The Revenge of Arcade Gaming at Home

[ShakeWell]

I can't believe I didn't remake this thread from the old board. Talk about your Superguns or your candy cabs or whatever!

Darksoft's latest is a Namco System 1 Multi! It's not exactly high on my list, but it's cool to see him making more multis!

 

[Octopus Prime]

Is the Pandora Replica arcade as good as this Amazon page insists it is, or is it as junky and janky as the fact that they mispelled "customize" at least twice on the product description would lead me to assume?

 

[ShakeWell]

Broadly speaking, the Pandora series are bootlegs running in MAME, but if you're asking about the quality of the sticks/buttons, I can't speak to that.

 

[M.Nicolai]

My mom wanted to get the kids one of those 1up arcade pac-man tables, and while I appreciated the gesture, it seemed like a very poor use of $500. Can anyone speak to the build quality of these things? I was tempted by the x-men cabinet, but in general would rather get an upright as opposed to a tiny table that the kids will sit on as a perch while watching videos, eating bowls of cereal on, etc.

My grandparents spent half their lives running a nice catering hall on a golf course, where we had every family event, birthday, communion etc. until I was in high school. I have really fond memories of a Ms. Pac-Man cocktail table that was a constant fixture. From the generation that bought appliances that lasted for decades, that was the one game they got, and it was there until they retired (only 8 years or so, but a lifetime to a kid). In all my wild and completely unfulfilled home arcade dreams, I never considered a cocktail table, but compared to an upright it seems so much more... practical?

 

[ShakeWell]

Michael B the Game Genie has done a bunch of reviews of the various Arcade 1Ups. Seems like the build quality has gotten better? My parents have a table-top Pac-Man from them, and the stick is fucking trash, but that's also one of the kinda older ones?

 

[demi]

Hello, I am having a controller dilemma still and could use some input.

Presently I have a MadCatz TE S for Xbox 360 (+PC ofc). I would love to be able to use this on modern consoles and a couple older ones

Target consoles:
360 / Switch / PS3 / PS4
+ Dreamcast, Saturn, possibly PSX as a bonus

That's a lot of ground to cover! It seems like there are options available but I am only aware of various Brook solutions - but not familiar with their performance.

Brook Universal Fighting Board (360, PS3, PS4, Switch, PC) seems good, then I could ostensibly use their Wingman SD Adapter to go from USB to Saturn/Dreamcast? Or, is it possible/preferable to connect their Retro Fighting Board to the Universal one? Does anybody have experience with any of these products and their performance (namely: input lag)? Or non-Brook solutions?

Thanks as always for your help!

 

[Klatrymadon]

I can vouch for both the Brook Universal Fighting Board and the Retro Board, both of which I use regularly! They're brilliant and introduce no extra lag whatsoever. I have these installed in separate sticks, with RJ45-to-PS1/Saturn/Dreamcast/SNES cables for hooking the Retro Board up to consoles, but you can actually dual mod a stick with both boards using the 20-pin multiplier seen in the third pic here (and you should have enough room for both inside your TES, if I'm thinking of the right body type?). Installing them will take an hour or so but is pretty straightforward, especially if you're using a Brook 20-pin harness for the stick and buttons (in which case you're literally just plugging stuff in), but even if you aren't it's just a matter of stripping the ends of some wires and inserting them into the screw-down ports on the PCBs. There can be tricky parts, such as the touch pads and home/share/whatever buttons on newer sticks, which tend to be wired to separate 'daughter' boards, but even these can be figured out pretty quickly, and if you look at video guides for other sticks you'll be able to copy the basic principles. At worst you might have to identify which wire goes to which button with a multimeter. (Let me know if you go this route and run into any probs, obv! Forgive me if this is presumptuous but I'm guessing plenty of people at your FGC locals will have done these mods, too!)

The cost of each individual cable for the Retro Board is reasonable, but the prices can get out of hand if you need a number of them shipped/imported, as I did - in that case I imagine the Wingman SD Adapter is a good alternative. I have their PS4>Switch and PS4>MD/PCE adapters and they're absolutely marvelous - I can't imagine the rest are any different. (Incidentally, that MD/PCE adapter is probably the best solution for playing with a stick on those consoles. No Brook PCB covers the Mega Drive to my knowledge, and the Retro Board doesn't have any autofire button mapping for the PCE.)

