Ms. Pac-Man is a Drag Queen

Note the NES Box Art

Finally up to the Ms. Pac-Man Cocktail Cabinet restoration!  As you can see in the pictures below this thing needs a fair (but not extreme) amount of work. 

 

 First and foremost the second player joystick is fucked.  Next the graphics (while they look to be lovingly done) are all inkjet prinotuts and not very attractive.  Third the cab is kind of beat up and the plexi-glass is shot to shit.








So I begin by researching what parts are available to purchase for this thing.  Bingo, in less than 10 minutes I am on an official page that sells are kinds of parts for Ms. Pac-man machines.  "Well, this isn't going to take nearly as long as I thought," said my unsuspecting brain to my.......unsuspecting brain.

  

Will the real Ms. Pac-Man please stand up?

Lo and behold as I start going through all of the offerings every single picture looks completely different than what I have here in front of me.  After careful cab inspection it turns out that...........................(drum roll)................this is actually a mother farking Donkey Kong Cab, fully modified from the days of its simian glory!












 Well great, this slots it right into the nothing is ever easy category. Ok, no biggie I go right to see what artwork i can find, since I know nothing that I find will fit, but maybe I can rig something up.  I was able to find some nice vector art for the Ms., and (what I believe to be) a correctly sized DK control panel JPG that I am using as a template. 

Trying to fit a square pac peg into a round pac hole

Two hours later (an Illustrator wizard I am not) I have something that may work, though the size of the holes for the buttons and sticks may be an issue.  Daniel (Retro Fool Deuce) is going to print them out in black and white on a large format printer and we are going to match them up and see what needs adjusting.




I also sent some pictures of the non working joystick to Andrew at The Twisted Quarter.  I have no idea if it is original or aftermarket, but hopefully he can find me something that works.
 







  So, here I am.  I strongly considered converting this back to a DK as I like original stuff, but that would require obtaining the right board and to be honest I would play the Misses more than the Monkey.  Updates to come soon when progress happens!

Not Emulation related, but I wanted to share a good pickup we (myself and my room-mate, with the help of my brother) got this weekend.

I was woken up at 10am with a text of, "Do you want to go to an arcade auction?"  "Well yes," I thought, "I would like to do that."

So away we went and when all was said and done for under $300 we got an X-Men, Pac-Man Jr. and (2-Player) Tetris cabinet!  Shitty pictures below, I will add better ones when I am able.

Apologies for the late posts, had a nasty cold for about a week there and the rest of the time was spent finalizing ConsoleBox.

Alright, not all of that is true.  SOME time was spent on ConsoleBox, but let us not forget we were just through the hurricane that is the summer Steam Sale, so that was where any free time was spent (and I finally got into a pool for the first time this summer).  I picked up some nice goodies including Dust:An Elysian Tail, Fez and the new Tomb Raider.

Anyhoo, some housekeeping items are finally being resolved.  There were a few issues with Dolphin (Gamecube and Wii emulator), one of them being a ~90% crash on startup that for the life of me I could not fix.  Error logs brought me to something with DirectX, but after trying everything under the sun relating to DX I could not fix the problem.  How I finally resolved it was by using the 32 bit version!  I am filing this one under don't know, don't care, so fuck it.

There was also an issue getting the Gamecube controllers C sticks to properly center.  After playing with the GCPad dialog box in Dolphin I found an unnamed feature where clicking the image of the analog sticks brings up more configuration options. Pure luck, and that was fixed.

The main thing that is being an asshole to me currently is Xebra (PSX Emulator) and configuring it to work with analog sticks.  This may be left as digital only for the time being, as I either wait for more information to surface or a new version.

Doing some final testing tonight, if the fates are kind and I finish I'll put up a video of it in action.

NES Box, Revisited

One of the issues I am correcting going forward is not skipping around everything that I do around here.  When Daniel and I made the NES Box we really did a lot of work and did not post anything close to what we did.  While a lot of the step by step is lost to the anals of time (I know that's spelled wrong :) I did come across some pictures of the process.  So let's step in the old time machine and go way back to 2011....






