Arcade 1Ups replica cabs thread

Chris_Heilong · 12-02-2019 3:23pm

Full rom sets are such a waste, you will never play the vast majority and when presented with such a list of games it will put you off playing anything at all.

Doge · 12-02-2019 3:50pm

Chris_Heilong wrote: »

Full rom sets are such a waste, you will never play the vast majority and when presented with such a list of games it will put you off playing anything at all.

It depends on how disciplined the person is really. I have found a lot of good games I never knew existed and just added them to my favorites.

Inviere · 12-02-2019 5:37pm

Chris_Heilong wrote: »

Full rom sets are such a waste, you will never play the vast majority and when presented with such a list of games it will put you off playing anything at all.

I wouldn't say they're a waste, but I agree, less is more when it comes to game availability. I've grabbed a good few full sets because if I want to add a game at some point, it's really convenient having it there ready to go, as opposed to trying to download individual roms these days. More so with MAME, because one version of rom might not work with the version of MAME on the machine etc.

Doge wrote: »

It depends on how disciplined the person is really. I have found a lot of good games I never knew existed and just added them to my favorites.

Launchbox has a fantastic 'playlists' feature for that kind of thing. Makes discovering games pretty fun

The Last Bandit · 12-02-2019 5:55pm

I've about 2K roms on my cab once I filtered out the totally irrelevant crap, and using multiple 'displays' in Attact-mode to categorise/filter them into sensible lists like - shooter, platform, fighting, sports, driving, favorites, all games etc.
Obviously most of the time I'm just browsing thru 'favorites' which is a pretty short list, or just go straight to Galaga. But is nice to be able to select one of the other lists and hit random a few times to see what it chucks up - who knows maybe you'll find a gem worth adding to the favorites list.

o1s1n · 12-02-2019 6:02pm

Roms are a godsend when it comes to dropping cash on items too. Sure most of the arcade PCBs I've bought over the years would have been given a test drive in MAME first.

Doge · 12-02-2019 10:00pm

Inviere wrote: »

Launchbox has a fantastic 'playlists' feature for that kind of thing. Makes discovering games pretty fun

Yeah, I’m going to be using some of the launchbox xml category lists and drop them into attract mode so I’ll be able to browse by genre.

Hopefully it won’t be too hard to do and the Nevato theme can be used as a “main menu” also.

The Last Bandit · 12-02-2019 10:04pm

I used the Nevato theme for a while but tbh its looks a bit crap on a large CRT. The default basic theme suits the cab a lot better.

Doge · 13-02-2019 12:08am

The Last Bandit wrote: »

I used the Nevato theme for a while but tbh its looks a bit crap on a large CRT. The default basic theme suits the cab a lot better.

That's very interesting, I thought the default theme was rubbish! Then again im using the 17" LCD that came with the 1up.

Here she is illuminated, you can't see the text "coin" on those white buttons when using a phone but they're there in real life plus they're not as bright as a nuclear explosion like they look in the picture.

My 3" speakers arrive tomorrow. Sorry TLB,.but that ugly yellow paragraph kills the look of the Control Panel already imo, so it shall be mostly covered by the left speaker. Looks like an ugly yellow sticker slapped onto it!

CiDeRmAn · 13-02-2019 1:03am

Ha, I made the mistake, on the FB Arcade 1up group, of posting that I didn't like illuminated buttons as I found them garish and distracting....
90% of replies were having the laugh about it, for and against, but that 10% of pure @ssholerly accusing me of negative posting, forcing my likes on others... FFS!
Oh, then the local admins deleted the whole thread, over a couple of people who are waaaay too attached to their choices of arcade controls...

Doge · 13-02-2019 1:08am

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Ha, I made the mistake, on the FB Arcade 1up group, of posting that I didn't like illuminated buttons as I found them garish and distracting....
90% of replies were having the laugh about it, for and against, but that 10% of pure @ssholerly accusing me of negative posting, forcing my likes on others... FFS!
Oh, then the local admins deleted the whole thread, over a couple of people who are waaaay too attached to their choices of arcade controls...

The “Arcade 1Up & Modding” group has some great folk in it, they seem really helpful.

https://m.facebook.com/groups/2768572869834975?ref=share

Inviere · 13-02-2019 5:25pm

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Ha, I made the mistake, on the FB Arcade 1up group, of posting that I didn't like illuminated buttons as I found them garish and distracting....

I'd agree. Every time I seen them in pics they've always got illuminated buttons. Each to their own etc, but can't say I like them.

o1s1n · 13-02-2019 5:55pm

It's the equivalent to a boy racer sticking a spoiler and light kits on a Starlet.

