Arcade Otaku - アーケード オタク

I recently picked this up from a member called dee2er on the Aussie Arcade forum, its a JAMMA adapter PCB for a Raspberry Pi 2,it converts a Pi to a JAMMA board which can be used in any JAMMA cab with no modification to the cab, the unit is plug and play and powered totally by JAMMA like a normal PCB no external power supply is needed also it works on 15khz arcade monitors, there is even a plug for a kick harness a wire for which was supplied.

Dee2er sells them as a kit or pre-assembled he will also sell them as just the board only if you wish, the full pre-assemble kit cost was $230 australian dollars delivered although I did get hit with a £27 customs charge and it took 2 weeks to arrive.

There are 3 versions of Mame on the SD card Mame4all, Final Burn Alpha and Advancemame. The SD card has 2 partitions, on a windows PC the roms folders for each mame emulator can be accessed and roms added/deleted as you wish, the other partition on the card can only be read in linux in this part you can access emulator configs, snapshots etc so you can set it up as you wish, also when playing a game if you press tab the mame menu appears and you can adjust game options.

Reading the forum thread it appears it doesn’t work with multisync monitors and there is no video amp on the board so it does appear slightly dark on my arcade monitor even with the brightness on full maybe tweaking the monitor chassis pots might correct this?

Anyway, ive only had a quick go and so far im really impressed loads of the titles play really well far better than than on the Chinese multiboards with no lag/screen tearing.

Heres some videos of the board running :

Horizontal Games - Video 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na1kWKzpZWk

CPS1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmpdHPaGGfU


CPS2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKccjRb2ABo


CPS3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0yVZKYQezo


Horizontal Games - Video 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_WseEfLueM


Vertical Games

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWQZfN4a1MQ


Daphne Emulator (Running On Raspberry Pi 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpIoo2TH2yg


If anyone wants to have a read of the thread on Aussie Arcade for a bit more info the link is below, I will invite Dee2er to this thread so he can answer any questions you might have.

http://www.aussiearcade.com.au/showthre ... spberry+PI

No video amp is a pain.

Seems to be a nice little kit.

cools wrote:No video amp is a pain.

Why is that?

An MS8 needs amped video for one. I can't quote model numbers but a significant number of arcade monitors need it. Most of them. Not having an amp onboard is crazy for anything designed to connect to a low resolution CRT (since everything else that's designed to connect to it runs with amped video!).

You can't just fix it with pot adjustment unless you're getting at the chassis itself.

The monitors that accept unamped video all accept amped video too, and have a switch or different inputs for them.

Looks great.

Regarding the video amp, dee2er wrote:The focus of this version was to lower the price compared to the first version of the board. I'll probably put a video amp into the next version (if I get to version 3). For now if you need one you will have to supply your own. Ultimarcs video amp works well with the board but if I supplied them they would end up being flown around the world twice, adding to the cost.

Great idea but really needs a built-in video amp to be of use - most arcade monitors will struggle with 0.7V signal inputs. Adding the amp shouldn't increase the BOM cost by more than €10.

pubjoe wrote:Looks great.

Regarding the video amp, dee2er wrote:The focus of this version was to lower the price compared to the first version of the board. I'll probably put a video amp into the next version (if I get to version 3). For now if you need one you will have to supply your own. Ultimarcs video amp works well with the board but if I supplied them they would end up being flown around the world twice, adding to the cost.

Cool.

Reading into the technical bits, there's a lot that I could pick at BUT it should do a much better job than the Chinese multiboards.

Ideal partner for the dinoking/l&b cabs imo.

Miles better than the Chinese multiboards. There is stuff to improve but you're getting closer to a groovy mame PC with each improvement. The highlight of this is that it actually does a good job running on jamma alone, and it costs about £100.

Currently, if you want the best mame you have to go X86, but it always feels very power wasteful when I turn my cab into a fan assisted oven.

Something more like this is the future ideal imo.

Yeah it would be great if it was a plug and play GM board.

New videos added to the original post showing CPS1, CPS2 and Street Fighter 3rd Strike on CPS3

Thanks for the videos. It's a great little set up. Could you answer a few questions?

• So CPS3 needs an overclock to 900? I'm a bit confused about that as I thought the Raspberry Pi 2's CPU is clocked at 900 by default.
• Have you viewed the FPS and were there any dips in frame rate in the CPS2 and CPS3 games?
• Any tearing at all? Even with FBA?
• How about input lag? If you have a 60+ fps camera, a view of both the joystick and screen for a few presses would be fantastic.

Hmm this does look pretty nice but like pubjoe said, if it has any screen tearing or lag that would be a dealbreaker for me. How is it compared to a Groovymame setup?

It's a pain in the **** having a bulky desktop PC and waiting for it to boot whenever I want a quick blast on something.

Mine boots faster than most PCBs.

Cools: Your PC boots faster than a PCB? 5seconds?

spmbx: Your PC boots up and is ready to play before the monitor warms up? I find that hard to believe.

The number of PCBs that instant boot is significantly fewer than those that have a boot check but yeah, its ready to go in about 8 seconds or so if I enable fast boot. Normally have it disabled though for sexy bootleg Taito boot screen fakery, so longer.

From cold its like spmbx's and is at the frontend before the monitor has fully brightened up.

Windows 7 on an SSD and properly supported BIOS is crazy quick.

Oof nice! Mine takes about 4mins to get into a game, maybe I need to set it up more efficiently :/

Mines probably running in about 10-15 seconds and im only running a E8400 , 4GB Ram and 80GB HDD via XP

Ive just kept the HDD to the bare minimum

I like haha what a nifty little board that is!