People following my twitter might have been wondering what that Canadiana Road Trip stuff was a'boot yesterday. It was about salvaging a pile of 50 arcade boards from certain death.
My Pirate Map pointed to a secret location near Ottawa, Ontario, so went, dug up, and found the treasure!
(yes that's the trunk of MY CAR)
A quick evaluation can be made to about 65 soundchips on these. (some boards do have more than one). I don't know WHEN I'll get time to go through the good, the bad and the awesome. What works and whats useless, but there you go.
Each board is different (except two MS Pacman boards, but i will NOT complain here, lets just hope I can get one running, even it if means cannibalizing the other)
chipsounds 2.0 R&D really REALLY doesn't need more chips at this point....
I use MAME differently than you I'm pretty sure. You can sort games by name, company, date, but usually I sort entries by 'sound'. For a guy like me, its both salivating and dangerous... for my finances.
There are a few sound chip gems that are only found on obscure PCBs. However, a side effect of the omnipresence of MAME is to somewhat lower the price on used game PCBs on Ebay. Why would you have this 20+ year old board around in a wooden box when you can play the game on your PC or some MAME'ed cabinet?
When you're a sound chip freak its not a question of course. Since I cant put myself to loan a van just to shove an Arcade cabinet into the office (not that it wouldn't be nice to have a Shinobi or Splatterhouse around). It just wouldn't be convenient.
I'm contemplating starting a collection of PCBs, to get new chips, but also just to get a few spares. Recently I acquired a 10$ game from a local Ebay seller, a really crappy Jap quiz game to get an extra YM2413.
Friday after work, bored, Ok should I trash this board and get the chip from it? Or, wait a minute... there must be something to play this thing for cheap! And of course there is ... A SuperGun!
Two minute googling and I found this very well done document on building a home made JAMMA harness. Cool, but i just want to HEAR the intro tune, not to see and play it!
I had about 5 more or less useless PC casings at home, so I looked around for one which had a suitable PSU (read working +5v,-5v +12v). (it allowed me to sort through them at last and thrash two deabeats, ... missus is happy)
15 Minutes soldering and it worked.
That is JUST a test of course, I'll surely hook all that with two joysticks an fake coin slots on the PC case in the future. And of course proper video outs.
Or.. maybe I should go back to sound R&D...
ZIF (Zero insertion force) sockets are a great way to reduce the wear on chip pins when you need to swap them often, which is as you've guessed what I need.
A full day spent figuring that chip's sound generation again. Recorded the two separate output pins in a multitude of ways, but there seems to be signal bleed whatever I try (even removing the chip and lifting one of the pins of its socket from the circuit)
