Phill's Arcade: March 2017

Saturday, 4 March 2017

Namco 246/256 I/O Kit

I recently began shopping on Yahoo Auctions Japan (YAJ) again. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, but having enough spare parts to keep my cabs going for the foreseeable future, JAMMA PCB prices going through the roof, and having most of the games I really wanted anyway I was looking for something new to enjoy.

Now if you've ever shopped on YAJ for arcade stuff, you'll know there's a few sellers on there with incredibly huge inventories of stock. A couple of these sellers had an abundance of Namco 256 mainboards. I decided I'd pick one up for around 3000 Yen (~£22). Now these were just the mainboards, with no I/O and no games, and the only game I could see going for a reasonable price was Gundam Vs. Gundam Next. I purchased one of those, and now I needed an I/O to connect the board to my cabinet.

These are a little different to the usual I/O boards you see for your JVS hardware, they are specific to the Namco 2x6 hardware. This kit is the System 246 B kit, compatible with 246 and 256 hardware. This kit is specific to joystick games.

Here's the kit box, full of packaging tape and stickers, not particularly pleasing to the eye, but then again these were never intended for the average consumer.

And the contents of the box

If you ever decide to go into this range of Namco hardware, ensure you have all of the parts contained within. These are:

Main PCB
Kick Harness (Below PCB on photo)
Ribbon Cable (Top Centre)
Power Cable (Centre)
Phono Cable (Top Right)
VGA Cable (Botton Right)

There are various I/O kits for the Namco 2x6 hardware, as it was used for more than just regular joystick games. Read more about them on the Arcade Otaku Wiki

Thursday, 2 March 2017

Sega STV Carts and Internals

So it's been a while since I last posted....

I saw an interesting post on the Arcade Otaku forums from user Stompp who is putting together a Sega STV wiki. The plan is document the cartridges with as much info and art as possible. It will also include photos of the boards inside the carts. The reason behind the board photos is so people can identify if they have a legitimate or bootleg board. While it has long been assumed that bootlegging was quite uncommon on the STV outside of a couple of games it appears that bootlegs of even the cheapest games exist.

Here is Stompp's wiki: http://titan.clubsega.se/

Having a few STV cartridges I thought I'd help out and photograph my collection.

The following 12 cartridges are all Japanese and from my personal collection. All appear to be the genuine article. Click the images to get them in full resolution.

First up we have the mighty Radiant Silvergun