Various questions

[Acid King]

Hey hey. As some of you know from my sale thread, I sold most of my stuff to buy a cab. Payment went out and is waiting in the post office for Richard so it should be a week or two afore i have my New Astro City. Anywho, I had afew questions for ya'll.

1. I read that the screens are dual res (15 and 24?) switchable. is it automatic depending on the PCB or is is it two separate connectors, one for 15, one for 24? Also as far as the monitor goes, will I need a triple res monitor to play naomi games? i.e. I buy a Naomi mobo and Ikaruga, will I need to innstall a new monitor to get it to display properly? I also heard someone mention that Naomi isn't jamma, what would I have to do to run it on a jamma cab?

2. Full auto. I hate tapping buttons (which is why I will never buy a metal slug game, despite their greatness) and I was wondering if Cave maps C as full auto button on the Pachi's, Guwange and Ketsui. If not, would it be possible to build a panel with an extra A button set to rapid fire?

3. Is it ok to just plug my board in and fire up the cab or will that be tempting fate?

[zakk]

1) It isn't automatic, most likely. Seperate connector. For Naomi stuff, you can either buy a multisync monitor that'll do 31khz, or you can set the Naomi to do 15khz. There are Naomi I/O boards that should do Jamma, but I'll let someone that owns it speak up here.

2) Most Cave games map C to full auto. The ones that don't have it on by default have an option for it at least.

3) I'd at least do an inspection of things first to make sure nothing cracked/broke/became unconnected in transit. If everything looks good it's probably fine to plug in and go. I'd probably power up the cabinet with no board in it first just to make sure nothing will explode.

[Dave_K.]

1) agree with Zakk here. Its a plug you have to manually switch over if you want to change from 15khz to 24khz. You will never play 24khz, so just keep it on 15k. And yes there are Naomi->Jamma I/O converters will will let you play JVS games on a std jamma cab.

2) as zakk stated

3) its generally not a great idea to power up without a board in place, and the power supply uses a regulator circuit, and can overheat or damage without load. If this is a japanese cab, you may also need a stepdown converter. What kind of cab is this?

[zakk]

Just to be clear. I wasn't implying he should do more than a quick on/off, at least enough to make sure some power wire hasn't had the insulation sliced/rubbed off in transit and is now ready to short to something nasty. I'd rather have it explode that way than with my potentially hard to get and expensive PCB attached to it. At the very least that's what the j-pac is for, right?

[Pingu]

1. There are two I/O boards for the naomi, the SEGA one and the CAPCOM one, the CAPCOM one features a built in AMP and a transformer to suply the naomi with 3.3V. So for pure jamma compatibility go with the CAPCOM one as you need a SEGA/JVS psu or a hacked PC PSU if you go with the SEGA one. Then again the CAPCOM one is alot rarer and more expensive.

2. Autofire button, should be quite easy if you can find a crystal that don't oscilate that fast, say 5-20Hz. Then again I've never seen a crystal that slow. Might be easiest to butcher an old pad with autofire.

3. For a new cab I'd start with my least expensive board.

[neorichieb1971]

Well I used the cab for about 5 months with no problem.

The cab plugs straight in to the wall no problem there.

Inside the cab in the PCB bay area there is a volume control, a degauss button and a test/service button.

Inside the CP, you have the monitor controls to adjust width, height, shrink and stretch facilities. There is also pots for the RGB controls I think (maybe thats just on the Impress).

Usually if the cab is moved, you will get purple and greens, hit the degauss button and it should clear it up.

The monitor is prestine, it accepts quarters, but some of the special quarters with the States on them get stuck so I would avoid using them, it only takes 10 seconds to get them out though.

It has the coin bucket in place, speakers work fine.

As for the monitor frequencies, never seen any switch on the unit, but never opened it up either. Everything is self explanatory.

[Acid King]

3) its generally not a great idea to power up without a board in place, and the power supply uses a regulator circuit, and can overheat or damage without load. If this is a japanese cab, you may also need a stepdown converter. What kind of cab is this?

It's a new astro city. Richard said he didn't need a step down so I assume i won't need one. Thanks for the info guys. My least expensive board is also my most expensive board... because I only have one (Battle Bakraid) so I'm just going to give it the once over and then give it a shot.

[Acid King]

Quick question. Cab arrived in great shape, works perfectly but the screen setting is a bit too wide. For example, the bomb icon in the left corner of the screen is cut off and the high score table looks like this

st
nd
rd
th
th

It's an astro city, in the PCB bay there's buttons for service, test, demag, a knob for volume and a power switch. neither the service or test buttons seem to do anything. ANyone?

[iatneH]

If the test and service buttons don't work (assuming they're wired correctly), check your PCB for a dipswitch bank. One of them should bring up the test menu.

edit: Or as Valgar pointed out, if there isn't a dipswitch bank you should also look for tactile buttons. They typically look like a small black circle on a metal square with a dot in each corner...

[Valgar]

Every board should have a button for test / service. To set monitor geometry, open the control panel and the at the top right is a pcb panel with knobs for RGB, Brightness, Contrast, Geometry.

[SAM]

Oh, the "New Astro City" monitor. I own one too (just the monitor only, I bought it new as an spare part from a local acrade meachine supplier)

You can actually connect console to it, and that is what I do most of the time. (Since I own one and only one PCB...) I modified to connection of the monitor to a Female Scart Plug (Japan RGB Pinout).

Most Sega consoles (MD, Saturn, DreamCast) can connect to to without doing anything. If you wish to connect PS1/PS2 to it, you would need to build the sync saperating circuit with a LN1881N chip. (I have done this too, DDP DOJ and ESPgaluda are wonderful but MushiHimeSama is horrible...)

Currently playing Raiden III(PS2) on it, using Acrade resolution, of couse. And using a Real Acrade Pro Joystick (Seimitsu Stick within). If the PS2 version of Raiden III could do progresive scan, that would be acrade perfit experiance.

If you are planing to connect your consoles to it, I can provide some more information on how to do it.


For the auto fire, Seimitsu actually got a hardware auto fire PCB for Jamma. oxtsu is doing a group order of Seimitsu/Sanwa parts right now, you can join and order that.

http://forum.shmups.com/forum/viewtopic ... &start=100