# Latest Arcade Pickup - Vewlix Diamond Blue w/ Artax TTX3 Multi 4.1! **Source:** RetroRalph **Type:** video **Published:** 2023-07-11 **Duration:** 13m 59s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niNuByjA3Uw --- ## Analysis RetroRalph reviews a Vewlix Diamond Blue arcade cabinet he purchased from Hadouken Arcade, featuring Taito Type X3 405 hardware running Artex Multi 4.1 emulation software. The cabinet can play a comprehensive library of arcade games including fighting games, shmups, and Laserdisc titles, though he plans to upgrade the CPU and GPU to play modern titles like Street Fighter 4 and 5. He discusses the superiority of genuine Vewlix cabinets over Chinese 'Chu-Lex' clones and plans future content on cabinet upgrades and related arcade projects. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Vewlix cabinets are superior to Chu-Lex (Chinese clones) in sound, screen, amp, and power supply quality — _Direct comparison statement by Jon explaining why he chose genuine Vewlix over Chinese counterpart_ - [MEDIUM] The Taito Type X3 405 model is less capable than the 404 model despite higher model number — _Jon states he could only get 405 and that 404 was 'a little bit better' but doesn't provide technical details_ - [HIGH] Artex Multi 4.1 image now incorporates Fightcade integration for online play — _Jon describes Fightcade integration feature requiring Ethernet connection and Fightcade account login_ - [HIGH] Street Fighter 5 currently runs at only 20 FPS on the unupgraded Type X3 405 — _Jon explicitly states SF5 limitation before planned upgrades_ - [MEDIUM] Carlos (formerly of Arcade1Up) has purchased the rights to Rec Room Masters cabinets — _Jon mentions this in closing context about upcoming video content, describes Carlos as running Arcade1Up company_ ### Notable Quotes > "Vu-Lex is the original Japanese cabinets made by Taito, and there's a couple different models. And then Chu-Lex is really China's approach at reverse engineering this exact cabinet. But that's kind of where the similarities end. It's cheaper sheet metal, they usually put Pandora's boxes in them, there's cheaper displays in them and for the most part everything about them is mediocre in comparison to the Japanese counterpart." > — **Jon (RetroRalph)**, Early in video (~2:00) > _Establishes quality differentiation between genuine and counterfeit arcade cabinet types, important for collector purchasing decisions_ > "It does have a 1080p screen it's not a 4k screen. There are kits that allow you to upgrade these screens but this is one of the later gen Vuelix cabinets so actually it has a pretty decent screen in it and it looks pretty good from my perspective." > — **Jon (RetroRalph)**, Mid-video (~8:30) > _Details technical specifications and upgrade path for display hardware_ > "What's cool about it is it's really comprehensive of everything on it. I mean, it's a really great multi-image. It very much leans toward the modern fighting games, but it also has a bunch of retro fighting games as well, Neo Geo games." > — **Jon (RetroRalph)**, ~11:00 > _Describes content breadth of Artex Multi 4.1 emulation image_ > "I can't collect every arcade game and there are arcade games that maybe I don't want to have the dedicated cabinet of so how nice would it be to just sit down and play them on something like this." > — **Jon (RetroRalph)**, ~7:00 > _Articulates primary motivation for multi-arcade cabinets in collector strategy_ > "If you do update or flash the BIOS on the Type X3 you can actually add pretty much any video card that's compatible with with the motherboard." > — **Jon (RetroRalph)**, ~10:15 > _Explains upgrade path and technical customization capability of hardware platform_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Jon | person | Host of RetroRalph channel, arcade collector and enthusiast | | Scarlet Sprites | person | YouTube content creator and friend of Jon who inspired the Vewlix cabinet purchase | | Hadouken Arcade | company | Retailer/importer that sells imported Vewlix cabinets from Japan, cleaned up for resale | | Taito | company | Japanese arcade manufacturer that created the original Vewlix cabinet design | | Vewlix Diamond Blue | product | Specific arcade cabinet model purchased by Jon, Japanese-manufactured with Taito Type X3 405 hardware | | Taito Type X3 405 | product | Control board/motherboard hardware running in the Vewlix cabinet, less capable than 404 model | | Artex Multi 4.1 | product | Comprehensive emulation image software running on Type X3, includes fighting games, Fightcade integration, shmups, retro games | | Chu-Lex | product | Chinese counterfeit/clone version of Vewlix cabinets with lower quality components | | Fightcade | product | Online fighting game platform integrated into Artex Multi 4.1, accessible via Ethernet | | Carlos | person | Currently runs Arcade1Up company, purchased rights to Rec Room Masters cabinets | | Arcade1Up | company | Home arcade cabinet manufacturer, Carlos