Astro Restoration

Last month I bought this fixer-upper from Kenchan on the shmups forum. I remember the same cabinet being offered on the sega-naomi forum awhile ago, due to the distict "Lyfer" graffiti scratched into the monitor. :(

Besides the ruined tube, the monitor chassis was non-functioning, the control panel wiring was a mess, and there was a ton of caked on dirt inside the cab.

Since I already had a spare tube, chassis, and panel sitting in my garage, the actual restoration time was just two weekends. I completely gutted it, hosed down the fiberglass frame, then put it back together with the replacement parts. I ran into one small problem with the replacement chassis, which came from an Egret II, but was able to make it compatible with the Astro monitor harness via a slight modification.

I documented the project via twitter using my yfrog picture stream. Here are a few select before and after shots:





And here is the finished cab.

Many thanks to Kenchan for driving this down from Reno!

Ketsui Highscore

I've never given Ketsui a lot of attention since my last high score, only playing it on random occasions. In fact I'd almost call it casual play, since I have no strategy, other than trying to get as many 5 chips as possible. I think I decided to bomb more often in this run, and it paid off, getting me almost halfway into stage 5.

DJK - 95,357,314 - Stage 5 - Tiger Schwert

I'd really like to clear this before the port comes out for xbox360...but seems unlikely without some serious time and attention.

Ketsui crashes with no battery. Solved!

After having discovered what happens to Varta batteries if left unchecked, I decided it was best to remove them from all of my PGM Cave boards (Espgaluda, DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou, Ketsui). Since I always use default settings and always play with coins, I figured there was no need to buy new batteries, only to have them fail sometime in the future, so I just left them off the PCB.

I continued playing without batteries for a few weeks, with no problem, and then yesterday after I powered up Ketsui, I got this crash. This looks very similar to the known "Freeplay" bug....only difference is with no battery my game was set to use coins, yet it still crashed!

In fact, once in this state, the game crashes every time I power it on, in exactly the same place, during the start of the "Demonstration" sequence. Now my thinking was: buy a new varta battery, and/or replace the ROM with the "Fixed" version. Given the fixed ROM has a *very annoying* lock-on laser sound change - that was a not an option. And I really didn't want to have to keep changing the battery like CPS2 games. So I investigated the crash further, and found the reason, and how to prevent it.

How it happened:

Ketsui will run fine without a battery as long as you DO NOT turn off the PCB during the middle of an active game. If you turn off the PCB while its still playing an active credit, this can potentially leave NVRAM in a corrupted state. And with no battery, the board seems to fall victum to this corrupted state, and crashes when it tries to execute the stored demonstration sequence.

How to fix if your PCB is stuck in this crash state?:

1. Insert a credit before the first demonstration cycle, and play normally. Then just remember to not power down the PCB during the middle of an active game.

- or -

2. Before powering on Ketsui, flip that red devil switch shown in the first picture. Actually you will need to hold the switch for a few seconds, then release, then power up the board. This grounds the NVRAM chip, clearing it of any data. Then power on the PCB and everything will work fine. Again, make sure you do not power off until after your credit ends normally.

[update]
So it seems option 2 above, using the red switch to reset NVRAM (and fix the demo crashing bug), didn't seem to work 100% of the time. So option 1 is really the only way to ensure your Ketsui doesn't crash without a battery: just insert a coin (or press the credit button) after booting up the PCB and all will be fine.
[/update]

And there you have it. Also note that ESPGaluda and DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou have no problem powering off during an active credit....so those games run perfectly fine without a battery.

A Merry Christmas!

Santa was good to me this Christmas, got some much wanted Technosoft and NMK games, and even a great puzzler for the wife!

Also, my wife got me a 60G harddrive for my XB360, so I can finally log onto the Xbox Live Marketplace to download Mushihemesama Futari Black Label (and more). For those that care, my gamertag is "ArcadeFever".

Cyvern The Dragon Weapons

Cyvern is an exceptional Kaneko game on the Super Nova motherboard system. I bought this awhile ago, and don't see it come up for sale often anymore. I started playing this today after watching NRKCFK's 27M superplay (and 41M Cyvern Plus superplay). As seen in the videos, using a 30hz rapid fire on the C button can recharge your banish shot a lot faster!

