Xybots is one of my favorite arcade games. Played it in a skating rink as a kid.
My only platinum trophy is from Midway Arcade Origins on PS3. The xybots trophy on there is pretty easy. Smash TV, not so much. You have to beat the first stage on a single credit.
My favorite defender game is Defender 2000 on the jag. Strikeforce looks dope though!
In that video, it looks like the joystick is on the right side and you press the buttons with your left hand? That is kind of fascinating to me. I wonder if anyone has build a MAME cabinet with that control scheme in mind.
I don’t remember the exact layout and none of the images I’ve found are zoomed in enough to really see. It is a two button game, though, and the pictures show a button on either side of the stick. Kinda weird! However, one of the buttons is only used occasionally. Xybots also has a rotary joystick a bit like Ikari Warriors.
bubble bobble is great but it is also a heinously cruel kusoge, even in co-op
Update: my Naomi 2 shipped in a single layer of bubble wrap all the way from Indonesia, and of course it’s broken. One of the heatsinks came off and ripped part of the GPU along with it. It’ll take a while but I’m waiting to buy localish now.
I noticed this Planet Harriers cabinet in a Buffy episode. Maybe someday I’ll shell out for a broken board in the hopes someone offers a reball service.
I’ve wanted to own my own Neo Geo arcade cabinet forever, and saw one on classifieds along with a bunch of other mostly-broken miscellaneous games. I offered $900 (CAD) and the seller said “depends, are you taking everything?”
So here we are. You’ve got Invasion: The Abductors, a late 90s Midway lightgun game that currently can not be emulated. It doesn’t look great but I’m a sucker for light gun games.
TWO NEO GEOS. One has no picture and one has no power. I’ll clean them up and combine the best parts into one super-cabinet, but which one?
Hyper Olympics. This one does not boot.
SHUUZ by Atari. Apparently this one is quite rare, assuming it’s not a bootleg. The control panel is some kind of massive homemade thing with a trackball. Does not boot.
MORTAL KOMB–huh? It’s Marvel Super Heroes! this one has been converted. Seller says the game doesn’t boot but the monitor works.
SHUUZ is an amazing title for a video game.
A crime.
Most of the pics I posted above were taken by the seller. He used to own an arcade and kept some of the cabs at his Dad’s house. His Dad passed away, so he’s selling the house and needed someone to take the games away.
Moving cabs is no easy task. Mortal Kombat was by far the worst. I lift weights and my friend is a powerlifter, and even together, we nearly keeled over trying to get the dolly up the ramp.
To socially distance, my friend drove in a second car and we stayed on speakerphone on the highway, him helping check my blindspots for lane switching.
My family just bought a storage unit, so time to use up 60% of it! The cabs could be packed tighter but I need space to get around and work on them.
The Neo Geos, proudly at home in the garage. No, one of them does not come with KOF 99 and Metal Slug 1 like the marquee advertises.
However one of them does come with these games! These are all pretty uncommon and valuable. I already own Slug X, so I’ll sell my spare and try out the others first before they go on eBay. However, that will require getting the cabs up and running first, won’t it?
First up is Big Red. This thing is 193cm tall! Plugging it in does nothing. Let’s see what I’m dealing with.
Yeesh. Don’t mind the rat poop at the back.
I think I know why this doesn’t turn on. After a deep cleaning, there’s a screw that’s too rusted to come loose. I’d have to dremel the whole thing apart. A modern power supply will supply more stable electricity and run more efficiently, anyway.
To noone’s surprise, the one cab does not turn on. However, the other one threw me this:
Took this pic at my TV with the supergun. This may look bad, but it’s a fairly common error. One of the RAM chips is dead. Luckily, I kept a broken MVS 1-slot board for repairs. The RAM chips are tiny 28-pin ICs, so I used a heat gun to remove them on both boards and then soldered on the spare ones onto the new 4-slot board. Here’s the chips that got replaced:
And my fingers for reference. These ICs are about the size of my pinky.
Let there be light! Or, uh, Baseball Stars 2!
We’re getting sound, the marquees don’t light up, the coin counters don’t light up, the control panel has such a dent in the middle that I think a tree branch fell on it, and some of the joystick movements don’t register, but it works! Time to clean the hell out of it. The monitor also looks rather dim and dull, but new capacitors should fix that. In the meantime I have to figure out a way to power Big Red.
There are no power outlets in or around the storage locker, and most of these cabs won’t fit in my car, so the best I can do is test the game boards and power supplies at home.
Tucked inside Mortal Kombat. Good god this thing is filthy.
JESUS ARE THOSE DEAD BABY SPIDERS ALL OVER THE CPS2
Oh thank god they were just fluffy seeds. Seeds all inside this cabinet. Lends further credence to my theory that this and one of the Neo Geos were just parked outside for a while. Lots of rat poop in here too.