is mentioned as company operator in context of Rec Room Masters acquisition | | Rec Room Masters | company | Original arcade cabinet control panel manufacturer, rights now owned by Carlos/Arcade1Up | | Galloping Ghost | company | Arcade venue where Jon previously played Contra Evolution and Afterburner Climax | | Street Fighter IV | game | Modern fighting game Jon wants to play on upgraded cabinet | | Street Fighter V | game | Modern fighting game running at 20 FPS on unupgraded Type X3, target for hardware upgrade | | Contra Evolution | game | Modern Contra remake available on Artex Multi 4.1, also available as arcade board bootleg Jon purchased | | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles | game | Retro arcade game available on Artex Multi 4.1, used as example of CRT filter implementation | ### Topics - **Primary:** Multi-arcade emulation cabinets, Vewlix vs Chu-Lex cabinet quality comparison, Taito Type X3 hardware specifications and upgrade paths, Artex Multi 4.1 emulation software and game library - **Secondary:** Arcade collector strategy and game acquisition, Fightcade online fighting game integration, Arcade cabinet hardware upgrades (CPU, GPU, display) ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.85) — Jon expresses genuine enthusiasm for the Vewlix cabinet purchase, appreciates the game library breadth, and is excited about upcoming upgrades. Some mild self-deprecation about selling previous multi-cade cabinet and purchasing Contra Evolution board when it's available on the image, but overall tone is upbeat and satisfied with the acquisition. ### Signals - **[business_signal]** Arcade1Up acquisition of Rec Room Masters brand rights under new leadership (Carlos) suggests continued market viability of arcade cabinet manufacturing despite Arcade1Up's previous challenges (confidence: medium) — Jon mentions Carlos bought rights to Rec Room Masters and notes control panels were 'already awesome' and Carlos 'took it to the next level' - **[market_signal]** Import market for genuine Japanese arcade hardware remains active through specialized retailers (Hadouken Arcade) who source, refurbish, and resell Vewlix cabinets, suggesting collector demand for authentic vs counterfeit hardware (confidence: high) — Jon purchased from Hadouken Arcade which 'imports these from Japan, cleans them up,' and Jon explicitly chose genuine Vewlix over cheaper Chu-Lex alternative despite cost difference - **[technology_signal]** Vewlix cabinets represent modern arcade cabinet technology with upgradeable components (BIOS-flashable motherboard, replaceable CPU/GPU, SSD upgrade capability), enabling flexible emulation platform for game libraries (confidence: high) — Jon details BIOS flashing, CPU/GPU replacement, SSD upgrades, and Ethernet connectivity for Fightcade integration --- ## Transcript Hey guys, welcome back! Okay, it's been a long time since we've covered any kind of emulation product on this channel, but a lot of the channel's roots lie in emulation, things like MAME. If you remember, we built that gigantic beast cabinet that was just this awesome multi-cade. Unfortunately, I sold it, which in hindsight seems kind of stupid, because that could play all the games that maybe I didn't want to buy dedicated cabinets of. But I gotta admit, sometimes I'm inspired by other people. And about six months ago, I was, I think it was six months ago, I don't even know anymore, but I was watching a YouTube video by one of my friends, Scarlet Sprites, and he was covering a Vuelix cabinet that he got. And I was always like, hmm. In the back of my mind, it's always been kind of neat, but it's modern displays and I don't play as many of the modern games, although it would be really cool to play things like Street Fighter IV and V on a cabinet like this. So I ended up picking up this Vulex Diamond Blue. This is not a Chu-Lex, you may have heard that term before, there's Chu-Lex and Vu-Lex. Vu-Lex is the original Japanese cabinets made by Taito, and there's a couple different models. And then Chu-Lex is really China's approach at reverse engineering this exact cabinet. But that's kind of where the similarities end. It's cheaper sheet metal, they usually put Pandora's boxes in them, there's cheaper displays in them and for the most part everything about them is mediocre in comparison to the Japanese counterpart. This has better sound, better screen, better amp, better power supply, better everything. So if you were looking at one of these and you wanted to get the Chulex counterpart you're probably going to end up ripping out a lot of the original components in which case I don't know if it makes a whole lot of financial sense. So I picked this up from Hadouken Arcade. I'll have a link in the description of this video. He basically imports these from Japan. He cleans them up. Matter matter of fact I didn't even touch this I literally took it right out of the wrapper and it looks really really good the overall