*Updated* with my newly aquired artwork, and score from STGT'10 Cyvern competition.

DJK - 5,193,250 1-4

Galmedes

Galmedes is one of those hidden gems you don't hear much about, most likely because it was designed to eat credits. The level of difficulty is quite steep from the very start, adding another credit to continue does not reset your score, and there is no way to disable continues. Outside of these deficiencies, I'm finding the game quite addictive, and surprisingly similar to Dangun Feveron with respect to ship speed, and charge shot types. Did I mention this was produced 6 years before Dangun?

I found it strange that Galmedes was produced on Taito hardware, yet no mention or credits of Taito in the game.

I had play tested this in Mame, and never made it past the first stage, so I was quite pleased with this accomplishment, making it well into stage 3, using a rapid fire board.

DJK - 572,200 - Stage 3

[update]I had a heck of time trying to figure out why the game had no sound on my Astro City 2 or New Astro City cabs, but worked fine in the Windy or original Astro City cabs. Turns out Galmedes, being an old Taito board, requires -5V for the sound to function.[/update]

Japanese STG blogs

While searching for information on NMK produced shooters, I stumbled upon another STG collector in Japan who has similar stories (and struggles) when it comes to obtaining and playing these rare games. Well, at least these are rare in the United States, but probably not so rare in Japan.

Although I cannot read kanji or katakana, I found using Google Translate to read Japanese blogs can give me the high level subject matter and conversation. Of course this is not optimal, and I'm probably missing much humor and intricacies when it comes to game strategies. I wish I had time to learn Japanese, but between my work and hobbies, there is just not enough time for such an undertaking!

Anyway, the blog I found interesting is owned by Ikeda_San, and is titled "Watcher ][" at http://rehctaw.blog.shinobi.jp/ . He is a collector and STG player who has been building an impressive collection of PCB and arcade hardware over the last year. I was particularly impressed with his classic 1980's era black Taito sitdown cabinet, which leads me to believe this style cabinet may have been the motivation for Dillinger's computer desk in the 1982 movie Tron! :)

==?==> ^_^

Commonly referred to as "cocktail" cabinets, these sit down machines did not gain much popularity in the US, preferring to stand than sit while playing arcade games. Personally, I prefer the newer "Candy"cabinets to the cocktail style, but do own a few classic upright games from the early 1980s.

I tried to leave a comment on Ikeda_San's blog, but could not navigate the input form correctly (perhaps password protected) so I decided to send him an email instead. He graciously responded in English, which I'm sure was not easy for him, so I appreciated the response! おかげでIkeda_San

One last item worth mentioning, if you read back through Ikeda_San's blog far enough, you will see he has also encountered the dreaded VARTA battery leakage.

Weekend Project - XB360 to Jamma

After finally receiving Mushihimesama Futari for XB360 in the mail last week (14 days shipping!), I took some time this weekend to get my XB360 hooked up proper to my Exceleena cab.

Used xbox controllers were $20 each from gamestop (what a ripoff!), $10 project box from Fry's, a fingerboard I had laying around, and two 12 position barrier strips from Radio Shack.

Connected the two barrier strips together with quick-zip ties, disassembled the joysticks and soldered wires to the digital controls. Next, drilled and trimmed the fingerboard, and soldered wires onto it. Then ran both sets of wires to the 12 position barrier strip, which is just enough for 1 joystick, 6 buttons, 1 start, and 1 ground.

Why did I use a barrier strip? This allowed me to rewire the button configuration if I needed, and ended up having to do this after I finished the project. I initially wired the buttons to match the XB360 Street Fighter IV tournament stick, but realized afterwards that arcade cabinets have A,B,C buttons on the top row, not the bottom row. Also standard jamma only supports 3 buttons (some cabs support 4), so I ended up mapping A,B,X,Y buttons to the first 4 in the jamma connector.

Next was to take out the dremmel and trim my project box so I could mount the fingerboard between the two end screws, and have it still close properly. It was a tight fit, and just barely got everything squeezed inside this small box.

Final touch was to drill two strain relief holes for the controller plugs right at the seam, and close it up. And here is the final product.