Anyway, Marvel Super Heroes! This cleaned up beautifully. The oft-forgoten predecessor to X-Men vs Street Fighter. It’s got a cool powerup system and you can play as Anita from Darkstalkers. CPS2 carts have to be the biggest out there. Let’s compare this to MSH on the Saturn.
And I thought Neo Geo carts were big. I’m really happy to have this, because for a while I’ve owned a Marvel vs Capcom cart, with no CPS2 to play it on. Check out the colours on these.
Just fantastic presentation for something that is meant to sit inside an arcade cabinet and never be seen. And every region has different coloured shells: orange in South America, grey in Asia, yellow for rental boards, blue in English territories.
The seller of the cabs said Marvel Super Heroes didn’t boot, but the monitor and power worked. I haven’t been able to test the monitor, but MSH did work! This surprised me as Capcom infamously included a suicide battery in their CPS2 boards to combat piracy. The battery holds encrypted keys needed to boot the game, and if the battery dies, the board is dead. These days you can “phoenix” the boards through various means, but old batteries threaten to leak acid over important bits. Somehow, this battery was still trucking after 25 years! And so was Marvel vs Capcom, which I couldn’t test until now. You’re supposed to replace these every five years or so as a precaution. Neither batteries had been replaced before as I had to break through some Capcom warranty stickers to get inside.
Anyway, ordered replacement batteries to keep these going. I don’t yet have a way to actually control these games as 6-button Capcom fighters need a kick harness wired up to support the additional inputs.
Invasion: the Abduction also boots. I don’t have lightguns wired up so I can’t play this one either. It looks 90s Midway as hell. Again, I feel like I should play it if only because I have to be one of a couple hundred or so of people who have the means. Remember, there’s no emulation available.
What is cool is this game runs on Midway’s Zeus hardware which other Midway games such as Mortal Kombat 4. The data that holds the game is on a few socketed EEPROMs, so with a little work, this game could be converted to another Zeus title.
In fact, going off this serial code, it looks like this was originally an MK4 before being converted. Which tells you all you need to know about the sales of MK4.
Hyper Olympic. What’s weird is I live in Canada, but this game is titled Track and Field in North America. I assumed it was a bootleg, but it has a shiny “Konami seal of authentication” that I totally forgot to take a picture of but you can kind of make out in the shot.
SHUUZ. I don’t have a trackball. Plugging this game in has allowed me to bring you the best character select screen of all time.
And back to the storage unit they go. I wish I had a way to test the monitors, but these cabs will have to be sold as mostly working.
All of my energy has gone towards the Neo Geos, but Big Red has been throwing serious curveballs with regards to power and picture. You’ll have to bear with me as I wait for parts to arrive. Until then!
I have learned that Atari only produced 125 copies of SHUUZ. A collector on the West coast offered as much for just the game board as I was expecting to get for the entire cabinet. And let’s be honest, nobody else wants SHUUZ. I sold off the cabinet too, by reinstalling the original control panel so any traditional game can be played on it.
This also has the effect of making the cabinet take up much less space. Look at how huge the trackball panel was! I’m a US shoe size 12, for reference.
The panel was hacked on with all kinds of additional screws and planks that made it a nightmare to remove. After half an hour I just started to snap things off, and gave it to the cabinet buyer as a bonus.
An older guy bought the Hyper Olympic cabinet. He’s just gotten into the hobby since COVID started but he owns 18 machines between his two homes, all 80s games like Defender, Pole Position, Pac-Man, etc. He thinks the cabinet was originally a Frogger machine.
In fact, he has a ton of things he’d like to fix on his machines, but he’s so busy that he offered to pay me to work on his cabs. Replacing capacitors, adjusting power voltage, that sort of thing.
There are no outlets to test the supposedly working cabs at the unit, but the guy who bought Hyper Olympic suggested I get power through the lightbulb socket. Behold!
Okay not the best photo, but this light now has a three-ponged outlet in it. I was able to test the Invader cabinet and the monitor and guns look great!
Except sadly I didn’t take a picture, and things took a turn for the worse when I put the light fixture back and the positive and negative wires swung into each other and sparks flew. I was doing this while standing on an antique chair, okay? Anyway, the light fixture no longer works. I must have tripped a breaker. I’ll have to call the storage unit owner and explain.
I removed the Marvel Super Heroes aspects from the Mortal Kombat cabinet, in preparation for selling that separately online. Anyone who buys the machine will want to put a MK board inside.
The marquee is really nice. The Shuuz one was printed on regular paper but this has real weight to it, with the Marvel logo bleeding through on the back.
