Neo Geo Arcade Cabinet

Neo Geo arcade cabinet info. I have had a vector Starwars Arcade Cabinet for quite some time. I had a Karate Champ Arcade Cabinet for several years as well. I sold it to Aftershock Retrogames a few years ago to make room for something that's more useful.

Components

Gathered slowly over the course of a few years. Picked up steam later in 2017 once I got the monitor. Major components listed below, I spent ~$500 or so total.

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  Guts

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  Marquee

What	Cost	Notes
Cabinet	$0	Free from a friend who said "Hey do you want an NBA JAM cabinet?" It wasn't one, it was really a gambling machine with a secret switch to toggle between some cherry master board and Rim Rockin Basketball. Cabinet had many nice features - new/clean power supply,
Controls	$15	some guy on craigslist was selling a bunch of HAPP joysticks and buttons
27" CRT Monitor	$75	Purchased from a Facebook arcade group that's in my region. Originally from a TechnoMotion DDR clone. Bought it thinking it was CGA (240p) but it's VGA (480p) which made the design moderately complex. Tube says Samsung A68QCP891x002. Chassis says "Da San" but no part number.
Neo Geo MV-1C + 161 in 1 cart	$150	ebay. Had a terrible soldering job and was flakey. Carefully de-soldered wires and instead used a NeoBiosMasta ($13) to mount the bios.
GBS8220 Upscaler		Came with Neo Geo board. Cheap chinese board, works out of the box but picture is poor.
Arduino Uno	$20	This is used to speak i2c to the GBS8200 to make it less shitty using
Marquee	$33	purchased from GameOnGrafx after seeing a few people recommended it. Artwork is from Handré de Jager. It's absurd and I love it. Since this was going to be a mame cab and Neo Geo, went with the 4 slot style template and customized it after getting Handre's blessing.
pi2jamma	€109	JAMMA adapter for Rpi that handles video output to 240p via GPIO. This may not have been the right decision with my 480p monitor
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B	$35	Model 3 is the first model with enough GPIO pins to allow use of the VGA666 method for video
Extron SW2 VGA DA2	$20	This is to switch between video/audio output of pi2jamma and GBS8200
DROK TDA7297	$8.50	15w stereo audio amp. As the reviews say, it works really really well. Only annoyance is its blue LED is far too bright. I put some nail polish over it to dim it. Hopefully that doesn't start a fire.
JAMMA Harness	$12	bought from ebay seller '4partyfun'. Seems to work fine, they seem to sell a lot of them.
Lighting	$25	I used LED USB powered light strips. Two light the bezel, a 3rd is powered from a USB hub with power buttons inside the cabinet.
Ground Loop Noise Isolator	$5	The Pi causes noises to come from the speakers when its reading from flash. This seemed to help.
Screw Terminals	$11	Screw Terminals - $11.

Diagram

Building

Controls

I used slagcoin's templates to find a layout. It has proper PDF's that can be printed and says which layout came from which type of game.

The panel originally had 2 buttons per player, as well as two buttons on the bottom left. Those were wired to p1's buttons, I assume to be used as a convenience with the machine was switched to gambling mode. I used those holes as coin buttons.

I chose something that seemed neo-geo-ish that also could somewhat overlap with the existing two buttons. I really didn't realize that I probably don't need more than four buttons, so I later got some blank plugs for the extra holes.

The actual drilling was done with a 1 1/8" Forstner Drill bit that I got from a local hardware store. This was $15 or so.

I may shift all buttons to the left at some point so B1 is lower left. I may also get the correct red/yellow/green/blue coloured buttons at some point.

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  Original Layout

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  Working on layout

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  Done drilling

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  Controls installed

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  Done.

Display

I know very little about arcade CRT's, other than they're RGB and you're supposed to be quite careful with the high voltage. I kept the chassis attached at all and simply took my time.

The CRT came out of a Techno Motion cabinet, which is a Korean DDR knock off. The owner wanted to upgrade to a larger LCD monitor. I could not find any schematics online for this chassis or tube. Techno Motion was made by F2 SYSTEM who is still in business today. The only trace I could find of it on their website was here. I emailed them asking for schematics, they responding asking for the serial # of the cabinet, which i did not have. I tried to explain myself differently in another email, but the response was almost the same, asking for serial number. Definitely a Korean-English language barrier, and I do not speak Korean.

Since 480p VGA signal displays properly and looks fairly sharp, I think that is its native resolution. The majority of the time on this project is related to its display, and hackery to get 240p to display on it. Had I just gotten a CGA 240p monitor, I wouldn't have the GBS8200 or Extron switchbox at all. I had my eye out for a large (at least 25") CGA CRT for a few years but had no luck. I do not like the look of an LCD so I did not consider that as an option.

After asking around on KLOV forums, I found out that there are some tri sync monitors that will indeed accept 240p @60hz, so I was optimistic.

I hacked together a ghetto adapter to output video to a VGA style DE-15 connector and sent it 240p @60hz w Hsync and tied Vsync together, but it was not happy. I bought a few EL4583CS sync splitters to attempt to properly split H and V out, but never got around to testing it. I may re-visit that one day. Based on how scrambled the video was, I do not think it will work.

I have a GBS8200 that came with my Neo Geo board, it works out of the box to convert 240p to 480p. Unfortunately the image is slightly antialiased so the pixels are ever so blurry. Fortunately several folks at the Shmups forums figured out how to control this device's True View 5725 chipset via i2c bus to fine tune the display settings.

The initial project from doolink uses a raspberry pi. Several folks altered things a bit to use an Arduino for control, which is cheaper and faster. I ended up using rama's Arduino code, which is still under active development. This code is geared more towards PAL/NTSC video upscaling, I hacked away at it always expect 240p input and always output at 480p, using the presets that doolink created.

Note that there is a 240p @ 120hz preset that is interesting. This will allow me to display 240p video. It does work, but I could not properly adjust the monitor's controls to have the screen fit properly horizontally. I may revisit this one day and install a toggle switch that tells the Arduino to toggle between 480p@60hz and 240p@120hz.

The cabinet has an insert that's more or less a box that's made to mount a display in. I more or less did my best and ghetto rigged it in place by drilling a few holes and getting long bolts. I did look around on the internet quite a bit for a 27" CRT chassis but couldn't quite find what I was looking for at a reasonable price.

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  Tube info

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  Chassis

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  Chassis

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  CRT mounted

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  DE-15 Pinout adapter

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  240p direct

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  120hz 240p via GBS8200

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  60hz 480p via GBS8200

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  Pulstar