I'll stick to my factory made Rolls Royce, thank you.

ozmo · 15-02-2019 12:23pm

So - more progress on modding the existing hardware -

A lot of success - but with limitations -
Thanks to the guys on Reddit - I now have the ability to put new mame roms on the existing hardware - downside though is the choice of compatible games is extremely limited - to about 10 - and space on the device is very limited at about 2mb.

So I ve got tetris, millipeed, gravaton and 4 player Gauntlet 1 & 2 in that space.

"1944" should work - would be great I think - but it just wont fit.

Inviere · 16-02-2019 11:50am

Impressive, I do like the idea of keeping it stock and just adding a handful of games. I wonder if there's a way for the original board to use usb for external storage (I think you need to solder on a usb header)

Doge · 17-02-2019 2:30pm

Check out this dudes complete Arcade 1Up collection posted in the modding Facebook grouo. :eek:

Kinda sad in a way that there's no original CRT cabs when he has such a great space for them.

Inviere · 17-02-2019 2:32pm

Pretty cool, they look well together. True re him having space for some original cabs, though they'd only show up the 1UP's

Doge · 24-02-2019 2:45am

Looks like Arcade1UP have improved their more recent cabs.

Wish I had one now with proper T-molding so I could replace it with Red. Looks like I'll have to use red vinyl electrical tape as originally planned.

deadl0ck · 24-02-2019 8:56am

Doge wrote: »

Looks like Arcade1UP have improved their more recent cabs.

Wish I had one now with proper T-molding so I could replace it with Red. Looks like I'll have to use red vinyl electrical tape as originally planned.

One of the retro asylum guys has a YouTube video where he put a premade bartop cab together and he used car trim as it wasn't cut for t-moulding. It looked pretty good and he said you can buy it easily on ebay in lengths. Might be worth checking

deadl0ck · 24-02-2019 8:03pm

deadl0ck wrote: »

One of the retro asylum guys has a YouTube video where he put a premade bartop cab together and he used car trim as it wasn't cut for t-moulding. It looked pretty good and he said you can buy it easily on ebay in lengths. Might be worth checking

Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss0fgOsg938

Go to 53:25

I pinged him and he said he got the trim on http://www.rubbertrim.co.uk/

25-02-2019 12:59pm

My replacement control panel cover just arrived in pieces, not a wonder considering how it was packaged. To say I’m not happy is an understatement.

80s Synth Pop · 25-02-2019 1:24pm

unlucky

Mine arrive this morning too and thankfully it's all in one piece. The basic packaging was a risk with something as fragile as this.

25-02-2019 2:39pm

80s Synth Pop wrote: »

unlucky Mine arrive this morning too and thankfully it's all in one piece. The basic packaging was a risk with something as fragile as this.

Unreal, who in their right name packs something in the way they did

Guess I'll have to wait now another 2 months for a replacement, that's if they even send out one.

McDermotX · 25-02-2019 3:02pm

Yep......broken one here as well.

Completely unacceptable packaging. Broken in two like it was folded over. Lovely.

CiDeRmAn · 25-02-2019 6:47pm

Mine arrived last week with a large crack, though it's not as catastrophic as yours

CiDeRmAn · 26-02-2019 1:00am

Giving some serious thought to converting my Asteroids cab to Retropie.
I'd need to change the spinner to a compatible one for the Pie.

Inviere · 26-02-2019 4:08pm

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Giving some serious thought to converting my Asteroids cab to Retropie.
I'd need to change the spinner to a compatible one for the Pie.

Not to knock the Pi, it's a grand little gizmo, but I just can't hack anything on it after using RetroArch with the run-ahead latency reduction feature...the input lag on a Pi is a killer now for me. Funds willing of course, but if you could get a low end/basic PC in there you'd have a far better emulation experience with it, than you would a Pi

KeRbDoG · 27-02-2019 10:47am

Inviere wrote: »

Not to knock the Pi, it's a grand little gizmo, but I just can't hack anything on it after using RetroArch with the run-ahead latency reduction feature...the input lag on a Pi is a killer now for me. Funds willing of course, but if you could get a low end/basic PC in there you'd have a far better emulation experience with it, than you would a Pi

Interesting - would the input lag with the Pi be via the GPIO port or a USB adapter or is it because of RetroArch?

Shapey Fiend · 27-02-2019 3:33pm

I don't think I'm being a spod when I say my retropie has horrible input lag, particularly on SNES emulation. I must check this out.

ozmo · 27-02-2019 3:50pm

KeRbDoG wrote: »

Interesting - would the input lag with the Pi be via the GPIO port or a USB adapter or is it because of RetroArch?

Possibly no need to use USB adapters if you dont have a crazy number of buttons
- there are plenty GPIO pins and retropie does have a GPIO-to-Keyboard driver built in to support two joysticks. You assign keys to GPIO pins - and in Retropie you assign the key to a function as normal.

