Game Center Jun

02/07/2024

My version of this meme. What's yours?

21/06/2024

Jackpot! Found a bunch of tokens in a cab again!

18/06/2024

WE DID IT, GUYS, WE FREED MVC2!!!

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/5tvXhXnBFvRLCUyZ/?mibextid=tUvUA8

09/06/2024

They actually let me do it. I took my lag tester to the the mall and measured some TVs. I was hoping to get the 40" TCL and mount it on the Megalo 410, but it turns out it has 40ms of lag in game mode! That's more than two frames of lag, definitely not good enough for games!

On the other hand the 120hz TCL C69B TVs are quite fast at around 12ms in Game Mode! The lag tester is sending a 720p signal at 60hz, so this includes image processing time! 12ms is already quite good for a TV, but it's likely to go down to around 6ms in 120hz mode for PC and PS5/Series S games. Crazy good for a TV, and at this price! I'm seriously considering mounting THIS on the megalo now 😆

04/06/2024

Quick fix on this Asian region Super Street Fighter II X ! I had a Japanese board but I wanted this game in in English as well :D

I removed the battery and installed an Arduino Nano with NoBatteryCPS2 so that it doesn't need batteries ever again. The board showed an RAM 1 NG error before crashing and rebooting. Replaced the RAM ICs and fixed it!

Looks like the CPU is also really hard in the Asian version, just like the US release lol

28/05/2024

After spending months in the garage, it's finally promoted to the arcade 😁 I still need to mount the monitor, set up the controls, and set up the AC wiring. Almost there!

15/05/2024

Aeroooooo

09/05/2024

Installed a new monitor on my Namco Noir! It's a Viewsonic VX3219-2K-PRO 1440p 165hz. Big upgrade from the VX3208 1080p 60hz that it replaced. Color and contrast is also far better than the LG 32GN50 on the cab beside it!

This is my first time using a 1440p 32" monitor, and honestly, I don't think it's a huge step up from 1080p. Still definitely a welcome improvement, though!

Latency is 8.87ms at 720p 60hz, so we can probably assume somewhere around 4.44ms at 120hz. Quite good! Now I need to get another one!! 😅

03/05/2024

This is hilarious. I've never even considered picking up any LRG releases. I really just see these as legal reproductions (ie not original, no matter how expensive they get!) I know some people like their releases, but using CD-Rs is just pathetic lmao

Limited Run Games has apologized to fans who purchased the 3DO game D after it was discovered the company used CD-Rs instead of pressed discs.

28/04/2024

Some shots of the giant Namco arcade in Nippombashi.

Google says there used to be a Tekken museum here, so it's crazy that there's not even one single Tekken cabinet in this building! There are maybe five floors of rhythm games, racing, gundam, Fate, and DBZ games, but no Tekken!

17/04/2024

Taito Station in Namba. Didn't realize they actually had CRT cabs here! Some great games, too.

I got to play some Street Fighter 6 Arcade here. It SUCKS lmao. Low graphics settings, really laggy, and messed up resolution scaling. Some of that is probably the crappy Vewlix stock monitor's fault, to be fair, but any PS5 1080P setup will run better than this. Yikes!

12/04/2024

Went to HEY arcade in Akihabara. Saw this guy playing both 1p and 2p at the same time. Crazy.

08/04/2024

You can't miss Athena on the way to Otaku Road. The building looks so strange and unique! It has several floors of sweet arcade cabinets with fighting games, and the ground floor has claw games and gacha machines. One floor is packed with Neogeo games on 4-Slot MVS boards inside New Versus City cabs. They even have switches to change between traditional ABCD button layouts and "Tekken-style". Killer! As you can see, the monitors are mostly badly calibrated. I would at least try to tweak RGB levels if I could, since most of them just have FAR too much of one color. Otoh, it might be the only place in Namba with 3rd Strike. It's worth a visit just to see all these New Versus Cities still running!

Funny story about this place:
Last year, I came here and found both 3rd Strike machines occupied. When one guy lost, I dropped a coin to play, as usual. I won 5 games in a row and then lost, so I went to the other side to try and say GGs. Turns out my opponent was Irish, and he explained that they were actually renting the cabinet by the hour to practice 💀💀💀💀 I don't know why he let me play six games before telling me! I didn't even know that was an option here lmaoooo

04/04/2024

Another visit to Sengoku Densho in Denden Town, Osaka! I just love this store. I bought a Seimitsu LS32 and a bunch of old school flat Seimitsu buttons, but they had all sorts of modern parts in stock. Gamerfingers, dust washers, Qanba gravity buttons and levers, golden lever parts, etc. I tried the Qanba lever and it felt really awful to me 😂

Btw, Sengoku Densho is actually a general electronics store. It sells far more than just arcade parts. I tried to find a spare nozzle for my Hakko 484 but they didn't have any! 🥲

28/03/2024

On the day Sambo Paul’s Tekken Tag Tournament Korea and The Geek Material came to visit, we had a power outage just before 6pm! 💀💀💀 The power came back shortly after, but it was the perfect jump scare lmao

26/03/2024

Tekken Tag YouTuber Sambo Paul from Busan 🇰🇷🇰🇷 paid us a visit last Sunday!

