Jolt Country

Oh, it will rain blood. It will rain blood.

As some of you may be aware, the Milker and I did a viral video about the Polybius urban legend. We did that in, hoooooooooah, say June of last year. I actually got the Polybius cabinet at the end of April, during the Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown.

It was a magical time. Jon Exidy, who is an amazing collector with probably a hundred games in his basement, sold it to me before the Showdown - it was originally a JAMMA game called "Egg Venture." I don't know anything about Egg Venture - however! The control panel for Egg Venture says, in big, dramatic letters, that:

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE ADVENTUROUS WORLD OF EGG!

But what is JAMMA, you may be asking?

Okay, you know how each arcade game is essentially a custom-built computer designed to run a single game? For instance, you can't switch out parts between Asteroids and Donkey Kong, and either of those and Dance Dance Revolution. In the beginning, the arcade games really were unique.

Well, one day, someone realized that it would be pretty convienent to have a standard. So you can take out a printed circuit board for one game, drop in a new PCB, and more-or-less be assured that the process would work. This standard is called JAMMA. And there were hundreds, if no thousands, of games that were created on the JAMMA standard.

Let's say you have a Mr. Do! cabinet, and people at the pizza parlor got sick of Mr. Do!. "You could never get sick of that much Do!" I hear you saying. And you're right! I couldn't! But there is a serious discrepancy here, because it's been about twenty years since the last Mr. Do! game, and they didn't exactly stop making video games in that time. Since Mr. Do! was a JAMMA game, you can swap it for a different JAMMA game, so long as you have the new PCB!

By the 90s, most arcade games were of the JAMMA standard.

Anyway!

While digging around the inside of my cab, I noticed that the goddamn thing has a JAMMA connector in it! And it appears to be working just fine! Couple that with the 48-in-1 board! The 48-in-1 is a circuit board that plays 48 different games. Some I already have, some I know are horrible, some I don't know about, and some I desperately want. Let's organize them as such:

Games I want in the 48-in-1
Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Galaga, Frogger, Galaxian, Dig Dug, Galaga3, Ladybug, Millipede, BurgerTime, Jr. Pac-Man, Mappy, 1942, Centipede, Phoenix, Time Pilot, Super Cobra, Super Breakout, New Rally X, Arkanoid, Qix, Juno First, Xevious, Mr. Do's Castle, Scramble, Bomb Jack, 1943, Zaxxon

Games I already have
Pac-Man*, Ms. Pac-Man*, Super Pac-Man*, Space Invaders*, Pengo*, Gyruss, Mr. Do!, Pac-Man Plus*

* = thanks to the 96-in-1 kit

Games that are fucking pants
Donkey Kong 3, Dig Dug 2,

Games I'd never heard of
Crush, Tank Battalion, Hustler, Space Panic, Moon Cresta, Pinball Action, Shao-Lin's Road, King & Balloon, Van-Van Car, Amidar

So that's pretty good. There are several games in the 48-in-1 that I am LEGITMATELY crazy about, mainly Donkey Kong, Qix and BurgerTime, to keep it to three. Centipede will be weird with a joystick, but that's OK. The best part is, people from the KLOV forum are doing a group purchase of the 48-in-1, and getting a board is seriously cheap because of it!

So, further bulletins when it comes in!

What happened to that Mame cabinet you were working on? Isn't that the same type of thing you are referring to here?

THE
MR. DO WOULD BE
VERY PUT OUT
AARDVARK

Yeah, it's one and the same.

Well now,I'm at a loss. I had an idea that a mame cabinet was basically a PC in a large wooden box with garish side art and industrial strength joysticks. I dint realize it was actually swapping out rom boards or something.


THE
HUH,S'PRISED I DIDN'T KNOW THAT
AARDVARK

AArdvark wrote:Well now,I'm at a loss. I had an idea that a mame cabinet was basically a PC in a large wooden box with garish side art and industrial strength joysticks. I dint realize it was actually swapping out rom boards or something.