The real surprse came from removing the MSH paper shroud around the monitor. Mortal Kombat was hiding behind it!
Also while poking around I noticed that the monitor’s power and degauss cables were cut and braided by hand.
And the remote pictureboard is still mounted under the monitor, but unplugged. Instead there’s a different pictureboard connected, dangling from the back. So this is not an original monitor, or at least not an original chassis.
That’s all for now! Next time we will return to the Neo Geos.
This time I worked on the wiring of the Big Red Neo Geo. Previously I had assumed that the monitor was just busted, but after swapping the monitor from Little Red into Big Red, I realized the entire cabinet wouldn’t turn on.
The power supply was trashed, so rather than having to swap that between the Neo Geos I removed the PSU from Mortal Kombat. Neo uses a different wiring setup so I chopped the wires from the broken PSU and secured them to the equivalent screw terminal posts on the MK. It’s filmsy and scary looking, but it gets the job done. I’ve ordered shiny new PSUs for both of the Neo cabs. Here’s the temp power situation.
I could hear sound but the monitor still wouldn’t boot, so I messed around with the wiring of the isolation transformer, which is a big ball of copper that routes electricity to the monitor, allowing techs to work on a arcade monitor while it’s running.
As an aside, I feel safer knowing that high quality monitors are designed to discharge immediately instead of holding electricity for weeks on end like cheap CRTs do.
And that’s a picture! It looks scary, but this is pulled from the working monitor on the other cab, so the V-Hold pot on the picture board (mounted on the bottom right) was set to the other monitor’s value, and had to be adjusted a little.
As an aside, when rewiring the iso transformer setup on Little Red, I plugged in one of the wrong wires (leaving Ground unplugged), and both it and Positive brushed against the metal shell of the PSU. I flicked the switch on and felt 130V shoot through me. Ow. Lesson learned!
Next time, I’m going to clean up both of the 4-slot Neo Geo boards.
Neo Geo boards use a coin cell battery to hold highscores and settings. Over time there is the threat of batteries dying and leaking acid onto the board, eating traces.
And the board with the battery removed. It left some acidic residue. Had I waited a year to do this, both boards might have had serious problems.
I don’t have any batteries with leads to push through solder holes, but I do have some coin-cell holders from replacing the batteries on my Dreamcasts. This means changing batteries in the future can be done with a simple push tab.
I’ve also lifted one leg on the brown resistor next to the battery holder. The MVS uses a regargable battery, meaning you need a suitable replacement or the battery will overcharge and explode. For some reason rechargable coin-cells are pretty expensive, so by lifting this leg it cuts the recharge circuit, and now I can slot in a standard CR2032.
Here’s a CPS2 board. Note the red battery in the back.
To combat everyone bootlegging the hell out of the original Street Fighter 2, Capcom released a new board with tight security measures: the battery holds decrypted keys that are sent to the CPU on boot in order to execute code.
If the battery dies, the unique keys are lost and the game won’t boot. This also means that unlike the Neo Geo where you have to worry about the battery of the console itself, for the CPS2 you have to worry about EVERY SINGLE GAME dying on you. And CPS2 batteries deplete themselves much faster than a coin-cell. They’re also in the bizarre 1/2 AA format. As an aside, it was the comparatively easy ability to bootleg Neo Geo games that made SNK such a powerhouse in Mexico, South America and China.
Capcom offered a battery replacement service until 2007. There are forum posts telling people to replace their batteries reaching back much earlier than that. I have no idea how this battery still works in 2021.
Here’s the new battery. Once the old battery is out, you have about 20 minutes to make the swap before the board dies.
Thankfully, the game still works. It actually gave me garbled kanji and a frozen screen on the first boot, just to screw with me.
This battery is older than I am. I’m in awe.
I want to say there’s been a solution devised for CPS2 boards that involves removing the battery entirely. I think the process is related to the emulation community solving the rom decryption issue, but I don’t know the details off the top of my head. Might be worth looking into unless you’d like to keep everything original.
Yeah, you can swap some chips out or install a new PCB inside that will remove the need for the decryption key. However that has a huge impact on the resale value, and while I like MSH and MvC, I plan to sell my copies. It’s one thing if the battery is already dead, but I would be mad at myself if I screwed up and needed to pay to phoenix a board.
Capcom used an even more complex protection method for the CPS3 (Street Fighter 3, JoJo, Red Earth), and you also have to deal with a battery per game, but the decryption process has yet to be reverse engineered, so a dead board is unrevivable. Which has driven up the value of those games tremendously.
Have I mentioned I’ve got the top uh, banner/marquee whatever you want to call it from an old Atari Warlords cabinet? It’s really beautiful, the paint/applique whatever is scratched off in a few spots but it’s in great shape otherwise