09/01/2024

I can't wrap my head around this idea. It seems easier to just get a table and put your favorite stick on it lol

https://fb.watch/psiy8H3p0Q/?mibextid=UyTHkb

08/01/2024

Remember those tiny Mushiking / Dino king cabinets? I found a monitor from one of those! It's a Sega 14" monitor with a Panasonic tube.

When connected it to 100v power to test, it would only flicker for a moment and shut down immediately. Something was wrong, so I removed the chassis to check. I found a bunch of bad capacitors and replaced them. It works now! Easy fix! 😃

The image quality is beautiful! This has now replaced the RGB modded 14" Philips TV I used to have on my repair desk. Got a lot more space to work with thanks to this monitor 😍

21/12/2023

Omega level core memory. Took a long time to get power back, and FAR longer to get the house fixed. The arcade survived practically unscathed - only because the Versus City I had in there was preventing the door from blowing open! Heroes 🫡

Typhoon Odette beat up my house but she couldn't damage this TANK of a cab! If we had power, I would have turned it on and played a game of Street Fighter Zero 3!

01/12/2023

3rd Strike at Evo Japan 2024??? That's insane! I think I'll join just for that sweet, sweet 0-2 drop 😍

22/11/2023

Exosia Project raided my arcade last Saturday! :D played some games while having coffee ☕

20/11/2023

Took my daughter to the last day of :) I'm a total sucker for pixel art, so I got some neat stuff from Pixel Hero ! I don't know where my daughter found the rest lol

08/11/2023

The Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution stick for the PS2.

It has switch based Hori buttons and the old white base Hori lever with Omron switches. I haven't used this much in the 17 years that I've owned it, but I've always been fond of how it looks and feels! ❤️💙

31/10/2023

Hey guys. I'm still here lol. I've just been so busy and dead tired for the last two months. Finally got to catch my breath over this short break. I'll be rearranging the cabs in my basement arcade. I'm hoping to gain a bit more space with a better layout, but here's a video of what it looks like right now! 😁

02/09/2023

I know I haven't posted in a while. Been busy with other things 😆 but I have some science for today. Just a quick video about what an arcade stick lag test looks like on the PC.

Before all of this could happen, I had to build a lag tester with an Arduino Uno and a USB Host Shield, and then connect the test pin to a button or direction on the stick. I then connect the stick to the USB Port on the Arduino USB Host Shield. It is not connected to a console or PC while this test runs.

The Arduino shorts the test pin to ground and measures the time it takes for the stick to send a signal. This is repeated 1000 times, and the measurements are displayed on the Arduino IDE Serial Monitor. After this, the data is copied to a spreadsheet. The whole test is then repeated for each available poll rate (in this case, they are 10ms, 8ms, and 1ms). Each test run takes about 1 minute, so I had to speed up some parts of the video 😆

This is a test for the Madcatz TES+ in PS3 Mode. It shows an average latency of 16.9 Ms without overclocking. That's almost guaranteed to lag 1 frame on every input. Garbage! 🚮🚮🚮 For what it's worth, it's actually better than the older Madcatz TE sticks, which averaged 24ms! 💀 Old Madcatz PCBs were awful!

13/08/2023

🤔

06/08/2023

04/08/2023

It's always a pleasure to share these games with the next generation. Who knows if they'll ever get the chance to play arcade games like these in the future? 🥲

Prehistoric Isle 2 is underrated btw!

27/07/2023

I don't know about this... This was in Tekken Tag 1 on PS2 and it actually wasn't fun.

23/07/2023

The Geek Material held their first anniversary party at VAIS, an arcade bar, last night. I wanted to go and buy some of their cool merch, plus they held a 3rd strike tournament so I had to join!

I had never been to VAIS before. The tournament setup was a Pandora machine. There was a little lag but it was playable and the controls all worked, but the craziest thing about it was the messed up control layout:

MP HP LK
LP MK HK

I knew I couldn't play normally (aka Yun Genei Jin) with this setup, but I realized I could pick Yang and just spam c.mk into EX mantis slashes with normal button placements so I went with that. Early on in the tournament, I noticed most participants weren't 3s players, so EX mantis was enough for me to win my games and make it to the finals.

At this point the organizers decided to let each player pick his OPPONENT'S character... lmao I'd never heard of this before but I went with it and picked Twelve for my opponent. 💀 I could tell he didn't know much about the game but surprisingly, he settled on picking Q for me! I ran away, taunted 3 times to buff my defense, and pressed some buttons until he died. I think he realized how bad Twelve was since he made me pick Twelve for the next game. Smart, but I won that game as well by having a slightly better Twelve 😆

For the last match we were finally allowed to pick our normal characters, so it was Yang vs Ken. I just stuck to my c.mk EX slash strategy and ended up winning the whole thing! Woot!!

Congrats on your first year, TGM! Thanks for hosting the tournament!