Sorry, let me clarify --

Haha, yeah, a MAME cabinet can definitely be that. What a lot of people do is take an old arcade game (preferably one nobody cares about, like Egg Venture), strip it of its circuit board and power supply, and then throw a computer in there instead. I was originally going to do that with Egg Venture/Polybius.

However, the whole time, EggVenture/Poly was ready for the JAMMA system - I just didn't bother to recognize that until a few weeks ago.

So, since it can handle a drop-in JAMMA PCB replacement, I am just going to do that with the 48-in-1. The downside is that I can't control what games are going in it, and I won't be able to use the spinner or roller I had ready to go (but that's fine, I'll find a use for them). But that's fine - I was probably going to have to buy a new motherboard and processor to get MAME going (and RAM, and a fan and so forth) whereas the 48-in-1 is like the price of one expensive computer game.

Does that make sense? I'm so sloppy for this arcade shit that sometimes I don't explain myself very well.

Some more good news! I wasn't sure if the cabinet had speakers in it - as it turns out, it does. They are there, seemingly completely functional, and just behind the marquee.

Here is a question, though. The 48-in-1 has a 1/8th inch speaker port - so a set of headphones would be perfect for plugging into it. Obviously, I want to use the cabinet's speakers and not a pair of headphones, and there are two wires coming out of the headphones and dropping down towards the power brick.

Can I take a pair of headphones, earbuds or whatever, cut into them, and splice them into the wires for the speakers? That way, I have a 1/8th inch plug from the earbuds that can go into the 48-in-1, and then wire that leads to the speakers. How do you know which wire is ground, though? I'm not going to fuck anything up by having the circuit incorrect, am I? I figure I have a 50/50 shot of getting it right.

It really won't matter which is which. If it's a stereo configuration then it might make a difference but it'll still work when hooked up.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Can I take a pair of headphones, earbuds or whatever, cut into them, and splice them into the wires for the speakers? That way, I have a 1/8th inch plug from the earbuds that can go into the 48-in-1, and then wire that leads to the speakers. How do you know which wire is ground, though? I'm not going to fuck anything up by having the circuit incorrect, am I? I figure I have a 50/50 shot of getting it right.

The wires on headphones are really flimsy I think. I think Radio Shack should still carry the kinds of adapters you would need to do a more sturdy job. I know they have headphone plugs that you can hook two wires into. They would also have a headphone plug splitter in case you still wanted to use the headphones as well.

Meant to say "thanks" to both of you. I did end up taping the wires back together, and I did get sound out of the top of the cab, which was solid.

Also, in getting the 48-in-1 working, I thought that I'd need an AT power supply. Which, at the time, I thought was in my Ubuntu machine. So I yanked it, and later found out that it was an ATE power supply, not an AT. Different connectors, but still no on/off switch on the back.

So now my Ubuntu sits here, gutted, for the greater good. But isn't that what Ubuntu is about? Wouldn't it be happy to give its life force, it's soul blood, to a cause even greater than Linux itself?

I think so. I hope so.

I hope, anyway.

At long last, the 48-in-1 in the Polybius cab is more or less finished. I put a real arcade monitor in it tonight, instead of the 17" VGA shitbox that was otherwise its display.

Of course, I had thought that the monitor in there was a 19". The Happ Vision Pro I picked up for it *definitely* was 19", and I also learned that Egg Venture (the games that the cab was originally made for) was a horizontal game.

Fuck, thank Christ Egg Venture used a 25" monitor. I had room to put the vertical 19" in there, but barely. I also had to make a platform for it - it had two pieces of metal protruding from it at a right angle that were helpful if you were to mount it to a shelf. Not so helpful if you just want it straight up sitting on something. I took some wood and "filled in" the right angle. I'm sure this makes no sense in text. Ah, well.

The 48-in-1 games look gorgeous on the new monitor. I think I really just need to lock the control panel down and I am set. This is the part in the message where I lament not having photos to upload. Seriously, soon!

Tonight the monitor acted up. FUCKING HAPP. The sync was all fucked up. I thought my wiring back there was good. I used a molex connector! "I used a molex connector." The last cry of the damned before slaughter.

