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June Pickups

Some good pickups last month, starting with a better control panel for my supergun setup. A guy on the shmups forum was parting out some Astro City cabinets, so I grabbed the plastic part that the control panel attaches to so that I could use it with my spare two player control panel.

Since this is only the upper part, I had to get a little inventive to make it sit firmly on the table. I thought about cutting a piece of wood that I could attach it to so that it would have a flat surface to sit on, but that seemed like a lot of work to do correctly. Instead, I bought a roll of adhesive padding that parents use to soften hard corners and edges in their homes when they have kids. I just took it and wrapped it around the bottom corners of the piece, which due to the rubberiness of the padding really helps it stay in place on the table.

This new setup is great for fighting games, so I picked up Super Street Fighter II X, or Super Street Fighter II Turbo as its known here in the US. I play it quite a bit at Full Tilt Ice Cream in Ballard and it’s an awesome game. I’m gonna try to start getting better at the game so I can whoop up!

I also picked up some Taito F3 hardware. This platform ran some great shmups and I’m most interested in Rayforce and Darius Gaiden. So I picked up a motherboard and cartridges for Arkanoid Returns and Puzzle Bobble 4. Why those games? Because they were cheap and supposedly you can swap roms in the game cartridges, allowing me to convert those cheap games into expensive awesome games.

Unfortunately, my attempts to convert the cartridges has been a complete failure. I went through all the work of desoldering the ROM chips out of the Arkanoid Returns cartridge and installing chip sockets so I could easily swap ROMs. While I can swap out the chips, both Rayforce and Darius Gaiden just reboot endlessly when I install their ROM chips. The good news is that I am now actually pretty decent at desoldering chips, and my sockets work because Arkanoid Returns still works when I put its chips in the sockets I installed! I did rip up a few traces in the process of desoldering, but I was able to patch those with wire.

So lately I seem to just be amassing more and more games but not really playing anything super seriously. This is mostly because work is pretty crazy right now, but at some point I need to sit down and actually put time into playing a game.