Edit: oh, I almost forgot - the Retro Board needs a Neutrik RJ45 port (and comes with one if you order this kit), so making a hole for that in your stick is also something you'd have to consider. I have my Retro Board installed in a TE1 Round 2, and didn't drill any external holes for the port, but just ground out a hole inside the cable bay and sort of left the Neutrik port hanging out in there. Sorry if this became a bit of an info-dump!

Edit edit: by his own admission he does a messy job of it, but Mark_MSX's video on dual modding one of his sticks is probably very helpful in terms of visualising everything. I pretty much followed this guide when I first installed the Retro Board, but without the soldering since I ignored everything but the main stick and buttons (since the older consoles don't need the home button, and I wasn't using the 360 USB cable any more).

 

[demi]

Amazing information as always, thank you so much for all the detail. I am not looking to do any kind of fancy modding, so grinding out a hole in the casing sounds like my kind of solution! I don't think touchpad support is too much of a consideration here, so long as the stick and the main buttons work I'd same I'm in good shape lol! I'll check out the video after work. I'll let you know what I get sorted out. c:

 

[Klatrymadon]

Cool! Yeah I wasn't bothered about the touchpad at all, but some M2 ports use it for the pause menu IIRC! I wonder if that can be remapped, though...

(If you have an unused button on your stick you can insert that into the screw-down port for the touchpad, actually! Just remember to ground it!)

 

[muteKi]

@Klatrymadon -- do you know if there are Dreamcast cables that still support the maple bus (i.e., so a VMU can be plugged in)?

 

[Klatrymadon]

I haven't heard about any, sorry! I've gone back to using a modded Agetec stick for DC stuff, but when using the Retro Board stick I usually had a standard Dreamcast controller in the second port for loading and saving. It worked well for most games, as long as they were both plugged in on startup...

Edit: it looks like the Wingman adapter holds up to 200 blocks of data if that's at all helpful?

 

[John]

One of my Pandemic Goals was to figure out how best to setup an arcade cabinet in our basement. I originally looked at buying an OG cabinet and retrofitting it for a MAME computer, but that's a whole lot of work, both on the hardware and the computer end. Then I looked at a DIY cabinet kit, but they were either very expensive, or had poor reviews. I even considered an Arcade1up 3/4 size cabinet and hacking it to run a RetroPie or computer, but the one I wanted (Midway Legacy) is out of stock.

I finally settled on the AtGames Legends Ultimate set. It comes stock with two joysticks, the standard 6 button fighting layout, but also has a trackball and two spinners. It was $100 off at Wal-mart, where I bought it, but if I wasn't so hasty I could've used my in-laws Sam's Club subscription and gotten it for the same price with the optional Pinball Kit (4 extra buttons on the sides, for doing virtual pinball). They included free shipping, but did have to pay tax in my state.

The other reason I went with this one is it has HDMI and USB ports on the front that you can plug into other devices, like a RetroPie or MiSTer, and the joystick works either via USB or bluetooth right out of the box. I've already got both of those, and would like to use them more often. The built-in licensed games are okay, but they pad out their 300 built-in games with a bunch of Atari 2600 titles. They also let you sideload games with a USB stick, using a frontend called CoinopsX. This will let you load non-3D titles, so mid-90's and below. I've already got the standard Arcade collection plus the Daphne Laserdisc collection loaded up.

The cabinet's being delivered tomorrow, so I'll do a write-up of how all this works, if it works. AtGames also offers a controller-only set for half the price, which recently went on sale for $100. It has the same processor and options, with 8 buttons per player but no spinners. I wanted a full cabinet experience, but you can't beat that price. They're sold out now, but I'll be keeping an eye on those.

 

[ShakeWell]

AtGames has sucked in the past, but Michael B the Game Genie gave this one pretty high marks. I'll be curious what your take is, John.

 

[LBD_Nytetrayn]

I kinda hate this trend of home arcade cabinets.

I mean, I love that they exist, but I hate that it's the only way to play so many of these games on the up and up.

I simply do not have the room for these. My dream house does, but my current one bedroom apartment lacks the same amount of space.

 

[John]

To be fair, there is no way to play many of these games on the “up and up” right now. You have to embrace some level of emulation and the piracy involved to play 90% of arcade games. On the legal end, you've got Hamster's Arcade Archives/Sega Ages for individual titles, and the various individual publisher's compilations, but there's many games where the publisher/developer has folded and it's unclear who the rights owners are.

