Archive for the 'News' Category

twisted’s PCB Bubble Wrapping Guide

I’ve had a few requests to put together a guide on my PCB bubble wrapping technique. There’s a lot of text here because I wanted to provide insights into why I chose this method and do it the way that I do. But if you just want to know how to wrap, scroll down and follow the pictures. I tried to make it good enough that you could follow this guide without reading any text…

The Problem

I’ve got a lot of arcade PCBs, over 500 at last count. Storage has always been an issue. How do you keep them safe and dry, dust free, and static free while also keeping them compact and a solution that works for tiny boards like a Cave CV1K all the way up to an old SNK Triple Z80 3-board stack, and something that’s not going to cause me to go broke implementing it x500?

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Konami’s Jackal Rotary Stick Version

I’ve been buried with my work for months now, but it’s a quiet Thanksgiving so I decided to dust off a project. I’ve been rounding out my collection of Rotary stick game so decided to dive into Converting Jackal to the Rotary Stick Version a go.

Some Background

Konami’s Jackal (also known as “Top Gunner” in the USA or “Tokushu Butai Jackal” in Japan) is a top-down Run-and-Gun. The game only ever officially released as a joystick and button game. but the PCB has a 13-pin header like you’d find on SNK Rotary stick games and there is a world region rotary stick dump in MAME, and a few “bootleg” dumps of Rotary stick versions of the game.

ShouTime has this picture online showing a PCB with additional hardware populated: http://collectedit.com/collectors/shou-time-213/arcade-pcbs-281/jackal-world-by-konami-7895

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Repair Log: Namco System ND-1 – Namco Classic Collection Volume 1

Last week I caught a listing for a “Free non-working unknown Namco PCB”:

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All the officially released Flavors of the Net City/NAOMI Universal Cab

A while back I was having a discussion around the many variants of the Net City and NAOMI Universal cabs and it got me thinking about how many “official” variants of these cabs there were.

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Killer Instinct PCB Troubleshooting Guide

I recently bought a non-working Killer Instinct PCB and found it hard to find information on appropriate troubleshooting. So I pieced this information from all over the place and my own testing, hopefully it will help people determine what’s wrong with their PCB just from looking at what happens when it attempts to boot up.

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What does solid-orange mean? And what’s with the couch?

I’ve been asked this question a few times now and, well, there’s a story behind it…

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Building an Emulation PC for an Arcade Machine

If you have or want to build an arcade machine that displays and plays emulated games as authentically as possible then there are a number of things to consider that are quite different when compared to building a normal gaming PC. This guide assumes that you have a functioning arcade machine already and that you’re simply looking to install a PC in it to use along side your arcade PCBs.

machine_01

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Game Politics

I was poking around my Xbox 360’s blog on 360voice.com and  I noticed they had a link to google twistedsymphony. I google my name (both TS and my real name) every so often just to see what pops up. Usually I get links to my various websites, articles I’ve written and a whole lot of new posts about my Saturn 2 360 controller adapter. I noticed that their search query added the term “xbox” to the search as well. I clicked it expecting to get the usual, but a few links down from the top I noticed that GamePolitics.com mentioned me.

GamePolitics is the foremost internet publication discussing political issues surrounding games.  In general they act as an unbiased source of news about new game related bills being past as well as prominent lawsuits. I don’t frequent the site but they pop up on the radar quite often when big things start happening.

This is why I was flattered to see that my analysis of the ICE Raids on Modchip shops last year: The Legality of Modding, garnered two whole dedicated articles on their site. The first article captured the overall theme of what I was going for and used it as the voice of the modders side of the story describing it as “the most lucid, detailed and passionate criticism we’ve seen”. The second article was dedicated to a small bit of irony I noted at the end of my rant pointing out that the “gallery” provided by ICE was comprised entirely of copyrighted images that they themselves were infringing. This time they referred to me as “embittered”, which is accurate but somewhat humorous considering how my analysis was described by them just days earlier.

This is mostly old news but for all the writing I do online it’s nice to see that other people read and appreciate it as well.

FWIW I haven’t done any modding for quites some time now. Right now it’s just not worth it, I haven’t put a soldering iron to a console since long before I wrote that ICE Raids rant, nor I  have I even used any homebrew software since then.  I still write my Representatives and Senators regularly about my opinions on these issues.

I’m not giving up by any stretch of the imagination, I just feel that my efforts would be best served towards some goals that don’t walk the blurry lines of legality according to the DMCA. “The Scene” is pretty boring overall right now anyway. You’ll see something analogous to my Saturn Adapter sometime this year. In the mean time my efforts are pointed almost entirely towards my latest pet project: CollectorsEdition.org, which is coming along quite nicely.

CollectorsEdition.org

I finally got around to setting up CollectorsEdition.org. This is a site Idea I’ve had for a while. I love collectors editions of stuff, I’ve always been big on the way things are packaged and sort of reverse engineering the thought processes someone may have come to when designing the way something was wrapped up. I particularly enjoy those packages where someone took the time to think about the user experience of unveiling their shiny new product for the first time. Collectors editions games and DVDs are a good example of that. Some of them you can tell they just did the bare minimum to eek out some extra profits but in other cases you can tell that someone put a lot of time, effort, and thought into it and what the fans of that product might enjoy as a bonus.

This will be the first site I’ve started that is really unique, I’ve made dozens of pages before, with varrying levels of success. but CollectorsEdition.org the niche it fills and the kinds of things I want to do with it aren’t rivaled on the web, at least not to my knowledge.

It’s not much to look at yet, just the barebones WP install with a welcome message and the first official tid-bit of news. To be honest that news was so good it’s what prompted me to actually kick start the site. Over the next few weeks expect it to transform both visually and functionally. One of the first things I’m going to implement is a rating system, so that visitors will have the opportunity to rate the quality of the special editions cataloged on the site.

I didn’t originally want to use WordPress, I use that software so often I feel like a one trick pony when it comes to web design. The truth of the matter is I spent days researching alternatives and I keep coming back to it.  WP is just flexible enough that I know I can tweak it to fit my needs. The closest alternative I could find in terms of a database/cataloging software that did what I wanted was more along the lines of e-commerce and they were all licensed packages. I basically came to the conclusion that my solution needs to be homegrown and WP is a good foundation to build off of.

If anyone has any ideas for features that they’d like to see at CE.O or if you know of a cool WP theme you think might be fitting, leave a comment here or drop me an email.

Easy Button LEDs and Gen-Y

I’ve made some updates.

I’ve added a page about my Easy Button Hack. I’ve also added pictures to both the LED ring page and the Saturn Ion Gen Y page. The Saturn page will see another major update or two before it’s done but the Easy Button and LED ring pages are finished. A few other things have been spruced up here and there as well. Check it out!