Anyway, when I moved the power cord to look at it, it cleared itself up. What the fuck.

My buddy Aaron was over last weekend and I noticed that I failed to connect the "Player Two Coin/Start" button on this thing. I decided to hook that up tonight.

The original JAMMA wiring to this thing had all the wires split into player one controls and player two controls. After not being able to figure out how to wire Player Two Start it occurred to me that it was in the Player Two bundle, numbnuts.

(In the above paragraph, I played the part of numbnuts.)

Sure enough, when I wired the gray Player Two Start to my control panel, it worked fine.

The only other concern was that the 48-in-1 board would demand a set of separate, actual controls for player two. I only put together one joystick on my control panel (fuck, I should just take some pics) so this wasn't going to work if it truly needed the player two wiring connected. (I guess I could have just sent the player two wires to player one's microswitches, but that would have gotten ugly.)

Well, long, fucking boring story short, it doesn't need them. On the 48-in-1 board it will default to player one's controls for both players in a two-player game.

I will now take photos. There will be corn served.

Okay, here is the first pic. I noticed that the flash shows every flaw. While this is definitely not something I could sell, it's a reasonable first attempt, I think. You can see that I need to finish the sides of the control panel, and I also need to paint the inside of the cabinet (where the CP touches) black instead of blue.




Here is the control panel. It looks like shit under a flash! The paint is all uneven and there is a square of cyan spray paint near the right-most button. Shit!

I'm not a hundred per cent happy with it, anyway. I would have liked to use a higher-quality joystick, for instance. And I think I will go with a leaf stick next time, instead of one with microswitches.

This picture also reveals my bezel issues! Since the cab originally held a 25" horizontal and is now holding a 19" vertical, there is too much empty space on the sides. You honestly don't notice it when playing, but yeah, the flash sees all, tells some.




Here is the back of the cabinet. The power brick towards the bottom left only really powers the marquee. There is an ATX power supply modded to always be on when power is coming to it - this drives the actual 48-in-1 board, which you can just barely see on the right-hand side.

I couldn't easily mount the monitor, so I had to cut some wood to support it, which you can see it rest on. The thing with knobs towards the top-left is a little panel that lets you adjust brightness, size and so forth. 25 years ago these controls were on the back of the monitor, thus requiring either a second person, eyes-on-stalks or a mirror to adjust the picture. Now they give you a little control thingie that reaches around.




Here is a shot of the side that the flash ruined. Oh, well.




So yeah, there are some small things I am going to do to it, and I definitely want to replace the joystick, but it works great and is a lot of fun when people come over. I took off the games that I already had in their "real" form, with the exception of Arkanoid, because it's right next to a real Arkanoid, and playing Shitty Arkanoid with a joystick while someone plays the real thing with the spinner always makes me appreciate the spinner again.

As far as expenses:

Cabinet: $20
Monitor: $135
48-in-1 board: $90 (Though this was a gift from my folks for my birthday)
Buttons, Joystick, Wire, Spade connectors: Believe I got all this and some other stuff for less than $30 shipped
Marquee: Had this printed for $55
Marquee blacklight lamp: $6
ATX Power Supply: I actually had several of these around. Erp.

So, about $336. That's significantly less than what I have in Arkanoid and Mr. Do!, so all told, I'm happy with how it turned out.

At any time will the sentence 'Property of U.S. government' be spray stenciled near the bottom of the cabinet? That would (I think) be a nice touch. Maybe a some kind of camera lens mounted so as to point at the player to increase the paranoia factor. Also, is there a proper angle for the monitor to be tilted? It looks kinda too vertical. Don't mind me though, I don't even own a video game, much less a half dozen.


THE
MAYBE IF I
CLEARED OUT
THE DINING ROOM
AARDVARK

Oh fuck, the US Government thing is brilliant. I gotta do that.

Yeah, the monitor is definitely not ideally placed, being completely upright. I usually sit in a chair when I am in front of that game.