1) Decided Galaxy Force was an upright cabinet that needed to exist. There are pictures of one on a flyer, but it's clearly a mockup with the art contour from an Afterburner machine applied to what looks like a Power Drift one. I cannot find ANY long term arcade collector who can recall even seeing one, so I'm assuming they genuinely never got built.
2) Started thinking about donor cabs, settled on using G-Loc because it's the same game hardware and almost identical controls - took a while to find one too. The machine I got was more or less fully working, but has some niggles including crap sound wiring from the factory, faulty control pots and some burned out wiring as a result.
3) Fixed the wiring and put in new control pots. Throttle is dead, control stick doesn't work properly at all. After talking to the friend I got the PCB from, it turns out while the game hardware and controls are the same, the pinout is different - Sega have several voltage sensing inputs and G-Loc uses different ones. If anyone ever needs to know this, here is the pinout of the small loom between the PCB and filter board, it's the 20 pin one, black AMP at one end, single row JST at the other - change this to change the game controls easily:
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G-Loc and Galaxy Force filter to PCB loom pinout.
JST pin G-Loc AMP Galaxy Force AMP
------- ---------- -----------------
1 B1 A7
2 B2 A8
3 B5 B8
4 B3 A9
5 A1 A4
6 A2 A5
7 A3 A6
8 A8 A2
9 B8 B2
10 A9 A3
11 - -
12 - -
5) While the controls are working, they're lacking the range of movement Galaxy Force needs. The controls are fairly simple - you have 5k potentiometers with +5 and GND, and a wire on the wiper that reads the position by voltage returned. G-Loc was programmed and the hardware built to use alternative inputs that seem to get multiplied on the PCB in some way - Galaxy Force wants to see the full 0v-5v range. The end result of this is sluggish control, and being unable to climb/dive or bank properly. The throttle doesn't quite go as far as it needs to either. There's a solution to this recurring problem, and that solution is a pot amp board. Happ Controls make an adjustable one of these (VERY important as the G-loc stick can move more L/R than it can U/D). What this does is sit between the PCB and controls, and turn a range of (for example) 1.2v-3.8v into 0v-5v (or whatever you adjust it to). You don't actually want the full extremes of movement, the original cabinets didn't go that far either, but taking it to within half a volt of the extremes should do the trick. I'm going to try to get a GF deluxe cab owner to report their max/min values, I can't use MAME as an example because they incorrectly allow the full range of movement, as if the controls were locking on the pot running out of movement rather than the stick stops. I've ordered two amp boards, one for the flight stick and one for the throttle - each board can do two axis.
Here's how it runs at the moment. I'm seeing occasional glitches in the sprites, I don't know if that's normal or not as I haven't seen a real working Galaxy Force for many many years, the +5v is turned down quite low so it could be that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t0q5UQOcj4