 The pictures below are what we started with.  This was the original NES we got back in Christmas of 1987, and it was decorated with the destruction of childhood.  Apparently we liked stickers.  And scratching the shit out of the case.

The first step was to clean up the case by removing the stickers and sanding down the outside with very fine sandpaper.  Dremeling out the raised bottom was next, as we needed every centimeter we could get.

 

 

We had our motherboard (Mini-ITX) and we had our case, but how to combine the two?  Easy!  Suspend it like a bat(man).  Actually no Batman, just suspended like a bat.














 
Once we received the USB boards from Retrousb soldering the existing NES ports was a piece of cake.  I even did one myself, being the one and only thing I have ever soldered.  ROB also makes a cameo as he really wanted to be included in the process, even though all he did was drink and criticize the entire time...

 Hard drive in a cartridge.  In retrospect I regret using the gold cart but what's done is done.

Field testing the parts, making sure it work's BEFORE it's in the case.
























Assembling the beast, with a Pico power supply. HDMI & power cable being ran from the mobo to the back.  When I say this thing JUST fit I do not exaggerate, I am really surprised it actually worked.

And the finished product!

Of course having more experience now we could do it much better (news of tat may be coming soon right here) but as of this date it is still running great and is a great hit at our parties, having found a semi permanent home in the garage at the tiki bar, with people sitting and playing at the bar.

HyperLaunch 3.0 Kicks Hyper-Ass (Apologies, I had to!)

A few days into the new HyperLaunch and I am extremely impressed.

I started to do an upgrade as outlined by the steps on the new HyperLaunch site but after 20 or so minutes I felt starting from scratch would be the easiest way to go. My folder names were all out of whack and disorganized and this would be a good way to get it all cleaned up.

After downloading a fresh install of Hyperspin and adding the applicable HyperLaunch files I was off to the races.  First, how exactly is this different from the old HyperLaunch? This is like going from McDonald's into a 5 star restaurant.  The HL team wrote an ENTIRE GUI application, which so neatly and logically organizes things you will never know how you lived without it.

2 hours in I had MULTIPLE systems setup completely, only because I knew exactly where to link in all the options, and could easily look at the (very helpful) module notes if something didn't work.

Finally got FDS to switch disk sides via NES controller!

I even took this new found rhythm and fixed a few things that have been bugging me for awhile, that I had previously hit some brick walls on.  For example, for the Famicom Disk System, some games require a disk eject, a side switch and an additional disk eject (presumably re-inserting the disk).  Well that's all pickles and ice cream, but mapping that to a controller did not come that easy.  It actually was extremely easy to do in XPadder, I just had to find the correct way to do it.


 In short this thing is fucking incredible.  I have spent the past few days making minor tweaks and perfecting certain things.  I feel like the end is finally in sight with this project and am getting quite excited about the prospect.  I am also going to make some artwork and get the PC case wrapped in vinyl to make it look especially awesome (and will be subsequently posting pictures here).

It's a good thing too, because yesterday I picked up my (slightly beat up) Ms. Pac-Man cocktail table machine, which needs a little work.

Tonight I start getting my hands dirty with the new version of HyperLaunch, which looks to be an absolute masterpiece.  Let's see what kind of wonders and frustrations this night holds.

Check out this detailed overview DJVJ made of HyperLaunch 3, which after watching is more complete than most commercial software programs out there!

ConsoleBox Update!

I know I am terrible at updates and I am going to change that going forward.  Since the last post (in February, I believe) I have worked feverishly on getting this all together.  Some of the things I have done are listed below.

I placed an order for 2 drive bay Bliss Boxes (http://spawnlinux.dyndns.org/Bliss-Box/) in December, and the orders were fulfilled in the spring.  I asked for just about every port I could think of (though not getting the Saturn ones really bit me) and the guy who makes them (Sean I believe is his name) was extremely helpful throughout the whole process, answering my many questions.