The driver I used was able to support 3 joysticks.

It would be nice is Retropie supported the GPIO natively - ie not emulating a usb keyboard. Wonder why it doesnt?

Inviere · 27-02-2019 6:17pm

KeRbDoG wrote: »

Interesting - would the input lag with the Pi be via the GPIO port or a USB adapter or is it because of RetroArch?

I've not tried anything via GPIO admittedly, however, even on PC the difference between Run-Ahead ON/OFF is gamechanging. Games like Super Mario World and MegaMan feel completely different, and far more playable than before. There's basically two instances of the RA core running at the same time, so it's not something the Pi could handle.

The Last Bandit · 27-02-2019 9:53pm

The run-ahead feature is separate to actual input lag, its able to reduce the perceived lag by some real clever monkeying about with the running game engine to remove wasted frames.

The actual time from when you press the button to when its detect/processed/filtered up to the emulator hasn't changed at all.

GPIO vs USB, hmm... the USB stack is well established and can be tweaked to poll every 1ms and quick look at the SNESDev driver shows its waits 20ms between polling the GPIO's - which corresponds to a 50Hz frame.. I'd definitely change that to 16ms anyway to get better compatibility with 60Hz stuff.
But, then again the faster you poll the higher the CPU load and less CPU available for your emulator..

Inviere · 28-02-2019 4:19pm

The Last Bandit wrote: »

The actual time from when you press the button to when its detect/processed/filtered up to the emulator hasn't changed at all.

No, that'd require a hardware solution I'd imagine? The real reduction is in latency, from when the button press is received by RetroArch. Comparing something like a stock RetroPie installation, against the pc version of RetroArch with Run Ahead configured is literally game changing in terms of latency reduction (they claim it can reduce latency lower than real/original hardware, and it damn well feels close to it). PLUS, you have all those lovely modern shaders to use (ones that a Pi just unfortunately hasn't got the juice to run), which make retrogaming on a modern display so much more palatable than how it looks stock. It's a more expensive solution, but the additional cost isn't for nothing, you get real/significant improvements to the user experience, and the gameplay.

o1s1n · 28-02-2019 4:22pm

Any idea how it works? So I press a button on my controller, that is processed and appears on an LCD screen that has lag...apart from predicting what I'm going to press and doing it before I actually press the button, I can't really figure out how that works if the screen has lag?

Inviere · 28-02-2019 4:32pm

o1s1n wrote: »

Any idea how it works? So I press a button on my controller, that is processed and appears on an LCD screen that has lag...apart from predicting what I'm going to press and doing it before I actually press the button, I can't really figure out how that works if the screen has lag?

It runs two instances of the game, the one on screen, and the other offscreen but slightly ahead. Technical explanation (I only ever use Two-Instance Mode as there's audio issues with Single Instance Mode for me). I'm not entirely sure how it works, I can only comment on how effective it is, it's a stellar reduction in latency.

Here is a more detailed explanation on runahead by its author Dwedit.

How the Run-Ahead feature currently works:

There are two modes of operation.

Single-Instance Mode
Two-Instance Mode
In Single-Instance mode, when it wants to run a frame, instead it does this:

Disable audio and video, run a frame, Save State
Run additional frames with audio and video disabled if we want to run ahead more than one frame
Enable audio and video and run the frame we want to see
Load State
All save states and load states are done to ram and never reach the disk.

In Two-Instance mode, it does this:

Primary core does Audio only, then saves state
Secondary core loads state, runs frames ahead discarding audio and video, then runs a frame with video only.
For performance reasons, it only resyncs the secondary core when input is dirty, otherwise it keeps running additional frames on the secondary core while the input is clean.

Why bother with Two-Instance mode at all? Many of the cores do not leave audio emulation in a clean state after loading state, so you would get buzzing. Using Two-Instance mode makes the primary core not do any load states and avoids that.

In Single-Instance mode, it is possible to improve performance further by running ahead without loading state while input is clean, but I am not currently doing that.
I'd imagine there'd be issues if calling the "run a frame" function left you in a state further along than a single frame.

I'm also not doing any speculative inputs at all.

https://docs.libretro.com/guides/runahead/

The Last Bandit · 28-02-2019 4:41pm

Its basically magic.

Inviere · 28-02-2019 4:57pm

It's also game dependent. Ie, not all games will work via the one setting (in terms of how many frames you want to run ahead). Some games will be '2', others might be '3', another could be '1', and so forth. So you basically run the game, measure how many frames you need to run ahead, and save the settings...next time you load the game it'll apply those settings, so it's a once per game setup.

CiDeRmAn · 28-02-2019 5:44pm

The Last Bandit wrote: »

Its basically magic.