I've bought a few of the Arcade Archives, most of the Sega Ages, and pretty much all of the arcade compilations, but there's a difference between tapping on a keyboard and standing at an arcade cabinet. Even these emulation cabinets won't rival an actual cabinet with a heavy CRT and purpose built control panels, but this looks close enough for me.

 

[Klatrymadon]

I haven't been able to watch it all, but ShakeWell's video seems to show off a decent CRT filter, too! Definitely looks a lot more playable than the usual repro cabs, and since it's online it'll hopefully be easy to access firmware updates and general support. The layout looks really nice considering the amount of input devices involved, too - the trackball and spinners are in sensible, comfortable places, and not tripping over each other or spaced three miles apart like on so many MAME cab projects.

If you wanted something similar that takes up less space, LBD, I believe the Neo Geo Arcade Stick Pro is pretty open to being loaded up with, uh, other stuff. Not sure about the Capcom Home Arcade, but it'd be great if so, for a relatively hassle-free 2-player setup...

 

[John]

The AtGames Legends Ultimate got delivered today, so I wasted no time ignoring work to put it together. First impressions and pictures below.

Spoiler: Many Pictures Here

The box said it was 94 pounds, but I was able to pretty easily take it down the stairs to the basement by myself. No hand truck needed, just used the packaging handles.

Yeah you do.

Everything Pulls Out pretty easily. I was impressed with the packaging, kept everything rock solid. You have 3 main parts: screen, control deck, and base. You only have to put together the base.

The base uses standard cam locks, simple to put together. It took me about 20 minutes by myself. It's not great quality, the front/back panels are thin 1/4" sheets versus the 3/4" side panels, but they're not meant to hold up to arcade level abuse.

Here's the panel and screen sitting on the base. I haven't screwed it in yet because I need a final location, and it'll be easier to move in separate pieces. One thing I've found is it's definitely top heavy, and rocks forward a bit when pressing the joystick down. I'll be using the included zip-tie brackets to secure this once everything's settled. If this was on tile or concrete it wouldn't be as much of an issue, but even the minimal carpet and padding we have in the basement was rocking a bit, and I wouldn't trust my kids to play nice with it.

The height's about 5 and a half feet, so it's a little uncomfortable for me as a 6 foot tall adult to use. I'm going to do some measuring and get some adjustable bar stools.

The buttons and stick are decent quality. My only reference is a Hori RAP4 Kai PS4 stick, and I'd say they're probably not as good as that, but worked for the little bit I used it. The buttons are concave, which I prefer vs my Hori's convex ones. The stick has an octagonal gate, and has a mold ridge around the horizontal circumference which is a little annoying. The spinners and trackball were all fine in the couple games I tested.

Scanlines feature in Rastan

No scanlines

My build of CoinOpsX took one additional step to work. I set it up like YouTube told me, with an unformatted partition for the OS and a second one for the roms. It wouldn't work until I unplugged and reinserted the USB drive. Works fine after that, a little slow going through all the titles but usable.

It doesn't quite know what to do with 3-screen Darius. This is the Pixel Perfect mode.

And this is Fill Mode. There's no option to Stretch while keeping aspect ratio.

As far as processing power goes, I didn't notice any slowdown with anything I tried. I loaded up Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, and after changing some dipswitch settings to fix a volume bug it worked great. I need to figure out changing the button assignments though, they were all wrong.

So far I'm impressed with it! Going to test running my MiSTer and RPI4 another day. If anyone has any questions on it, let me know!

 

[LBD_Nytetrayn]

To be fair, there is no way to play many of these games on the “up and up” right now. You have to embrace some level of emulation and the piracy involved to play 90% of arcade games. On the legal end, you've got Hamster's Arcade Archives/Sega Ages for individual titles, and the various individual publisher's compilations, but there's many games where the publisher/developer has folded and it's unclear who the rights owners are.

I've bought a few of the Arcade Archives, most of the Sega Ages, and pretty much all of the arcade compilations, but there's a difference between tapping on a keyboard and standing at an arcade cabinet. Even these emulation cabinets won't rival an actual cabinet with a heavy CRT and purpose built control panels, but this looks close enough for me.

In some cases, sure, that might make sense somehow, but I'm thinking stuff like SEGA's arcade Golden Axe sequel that's never had a home port, yet winds up here, or Konami's TMNT games, or Capcom's Marvel stuff. Active companies that have apparently struck some sort of deal already.

 

[John]

More notes on the AtGames cab:

The rewind function in CoinopsX is nice, but buggy. I was messing around in Gradius, and rewinded a few times before getting to the first boss. I tried to get back from another death, but the game froze up. The music kept going, but the screen locked.

