The Home Arcade Archive Chronicles

Continued from here

Driving home from West Virginia with Mercs in the back of my minivan, I couldn’t help but think of what to buy next. The seller we had just left also had a Final Round cabinet. Like Mercs, it was $250 which is a fair price for a working machine and monitor with no PCB in it, let alone the game called Hard Puncher: Bloodsoaked Glory in Japan. My minivan lacked the space to carry two arcade cabinets simultaneously so I told my friend Rick, who had accompanied me to West Virginia, the seller, and my wife that I would have to think about Final Round. Rick and the seller both said ‘ok.’ My wife told me to work on the machines I had since I now owned three. It seemed like reasonable advice, but I still thought about Hard Puncher the whole 90 minute drive home from left Virginia.

Back in the garage, not much progress had been made on Bad Dudes subpar monitor and Mercs was proving a pain in the ass to get wired up correctly. During this flurry of frustration, the Mistercade arrived and decision paralysis set in. Unsure of which machine to stick it in, I did nothing for a few weeks. Does it count as decision paralysis when none of the options seem good? I usually think of the term  (or even the actual term, analysis paralysis) when I boot up a console I have a zillion games for and there are too many valid choices to make so I do nothing. Bad Dudes was not in shape for prime time, Mercs wasn’t even functional, and Golden Axe had been set aside as the piece of Sega history I wouldn’t mess with. Besides, the angle of the monitor is kind of displeasing; it’s almost lying flat on its back. At least it had three buttons per player while the other two cabinets only had two, thus restricting what could be played on them to roughly 1988 and earlier.

My indecision was put on hold when I saw someone list a cabinet they called a “big blue” on Facebook Marketplace. I didn’t know what that meant, but I did have eyes and could see it was a large, blue Capcom machine that appeared to have a Street Fighter Alpha 2 marquee. It did not appear to have anything to do with F-Zero. The bad news was that the original PCB had been swapped out for a Pandora’s Box, which is a cheap little emulation box that can play some hundreds of arcade games. But also the only thing left inside of it is hope, which is either a blessing or a curse depending on your interpretation.

I ran to my wife and breathlessly explained that this cabinet was different from the ones I had because each player has 6 buttons so it would be compatible with all the fighting games and I wouldn’t buy more after this one for a while and I promised to stop denying that we are married when it comes up in public. She told me I repulse her, which in our cute secret language means either “turn the tv volume up,” or “buy another arcade game.” Permission in hand, I rushed to my cell phone that was already always in my hand and sent the seller a message asking about the monitor. That’s always the first question I ask when buying an arcade cabinet and on a first date because a fucked up monitor may make a deal or relationship entirely worthless. Big Seller Blue was apparently unimpressed by my due diligence and a day went by without a response.

I began panicking almost immediately. The seller had seen my monitor question minutes after I sent it but did not reply. After refreshing the Marketplace app for half a day, which uses push messages so does not need refreshing, I began thinking of other options, including letting it go. Did I really need a third new/old machine? But I couldn’t stop worrying that this was a rare chance I may not see again for centuries. The thing with niche hobbies, I am learning, is that it’s hard to know when something is common or a one time opportunity without having to pass up one time opportunities to then years later realize, “yeah, that was a unique chance I let go.” I decided I wasn’t willing to learn the hard way so I set my thinking brain back to ‘buy.” I considered gently telling Rick to message the seller but then settled on taking my wife’s phone and pretending to be her. This time instead of sending a question I just sent an offer on the cabinet and the seller responded almost immediately. He was apparently more interested in money than discussion, which seems like a good way to make money but a bad way to become my friend, which is what everyone’s ultimate goal is or should be.

We agreed on the pickup time and date and it immediately snowed, as if Khione herself did not want me to have this big blue cabinet. The seller and I exchanged some more messages and I noticed how he seemed much chattier than the other people I’d bought things from. We agreed my husband would come get the machine some days later, but the wait was full of anxiety. The seller seemed flaky to me and I was terrified he would somehow realize I was the guy who had asked about the monitor merely pretending to be a woman. Full of worry, I decided to do something productive so I put together the Mistercade instead of working.