It's finding an alternate dimension, where everything is 2 seconds out of step with this reality and, in an unexpected turn of events, Prince is still alive....
They then link the console here to the console there and, boom, no-lag gameplay... Also, more raspberry berets...

80s Synth Pop · 28-02-2019 7:23pm

I must try that "run ahead" system out. Never used it when it first came out as the mame devs said it was an ugly hack
http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=378841&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&vc=1

Interested now to see how it runs.

Inviere · 28-02-2019 7:56pm

80s Synth Pop wrote: »

I must try that "run ahead" system out. Never used it when it first came out as the mame devs said it was an ugly hack
http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=378841&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&vc=1

Interested now to see how it runs.

The MAME Dev's would call the Mona Lisa an ugly hack too :P

In that thread above, highlights a difference in design philosophy. RetroArch itself isn't an emulator, it's a frontend for any number of RetroArch 'cores', which are either exclusive emulators for a given system, or ports of existing ones, designed to run in the RetroArch environment.

I personally love the RetroArch model, because it means I can play an NES game, followed by an N64 game, followed by a Snes game, followed then a PS1 game, all without having to run individual dedicated emulators. When itself fronted by something like Launchbox (so a frontend for a frontend really), it because a super streamlined experience, where you only need to ever configure one emulator for ALL of your settings, custom controls, display settings, shaders, etc. If you imagine something like the Nes and Snes Mini user experience, but better, and expanded across many many more systems.

I feel the MAME Dev's in that thread, while I have the utmost respect for them, are probably being a little harsh. I'd have RetroArch all day long over individual emulators, with the exception of a handful like Dolphin.

Inviere · 28-02-2019 7:59pm

I will say this though, setting RetroArch up isn't particularly difficult or beyond the abilities of anyone at all, it is a bit involved if you want it just right. Secondly, the UI isn't to everyones liking, so I find RetroArch paired with Launchbox (LB provides all the lovely scraped info, artwork, boxart, instruction manuals etc, and gives the feeling of a polished, finished product) is the best I've ever used. There's very very little I could say bad about the whole thing.

Doge · 04-03-2019 1:28pm

Collected my SFII overlay from the depot today and it's in one piece. I'll probably offer this up to someone on here as I'm gonna go try and break out the Rust-oleum today and spray the original panel if it stays dry.

Arcade1UP is now selling these on there site for about 40 or 50 dollars,a but cheeky if you ask me.

Skerries · 04-03-2019 3:56pm

let us know how this goes as I don't fancy trying to drill out this for my extra buttons

Doge · 04-03-2019 10:28pm

Skerries wrote: »

let us know how this goes as I don't fancy trying to drill out this for my extra buttons

It should be fine so long as you don't touch it within 10 /15 mins after spraying like I did. :pac:

I noticed a patch that was still damp when the rest had dried and put my finger on it out of curiousity, ended up smudging and lifting the paint in the process.

Just goes to show how crappy the paint job is on these things.

I'm thinking of mounting my speakers to the front of the cab now underneath the control panel:

Would save me drilling into the protective overlay as I'll probably end up using it now.

Skerries · 13-03-2019 8:04pm

4 player mod

Jerichoholic · 14-03-2019 10:05am

One of the lads from Arcade1up was on We Talk Games. He strongly hinted at a cabinet with a wheel and pedals for racing games coming soon.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/WeTalkGames

Shapey Fiend · 14-03-2019 2:02pm

I always think it's odd when people theme arcade machines around non-arcade games.

o1s1n · 14-03-2019 2:07pm

Especially if it's a game like Zelda that's not even close to being an arcade game.

Inviere · 14-03-2019 4:08pm

Shapey Fiend wrote: »

I always think it's odd when people theme arcade machines around non-arcade games.

Gtfo, nothing like a Super Mario World themed cab....

Doge · 14-03-2019 4:34pm

Jerichoholic wrote: »

One of the lads from Arcade1up was on We Talk Games. He strongly hinted at a cabinet with a wheel and pedals for racing games coming soon.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/WeTalkGames

God I can only imagine how poor the quality of the wheel and pedals will be to make them affordable.

Since they cheaped out on joysticks and buttons then this doesn't sound promising.

The buttons weren't too bad compared to the buttons in the iCades though.

Those were a nightmare, your hands would tire in 2 minutes they were so heavy and clunky.

Oisín took the piss out of me saying it before, but he obviously doesn't know just how bad they were!
I've since wanted to replace all the buttons in his cabs with stock iCade buttons to get my revenge.

Doge · 14-03-2019 4:36pm

Anyone in Cork want a Street Fighter II protector overlay thingie for free?

It would save me posting it.

I've since finished my cab minus PCB mounting and cable managment.

Must get a video of it up later.

Arcade 1Ups replica cabs thread

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