I found some games that were loaded in the build that were too much for the hardware or software. Super Street Fighter II didn't work, but OG SFII did. None of the SFIII ones loaded. I don't know what version of MAME is under the hood.

The licensed version of Bubble Bobble on the main OS requires you to hit the Menu button and select "Insert Coin", while the CoinopsX version combines the "Insert Coin" functionality with the P1/P2 buttons. The former's a bit annoying, but still works.

I plugged in my MiSTer, and it worked, after setting the cabinet to USB OTG mode and plugging in a USB A to A cable. Initial config, I was only able to get the left stick/buttons working, but pretty sure it's a user config error. Arkanoid worked with the spinner right off the bat without doing additional configuration, but I need to figure out the sensitivity if I wanted to get beyond the first screen. SFII Turbo ran great, but had inputs in the wrong place.

Most of the quirks I'm seeing are button config related. Anything that's not configured from the manufacturer may need some tweaking with controls. It's to be expected, I had the same issues with RetroPie.

The only other thing I've noticed are the buttons do have an audible spring "twang" noise when you press them, probably because they're Good, but not Great quality. It hasn't bothered me yet, and I haven't had mispresses in games, just some lag in UI's when selecting stuff.

So far, I'm happy. I could leave it be and just play The Simpsons and TMNT in 2-player, but it's a fun project just to tinker with too. Later on my list is to find 4-player Simpsons/TMNT versions and add a couple USB or Bluetooth controllers, get the whole family in on it.

 

[ShakeWell]

In some cases, sure, that might make sense somehow, but I'm thinking stuff like SEGA's arcade Golden Axe sequel that's never had a home port, yet winds up here, or Konami's TMNT games, or Capcom's Marvel stuff. Active companies that have apparently struck some sort of deal already.

I get the sense that the licensing fees associated with stuff like that might make smaller releases prohibitively expensive and/or limited (Simpsons, TMNT, TMNT Re-Shelled, Marvel vs. Capcom Origins were all only up for like a year or two before being unceremoniously delisted). You're kinda in for a penny, in for a pound on a $500 arcade machine, maybe it would only be $450 without the license, but so what? I feel like when Hamster is dropping $8 arcade games every week, charging $15 or $20 for a licensed arcade game is possibly a harder sell? Or at least, that's what the number crunchers at Konami, et al, have determined?

As for Revenge of Death=Adder, I think after it getting TWO releases (Astro City Mini and Arcade 1Up), points to the very real possibility of something a bit more affordable in the near-ish future (it's not like Sega is shy about re-releasing stuff, no matter how redundant it might be).

 

[LBD_Nytetrayn]

As for Revenge of Death=Adder, I think after it getting TWO releases (Astro City Mini and Arcade 1Up), points to the very real possibility of something a bit more affordable in the near-ish future (it's not like Sega is shy about re-releasing stuff, no matter how redundant it might be).

This was the more upsetting to me, truth be told, and I hope you're right.

 

[ShakeWell]

I missed this when it happened, but apparently Axunworks introduced some new arcade-at-home products. The big one is an affordable supergun with the appropriate power supply built-in. I cannot stress how big of a deal this is. Some people use laptop power supplies (do not do this). For me, getting the correct arcade power supply and wiring it myself (which required taking an extra PS3 power cable, stripping the insulation, then stripping the individual wires and connecting them to the terminals, as well as configuring the power supply itself properly) was the biggest pain in the ass of setting up a supergun.

Also, they're making a USB-to-DB15 converter, which Undamned used to and doesn't seem to anymore, so if you want to use any modern controllers on a supergun (or Neo-Geo), here's a way to do that. Also? A spinner/button combo that will fight in standard fightstick button slots. Not super useful, I guess, but if you're dying for a legit Forgotten Worlds experience (or, I guess, even if you just want a spinner for other games that use it).

 

[Sarge]

I saw the news for this the other day, and since I haven't done the supergun thing yet, I very well may go this route. Looks like an excellent way to get in without too much fuss. Looking forward to the review on it, but if it looks excellent, I may be scouring eBay for a couple of arcade boards...

 

[ShakeWell]

If you don't have an account on the Arcade Projects forums, I really recommend it. People sell boards at much more reasonable prices than eBay.

 

[Sarge]

I was going to ask about that - I've not bought any boards, and I'd certainly like to get something at a price approaching reasonable.