There is a place here in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle called Full Tilt Ice Cream. It’s amazing.
They have ice cream, pinball, arcade machines, and beer.
Recently a friend of mine became the operator of all the machines at this location. This is the same guy who used to run the Pink Gorilla arcade in the University District and the same guy I bought my Astro City cabinet from. He’s a great dude and keeps all his machines in excellent shape.
With a name like Full Tilt, obviously the main attraction is the pinball machines, but there are also some candy cabinets there with shmups, fighting games, and music games.
Currently my Ibara Kuro PCB is on location there in a New Astro City cabinet. It’s crunch time at work so I don’t have a lot of time to play games. I hate having my PCBs sitting around not getting played, so it’s good to get other people enjoying them. We just hooked up the game last night, and already another friend from the shmups scene here in Seattle has beaten my best score and taken the #1 position on the high score board. It’ll be fun to swap strategies, down cold ones and compete for the top spot!
Pretty much every Tuesday a group of us meet there to hang out and play games. If you’re in the Seattle area I would highly recommend heading over to Ballard and checking out Full Tilt!
I recently got a new iPad and wanted to test the video recording quality, so here’s a Battle Garegga run. This is actually my best score ever, which isn’t that great. Enjoy it in 1080p!
It’s been a while since I posted since I’ve been pretty busy with work and haven’t been able to play a lot of games. However, that hasn’t stopped me from buying games!
I got 3 new PCBs:
Ibara Kuro: Black Label
Strider
Street Fighter II: Champion Edition
Ibara Kuro is a remix of the original Ibara, which I also got recently and enjoy, but I enjoy Kuro a lot more. I sampled this in MAME when the Cave SH3 games were briefly emulated and quickly determined that I needed to have it. This PCB is pretty rare, making it the rarest PCB I own. In terms of gameplay changes, Ibara Kuro does with rank control what Ketsui does with chaining: makes it short and sweet. Ibara (as with most games by Shinobu Yagawa) is all about controlling rank over the course of a game, whereas Ibara Kuro is about quickly raising rank then caching in and building it up again. It makes for a pretty fun scoring system while staying tough.
Strider was one of my all time favorite arcade games growing up, but I don’t want to say that this purchase was nostalgic because the game holds up so well. Everything about it is top shelf: music, graphics, level design, and fun factor. The Genesis port is pretty decent, but of course nothing beats the real thing. The Amiga port, which is what I had as a kid, is HORRIBLE and was a crushing disappointment. I mean, look at this scene from the Amiga game, then look at that same scene on the arcade game and you’ll see what I mean.
Unfortunately, the Strider board that I bought has some graphical corruption issues. It is still fully playable, however there are vertical lines running through some of the sprites.
In an effort to fix the issue, I bought another game that runs on the same Capcom CPS1 hardware that you should all know and love: Street Fighter II: Champion Edition. I don’t need to say much about this game because it is amazing and we all know that it is great.
A CPS1 game has 3 parts: An “A” board which contains the CPU (68000) and other hardware; a “B” board that contains the ROMs for the specific game; and a “C” board that contains a protection chip. The reason I bought SF II CE is because the “A” and “C” boards are compatible with Strider. After getting it and swapping the “A” and “C” boards, Strider still has graphical issues, which means that it is either a bad graphics mask ROM, or the “B” board itself is bad. From swapping some of the graphics ROMs around, it looks like in my case the “B” board is bad and has bad connections. Unfortunately, the “B” boards from SF II CE and Strider are not compatible, so I might need to pick up yet another great Capcom CPS1 game like Final Fight or Ghouls ‘n Ghosts to fix the issue.
Still, the arcade Strider with vertical lines running through the screen is still FAR better than the crappy Amiga port!
Each CPS-2 “B” board contains a battery that is used to keep a volatile memory powered that stores decryption keys required to run the game. Since Capcom CPS-1 games were heavily bootlegged (which is why there were all kinds of wacky Street Fighter II variants), Capcom took some pretty drastic measures to prevent bootlegs of CPS-2 games.
Basically, if the battery dies, the decryption keys are lost and the game can no longer be played, hence the term “suicide battery” since the game basically kills itself. I have two CPS-2 “B” boards: Mars Matrix and Giga Wing. I got them both from Japan and have no idea when the battery was changed, so I figured I should change them as soon as I could.
I bought some replacement batteries, opened up my boards and took a deep breath. It was a little stressful because if you do something wrong, you can ruin your games. Once the existing battery is desoldered, the clock is ticking and you need to get the new battery wired up ASAP. Capacitors on the board will hold a charge for a few minutes while you change the battery, but if they run out of juice, those decryption keys will be lost and the game will be ruined.
Thankfully, the task itself is really easy. I heated up both my soldering iron and my desoldering iron. Use the desoldering iron to desolder and remove the old battery. Stick the new battery’s wires through the holes on the PCB, then solder it into place. Screw everything back together, then power up the game and take a deep breath. Thankfully, both of my games still work. Guidance says to change the batteries every 5 years, so I won’t have to worry about it again until 2017.
If I had screwed something up, thankfully the encryption for the CPS-2 was broken in 2001. This has led to interesting developments, including being able to play CPS-2 games in MAME, as well as resurrect dead boards. These boards are said to have been “phoenixed” since they have been revived from death, however some view phoenixes games as bootlegs since the EEPROMs have been swapped for non-official versions. I’m glad that I was able to not ruin my boards, but if I had I would’ve gladly used the phoenix edition EEPROMs to revive them. At the end of the day, I just want to be able to play the games…
Posted: March 4th, 2012 | Filed under:games | Tags:arcade, capcom | Comments Off
Introduced in 1990, the Neo Geo was very unique in that it was both an arcade platform and a home console. Since the home console hardware was exactly the same as the arcade hardware, it was finally possible to truly have arcade games at home. However the home console was ridiculously expensive at $649 and individual games were around $200, about the same as the full Genesis or SNES consoles from the time.
I wanted one so bad when I was a kid. I concocted all sorts of schemes that involved me combining Christmas and birthday gifts across multiple years and doing tons of chores in hopes of getting one.
Thankfully, my parents were sane and didn’t listen to my wishes. If they had, I would probably still have to mow their lawn (which now would involve air travel) and still wouldn’t be able to receive any gifts from them. Plus, if they got me one I would have been one of those spoiled brats with a Neo Geo. I was already that spoiled brat with an Amiga, so if I got a Neo Geo too that would have just been absurd.
My desires were soon replaced with something else, and the world moved on. But… Neo Geo is still cool, and I’ve always kind of wanted one. Since the home console Neo Geo (or AES) was so expensive and not a huge success, it is still fairly rare and expensive. However, the arcade hardware (or MVS) was a huge success and is really common. Since these days I like arcade hardware, I bought a Neo Geo MVS motherboard and some games. It’s awesome!
