Arcade 1Ups replica cabs thread

As of today I've completed my Arcade1Up Jamma Mod.

I'm just going to give a little recap of the process as it might help others who are considering this, in some areas it seems very simple and in others more complicated. I started out by buying a Pandora's Box JAMMA Kit on EBay. If I were to advise anyone in future I would actually say maybe don't go with the kit. You'll end up having to replace things anyway.

It's very handy in the sense that you get a JAMMA Harness, PB6 PCB, a fan, speakers, joysticks and a power supply but the cheap LED buttons and micro-switches were not an easy connect at all. So I ended up having to buy a Happ style set from Amazon. These were much easier to deal with. And even saying that, I'm going to swap out the Zippy Joysticks for Sanwa Micro-switch Joysticks down the road as I just don't find getting diagonals on the Zippy easy, even after removing the restrictor gates (fine for the four way classics but not ideal for fighting games - a pity as the Zippy's mounting hole naturally fit into the 1Up). So if anyone was thinking of doing this I'd actually recommend to get everything separately, not as a kit. I only went for the kit because it was very convenient price-wise. There's also the matter of ending up with spares - I decided not to use the amp or the second fan.

In terms of modding the cabinet itself to JAMMA, it's pretty straightforward. You basically just gut everything and replace. Retro Ralph and FourCo OpPop have very good videos on the process of modding the 1Up to a JAMMA so even as a first timer, following those videos helps big time and I understood everything. I actually would have preferred to stick with the stock parts but the 1Up's use proprietary micro-switches that aren't compatible with the standard arcade style ones. There are little things in the process that seem simple but are timely e.g. getting the stock joysticks off with the amount of superglue that is used, replacing the stock speaker (again, would have preferred to keep it but the stock + and - connectors were soldered to the point where it would have complicated things).

I also opted to have a new hole drilled for the new speaker grill. Didn't have to do that but I liked the aesthetics of it. I also put a coin mech into the front panel. Not completely necessary for a home mod but I like to challenge myself to be able to 1CC games, not having the coin mech for me just makes it less "arcade".

I anticipated the Chinese JAMMA harness would have been an issue over the subtraction of ground wires, but this wasn't the case. In fact, the seller on Ebay had the Tekken 2 PCB at €90 with the kick buttons soldered into the spare JAMMA pins so no need for kick harness. The only part that really frustrated me was the trouble over that faulty GBS video converter board I mentioned in the other thread.

But all's well that ends well. Must just put in the Scanline Generator once I have an extra VGA cable then the better Joysticks down the road and then sorted, sorted. And I've kind of caught the bug for JAMMA boards so if anyone has anything that they're finished with, give a yell (but not straight away, I need to save up again first) :P 😉

Here's the finished product. Side note: I was very happy to see Heihachi's face today (from the attract video). Scared five year old me but for twenty-eight year old me it meant mission accomplished.