Since I plan to play the XB360 on my Exceleena cab, there was no need for audio or video to the jamma box, all that would be taken care of via the cab's vga connector and stereo amplifier. But to make this really jamma compatible, future enhancements could include my Ultracade UVC converter to downscale 480p to 15khz or 24khz, and a mono amp, although that requires 12v from somewhere. Lastly, I'd probably wire a capcom kickharness to use the lower 3 buttons properly if I wanted to play some fighter games.

Anyway, here we are in hires shmupping goodness!

Update: I have since made one more modification to this converter which makes it a bit safer to operaate!

Espgaluda Arrange 104M

Finally broke 100M in Espgaluda Arrange today, which is a big up from my last score (64M). Takes me about 20 minutes of warmup before I'm comfortable with the 4 button layout.


DJK. - 104,364,082 - 4 - Black (Arrange)

Planet Harriers Highscore

Beat my last highscore by a little over 100K. This time you can see how armed to the teeth I was when I hit the midpoint Star Shop on Stage 4.

Didn't help me much as the second set of enemy after the midpoint are the suiciding turtles, that you need to shoot down + extreme dodge all within 1 second of spotting them on the screen or its an instant hit taking 1 full heart. I think I must have gotten down to the last turtle that nailed me here giving me this 571K score.

DJK - 571,939 - Stage 4 (Lavaa)

Muchi Muchi Pork - 59M

I died foolishly with one bomb in stock that could have easily gotten me past the 60M extend.


DJK - 59,809,530 - Stage 4 - Momo

Muchi Muchi Pork - 43M

I picked up what could very well be Shinobu Yagawa's last arcade game, Muchi Muchi Pork. This game has such humor/charm, its just downright sinful how much fun it is to play. From little parachuting pigs, to litters of piglets that get released when you blow stuff up on the ground (they try to make a break for it, but don't get very far being fat and lazy). The game is very well balanced, and has something for everyone. 1CC is within grasp of average players, 2LC (two loop clear) requires rank management and lots of strategy, high scoring sucicide bombing for the untraditional, and harder mode (manpuku) for the insane Japanese pro's.

After playing it for a few nights this week, I've made a pretty good start.

DJK - 43,723,220 - Stage 4 - Momo

Inside the Taito Type X (Part 1)

The Taito Type X arcade board came out in 2004, and is essentially a custom PC running the Windows XP Embedded operating system. Using commodity PC hardware and software development tools meant significant cost savings in producing games. This however, did not mean crappy and bloated doujin style PC games coming into arcades, as Taito kept strict quality controls over was released on the platform.

I was expecting an older desktop sized computer, but was surprised to find the unit is the same size as a Naomi motherboard (although obviously a bit taller). The motherboard is a custom 865G type, with "Taito Type X Rev A1" silkscreened onto it, and comes with onboard dolby 5.1 optical sound support, although I don't know of any arcade cabinet that would actually use this. The base unit comes with a Celeron 2.5Ghz processor, 256M RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 SE (AGP) and proprietary JVS I/O card. Even though this may seem whimpy by today's consumer PC standards, its surprising how efficent XPE can be without all the extra bloat of unnecessary device drivers and services running. Raiden III and IV for example, play at a rock solid 60fps with increidble graphic detail and sound.





The proprietary JVS I/O card is the key to the entire system, as games will not run without it. It's not a PCI card, but rather a free floating adapter which connects to a COMM port on the motherboard. It also connects to the motherboard's control panel header (for power on/off and lights) as well as the onboard optical sound. The black square at the bottom of the card is actually a plastic panel covering a set of dip switches. On the Type X, the dip switches do nothing, but on the Type X2 they do things like change the game's output resolution.



Games are distributed as an IDE hard drive and USB security dongle, and are conveniently installed via a square opening in the top of the case (each game comes comes with its own top plate). The Type X can play on a standard 15khz jamma cabinet via a JVS->Jamma I/O converter, such as those used for the Naomi platform. The graphics card has two ports, one for 15khz lowres and one for 31khz hires monitors.

Here is the complete shooter collection for the Type X, consisting of: GigaWing Generations, Homura, Shikigami No Shiro III, Raiden III, and Raiden IV.