The day finally came, so I told the seller my husband and his friend would come get the cabinet after work. Like all the sellers I’ve bought arcade games from, he was far out in the suburbs of somewhere stupid. It was also dark and raining heavily. Rick wept gently to himself as I took turns at 80 MPH, deadset on getting the damn big blue machine into my medium grey garage. The guy’s driveway was long and winding; I almost took out a retaining wall doing a K turn to back up to his garage. The cabinet barely fit in the back of the minivan and it weighed about six hundred thousand tons, but it was in great shape. I considered telling the seller that it had been I, Justin Scott (my Facebook alterego) messaging him all along and he had been bamboozled, but decided it was not worth risking even with the cabinet already in my car.

Rick and I survived the drive home, dragged the big blue into my garage, and got to work. The first challenge was that we had no key to any of the doors on the machine. Luckily, Rick, the master of unlocking, managed to pick the locks using a nail – hopefully the locks have had their tetanus shots. The first thing we noticed was that the original speakers had been replaced with some shitty Logitech “upgrade” speakers and subwoofer. The power source had also been upgraded, but actually so I don’t need to use quotes. As per the Marketplace description, there was no PCB but instead the cheap and mediocre emulator Pandora’s Box installed. We gave a few games a whirl to confirm the controls were good. I haven’t explicitly said it yet, but this new six button cabinet was obviously going to be where I installed the Mistercade. If you didn’t figure that out yourself you may struggle on the test at the end of this post.

Connecting the Mistercade to the JAMMA harness was easier than expected. Nothing needed to be done besides the predicted setting of a switch in the Mistercade to JAMMA+. I was pretty surprised by how easy it all was, from the initial Mister setup to building and then installing the Mistercade. It felt too easy and I had been prepared to fuck with settings files and whatnot. The Mister even automatically pulled arcade cores (effectively the games) off the web, which was a surprise considering it does not do this for any consoles as a way to protect the project from legal attacks. As an aside, I will be suing the Mister project and myself on behalf of the Japan Amusement Machine and Marketing Association. Neogeo roms did need to be hunted down and there is a lot of out of date info on them and what format they need to be in. I would clear things up but tried about five strategies and can’t remember what the actual working solution was. I learned how to try a dozen things then not write down what actually worked at my job in IT. To get Neogeo to output correctly through the JAMMA harness the system’s core needs to be changed from AES to MVS, which makes sense. All these years later I am still mad that the Neogeo that starts with an ‘A’ is the home version and not arcade, but I’ll get over it one decade.

The next week I spent a lot of time loading each game core to document if it worked and if it ran horizontally or vertically, or in tate mode for nerds. This wouldn’t have been necessary if the setting to change display direction worked, but it doesn’t seem to. There is a high probability this is due to user error and I need to configure a text file somewhere, but I’m not a rocket surgeon. Luckily, Rick interrupted this tedious process of documenting the vertical games by showing me a product called the Mistercade Vs. This little doohickey plugs into an arcade cabinet and then plugs into a Mistercade is a different cabinet, and then mirrors the video output to both monitors. I believe the intended use is to allow two two player machines to be connected in order to allow people to play four player games. For example, one machine with a Mistercade running The Simpsons is connected to a second machine via the Mistercade Vs and the same screen is shown on both but with each cabinet allowing for two players simultaneously, thus a grand total of two plus two players.

That may be the intended use, but could we use a Mistercade Vs to mirror signal from big blue’s Mistercade to the vertically oriented Mercs cabinet? Good question. Maybe by the time I sit down to write the next one of these we will have tried this very thing.

Here is the test I promised earlier. I know some people are really excited about it.

A. Video games are:

1. Good
2. Bad
3. My hobby because I’m middle aged and can’t be bothered to develop new interests now

B. Arcades are:

1. Cool
2. Dead
3. Affordable and easy to set up in your home as long as you are irresponsible and stupid

C. Websites should include more tests of knowledge:

1. True
2. False
3. The third option is the much longer joke answer because of how comedy works or in this case doesn’t

If you nailed these, feel free to add how well you did to your resume or college application.