Hey guys,

I need help getting a 2-player 6-button setup working. Does anyone have a wiring diagram that I can use to get this working?

A previous owner of the machine seems to have cut off the terminating connector that brings the button presses down to the terminating kick-harness plug inside the cab. Instead of a nice plug, I have a set of bare wires (see pic)



I tried brute-forcing the combinations to learn which wires go where, but it was tedious. I was able to get something working, but the kick would only register if I was pushing two buttons at the same time. Weird!

Do any of you have insight on why this is happening?

Hey guys, I am in Toronto, and today guys, yes today I finally brought home a SEGA New Astro City that I picked up locally. I've been playing my PCBs on a supergun connected to my PVM via RGB, and it has been a blast, especially since I built an arcade-like stand for the monitor and my SEGA HSS-0130 Arcade Stick Pro which you can see in the pic below.

I've posted here just a few times in the past, but I am a big fan of John's show, and wanted to sound-off again, and to hopefully bring some useful conversation. My past posts here have been about my arcade pause-button hack for 68k based hardware, but today guys, yes today, I'm here to gush about my new NAC!

The cab itself is is quite nice condition. I don't need to put any work into this to have fun, but I will do some future upgrades to the CP, as well as giving it a nice clean and perhaps a new paint-job in the far future. Now to get more PCBs!

Behold!



Any other Toronto, or Ontario guys here?

Is your TIT board 4-player? That board does not allow for character choice. Your credit will credit-up the character associated with the coin-chute you dumped your coin into. You can get this board modded to be the 2-player version that allows you to choose characters.

I was able to finally test this on another Motorola 68000 based arcade PCB - this time it's Data East's "Robocop".

As you can see in the video, I'm using the same setup as before, and pause does indeed work as expected without any side-effects.

https://youtu.be/6-x4bYoiIWY

Hey guys,

My arcade gaming rig is a Supergun connected via RGB to a Sony PVM monitor. I've played both "Shinobi" and "Final Fight" on this setup, and all works well.

I recently got a Data East "Robocop" PCB, and while everything seems to be working well on it, the image is slightly stretched in the vertical axis, making it so that there are rather noticeable black bars on the right and left sides of the screen.

I don't think it's an issue with the monitor (v-hold does not stretch the image), as it plays my other games at the correct aspect ratio. Is there any logic or components on the board that could have an effect like this if it was broken or old?

Obviously this isn't a solution across the board, however MVS motherboards have a similar feature mapped to one of the dip switches. So I believe it would be possible to wire up a button to trigger it instead. I haven't done it though. Obviously if you don't have an MVS this info isn't very helpful, but might be for someone.


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Yes. the MVS (as well as Capcom CP Systems) have a DIP switch that is connected to the 68000 HALT pin. This is the inspiration I used to make a pause button for my Shinobi - which does not have a DIP pause switch, but does also use the 68000.

most games this will not work. im kind of surprised it even worked there. Most games have a watchdog timer and if you halt the processor the watchdog will reset it.

Some games have a testing mode pause. Pacman comes to mind, which is different than the watchdog.

If you want to do this for every game you will need to disable the watchdog timer somehow when you pause it.  Also if for any reason the game uses dram instead of sram you will crash the game if you halt the cpu.

Very good info. Thanks for the heads-up on the watchdog timer.

Hey guys, I really miss having a PAUSE button on my arcade games. Of course I was raised on consoles that always had a dedicated PAUSE button that I could use when I had to with an interruption. Of course arcade games were not built with a PAUSE option... Hmm.

I did a bit of digging and found out that many of the CPUs (Motorola, Zilog, etc.) used in arcade boards have what's called a HALT feature, which is basically the same thing as PAUSE.

I wired up a button to this specific pins on the M68k of my Shinobi board and lo-and-behold it works! You can check everything out in this video link:

https://youtu.be/kTQ2KlvlboQ

Have any of you guys done something similar? Is there an easier way to get PAUSE functionality in arcade boards?