Once I started playing around with them I realized that a PC restart was required in order for them to recognize different controller ports.  That was a real "oh shit" moment for me as I didn't even know if what I wanted was possible.  Once again I emailed Sean and explained that I wanted to be able to change controllers on the fly and he offered to put in a reset button on each box free, I just had to pay shipping.  Well how awesome is that?  I received them a few weeks later and they worked as advertised.

So how did I manage all of these ports?  XPadder! It was a lot different than configuring individual controllers because they are all coming off the same circuit board so some buttons are similar across all controllers but for example the left button on one controller might be the B button in another.

The rest was constant Hyperspin tweaking, as there were many emulators and individual settings.  As of now I have about 80 percent fully functional, and once I hook up the USB adapter I have for an old X-Arcade dual stick it will be a lot closer.

Once I was (mostly) done, I put this thing in my living room (I live in a house with 4 other guys and there are a lot of people that come through here and set a small sheet up on how to play.  Obviously the idea was to have it as user friendly as possible.  After a month of field testing what were the results?

The list in the living room, current status of systems

Well, most everything went off without a hitch.  NullDC kind of freaked out and I have to see what's up with that.  I believe Dolphin also glitched.  By far though the biggest problem (and I use that term loosely) are the controllers.  Sometimes the reset button does not work on the first try and you have to hit it a few times, or hit both on both boxes.  I am sure this has something to do with the PC seeing two identical devices and me trying to shoehorn a dedicated first and second player out of it. 

If I had to do it again (which knowing me I will some day) I would go with single dedicated USB ports so they are as static as it gets, and just get a USB expansion card.  This is not to say anything against the Bliss Box, it is a fantastic product, amazing for what it can do and it's insane compatibility, and Sean is extremely responsive and informative, I just think trying to reach the 100% idiot proof plane of existence I am going for here requires a bit of, ahem, extremeness.

Expect more updates on this and other projects/ideas/shenanigans in the coming weeks.  And feel free to comment below!

I have been starting work on Consolebox, which will be a tremendous grouping of emulators and complete game sets. This will all be completely user friendly (your grandma could sit down and choose games to play) and all controllable from any controller plugged into it.

 I have been deciding how far I want to emulate, as the hardware I have will start to matter the higher up the chain I go.  For example I have a Wii, but the Dolphin emulator is extremely compatible and has the ability to output at 1080p.  There is also the added convenience of having all of the games in one place along with everything else. I believe as of now I am going to do everything except for PS2, just because of how good the Wii/GC emulation is.

I have fast been filling the 3 terabyte hard drive with lots of things.  The first thing I did was unzip the files from the Hyperspin project at Underground Gamer.  I had been out of the Hyperspin scene for awhile and while I was away a very nifty tool was created called Hypersync.  Hypersync is basically an artwork syncer, encompassing wheel and box art and game intro videos.  With the right configuration it matches what you have in your HS lists against what is on their servers and updates everything you tell it too.  In short, it is one of the most useful, time saving tools out there.

There are also updated sets on UG that further expands on the original HS project, which I grabbed and updated where neccessary.  I found that a lot of the original project is now outdated and now with the introduction of Hypersync can perhaps be made smaller.  This is something I would like to help out with I think.

I also ordered a drive bay Bliss Box that I am still waiting for, and has been holding up some of the progress.  I have been going through some systems and making sure the initial configuration is complete like launching and such but I have to do the controller configurations before I make the final changes to things like resolution and permanent full screen in the emulators.  My original idea was to order 2 Bliss Box's, but at $110 each I'd rather see how well it works first before committing more to it.

I am starting to get into the more difficult things emulators like Daphne and PSX, and I still have to figure out an xpadder solution soon, something that I am not looking forward to.  Believe it or not I have even found a little time to play some games!  I just completed Zelda: The Minish Cap and am now playing the fan translated Mother 3.

I will try to do updates more regularly or where progress allows.

Super Mega Console Hyperspin Project 2000 Infinity has begun.  Currently on step 16 of 10 million.