new developments on various projects that I haven’t had a chance to document yet.
I took some time to compile a list of games that I designed JAMMA adapters for. This list is a searchable and sortable list should make it easy to find the adapter for your game.
Here is the link to the list. Let me know if there are any additional adapters that you would like to see available.
I will be making a post about the status of the adapters that I am currently developing, so check back for that as well.
I have submitted a couple of new adapter designs and they are currently in production. With these two new designs, I have now created exactly 50 unique designs that cover approximately 500 unique PCBs. This took about 2 years, so that averages about one new adapter every two weeks. Not too bad considering all the other stuff going on.
The two new adapters are:
A few more designs and the project is pretty much completed. On the immediate to do list we now have:
… and maybe a few others that are not on the top of my mind. After that it’s requests only, for not uncommon games.
I’ve been in the field, testing these dongles, make sure they perform as intended. This mainly involves going thrifting and plugging these things into TVs and monitors while curious people stop to look at me like I’m up to something . It combines two things that I like, looking for electronics and playing with electronics.
It turns out that the VGA dongle is a little too big to fit a small percentage of the monitors. The TV monitor dongle needs to have its RCA jacks relocated for easier connection.
While working on this, I decided to create a similar board for arcade monitor testing, which may come in handy when testing arcade monitors in the field. Hardware and software is similar across the 3 devices.
More info on the project can be found here. The project page will have more information on these, and will be updated when these become available.
If you have been following my blog, you know that I’ve been building a single board supergun device which I named the Minigun. Project page can be found here.
While I’ve been developing this product, I realized that there may be a need for a simplified device, or rather a set of smaller, distinct components that can be easily integrated together to create a supergun like device that is customized to the user’s need.
This became very apparent when I began to build an arcade / JAMMA test rig for my new lab. A test rig may not require fancy features like autofire or button mapping, but may require the ability to output video in several formats, or more than one way to add controls to a game.
The result of this is a set of boards that can be easily connected via inexpensive dupont cables, that create the required functionality. The current set of boards include:
Pick and chose the functionality you need and connect the boards together to create a custom test rig or supergun device.
These boards will eventually be sold either as already assembled or low cost DIY kits. More information on this project will be available soon.
As I’ve been building a test rig in my new lab, I recognized the need for JAMMA fingerboards and generic JAMMA adapter boards.
Normally I’m against this type of stuff. I used to build adapters the old fashioned way with fingerboards, an edge connector and some wire, and I hated every minute of it. Not only is it time consuming, but the results end up looking ugly and have a tendency to break over time.
So why do this when I already have an awesome set of universal JAMMA adapters? It turns out that building a JAMMA extension harness is impossible without a decent fingerboard. For quick testing and prototyping, it helps to have a bunch of low cost boards available that can be abused and recycled time after time.
I’m going to make these available as a low cost DIY option for when it’s not practical to use a more expensive matrix style JAMMA adapter.
More to come on these soon. I’m a bit backlogged at the moment and don’t have the cycles to handle any more new orders.
I have received a new set of JAMMA adapters that I’ve been designing over the last few weeks. This set includes new adapters and updates to old designs.
New adapters include:
Changes to existing adapters include:
These adapters will be listed on Ebay after they are thoroughly tested.
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.