Live from Japan, its KET!

Woke up to a treat this morning. While on #shmups IRC someone posted a link to KET's Garegga Lab where KET was streaming a live broadcast of himself playing several Psikyo games, and of course Battle Garegga. After many attempts (and trying almost every character) he finally cleared the first loop of Sengoku Ace 2, then played several credits of Dragon Blaze (only making it to stage 5), and finally onto Battle Garegga.




The best part was that he was also streaming his voice live, and responding to peoples questions (posted in chat) while playing. He was also fond of humming parts of garegga's soundtrack while playing. :) Although 95% of it was in Japanese, he did answer a few short questions in english. Then after 2+ hours he excused himself saying it was 5am in Japan and wished everyone an enjoyable weekend.

Watching recorded superplays of pros from Japan can get pretty intimidating. So it was nice to watch KET play live, and make mistakes just like the rest of us would. Its easy to forget that supreplays are typically only one run out of a hundred (if even that).

Mushihimesama (Maniac Mode) - 54M

I know I suck at Mushihimesama, but played a single credit today out of the blue and made it midway through Stage 5.


DJK - 54,903,067 - Stage 5 - W-Power

Windy Love

One of the reasons why I let out a big smile whenever walking into my gameroom.


[Update 03/10/10 - Added an additional Konami Windy 2, with proper blue marquees]

Taito Type X in da house

Finally got my hands on a Taito Type X mobo, and what a beauty this thing is running on my Exceleena at 31khz! I'll gush on the technical details later, but couldn't wait to jump in on some vertical Gigawing Generations!

In Rank We Trust

Getting back into some Raizing goodness takes a bit of getting used to, as noted in my Ibara post last month. Confronting rank is like running into a brick wall at 100 miles an hour. You think you can bash straight through it, only to have your ass handed back to you just as quick. This is what makes Raizing games so much fun to play, as you really need to plan your objectives, be that 1CC with low rank, or scoring with high rank, or in some cases - a very fine line in between. Yagawa is a master at making this all too apparent with his games.

So this weekend I focused some time on Battle Bakraid, the arcade only successor to Battle Garegga, with some interesting differences in rank based scoring. I won't detail the differences in this post, but point out that in Bakraid you can actually ignore rank if you are not gunning for high scores, and focus solely on the 1CC in Normal mode. Combining this with an auto-bombing Training mode, makes the game accessible to beginners.

So where is the rank? Well if you want to play for score, you better get ready for some very unorthodox style of play. Imagine a game were bombing and committing suicide with your ship every 10-15 seconds is required to score high! Quite the opposite of Cave (and any other) style shmup, yet Yagawa's genius shines through. Even in Battle Garegga, where players were first exposed to suicide techniques to lower/tame rank, Bakraid takes this to the extreme with a 64x multiplier leading to amazing scores, amazing amounts of extends (extra ships), and an amazing amount of rank. Some people might think this "breaks" the game, and that such an unorthadox style of play must not have been intentional. The same thing was said years later of Yagawa's Pink Sweets. All I can say is that Yagawa's games truely innovate outside the norm of repetitive Cave style shooters, causing the player to plan/think rather then simply react with twitch reflexes.

And with that, I give you my latest Normal and Advanced course scores. Basically I temped fate by scoring large in the first two stages, and then play it safe from there on out. I've been able to 1CC Normal mode before but with only a 5M to 6M score. With this in-between strategy, I've been able to double my score, and still complete the 1CC. I tried the same technique in Advanced mode, only to learn that once you get 4 ships in stock, the rank gets so pissed, that there is now way in hell you will get past stage 6. I literally had a chain of missiles heading for me that I could not shoot down fast enough, even with forward facing options pointed straight at them.

My scores below are ranked #3 on my PCB, since I didn't bother resetting Rastan78's scores the last time he was over (a real master at this game). The last screenshot is the special Boss only mode, where I made it to the second form of Gollum.

DJK - 12,390,280 - Saber Tiger [C] - ALL - Normal (SE)
DJK - 12,416,350 - Saber Tiger [C] - Stage 6 - Advanced (SE)
DJK - 10,832,250 - Flame Viper [C] - Gollum - Boss