quality of it is awesome and yes I put some gaudy LEDs in it for this video but I'm like hey man it's modern isn't modern all about the RGB lighting I mean I watch all these like guys with their modern games and RGB lights everywhere but I probably won't keep it but I just thought it was kind of neat for the video but anyways let's explore a little bit about this what's running inside it what games can it play and can it be upgraded to play even more games? Okay, so your next question is going to be, well, what is running inside this? So this is the Taito Type X3, but this is actually the 405 model. Not to be confused with the 404 model, which is actually a little bit better. It's weird, right? You'd think the higher number would be the better system. So the 404 was the only one I could get my hands on. So unfortunately, I can't play all of the most current games, but the cool thing is the PC that comes in this thing, which is the Taito Type-X 3, can be upgraded. So if you simply flash the BIOS on the motherboard, you can basically put any graphics card in that you want. Now, I already have one picked out. I'm also going to upgrade the processor, and while I'm in there, I'll probably upgrade the RAM as well. That will allow me to play games like Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 5. Unfortunately right now if I try to play Street Fighter 5 it's only gonna allow me to do that at 20 frames per second Not exactly a good experience for a fighting game But the other cool thing is this image includes all of the Taito Type 2 and 3 games It also has a couple of other emulators It got Neo Geo on here it has Naomi it has a Thomas Wave It got Laserdisc games like it got Time Traveler and Space Ace Mad Dog McCree So it's got a bunch of those games that you remember from the arcade, the Laserdisc based games. You also have a bunch of different other emulators. You've got CPS3 games, CPS2 games, CPS1 games, Cave. cave so you have like a lot of your shmups on here it's really cool the other neat thing about this is it's got this kind of cool feature i'll show you here in a second it does play gun games and you end up playing that with the joystick but um whatever it's they're on here there's some different categories like platform games you've got games like shinobi sunset riders the other neat thing is it's got a sports category so you have your nba jam hang time but where it gets even cooler is there's this special section that has like music videos if you just want to kind of play like some cool stuff like there's an 80s cartoon thing where it will just sort of play a bunch of 80s cartoons on the screen as like a screensaver while you're just hanging out in your game room and there's music that goes along with it so this thing can just be sitting here and there's some really cool ambiance coming out of it but why I'm so excited about this is that I can't collect every arcade game and there are arcade games that maybe I don't want to have the dedicated cabinet of so how nice would it be to just sit down and play them on something like this. It does have a 1080p screen it's not a 4k screen. There are kits that allow you to upgrade these screens but this is one of the later gen Vuelix cabinets so actually it has a pretty decent screen in it and it looks pretty good from my perspective and the games I'm gonna play it's probably fine. Maybe down the road if the monitor dies or something like that, I might consider swapping it out But for right now, it's pretty good. The sound system on it is great You've got four stereo speakers and it has a small amplifier in there If you wanted to upgrade it some people will add a subwoofer right they'll replace that amp with with something else You can just run the line out of the main unit right right out of the Taito Tidek type x3 There's a 3.5 millimeter jack you could run that into any amplifier if you wanted to maybe give these speakers a little bit more juice or you wanted to add A subwoofer or something like that or you could replace the speakers all together. Although I think they sound pretty good So if I didn't mention this earlier, this is running the our tax multi-image version 4.1. It's available for you online I can't give you the link directly to it But if you go and look our tax multi 4.1, you'll find it But what's cool about it is it's really got everything on it I mean, it's a really great multi-image. It very much leans toward the modern fighting games, but it also has a bunch of retro fighting games as well, Neo Geo games. One of the things I really like about it is in the latest image, they've actually incorporated Fightcade into it. So if you hook the PC or the Taito Type-X3 up to an Ethernet port, you can actually log in with your Fightcade account and have it all kind of in one place. So imagine you can do all your fightcade stuff, and then you also have all the retro titles already built into it. So it's really cool. It's meant to be a plug-and-play image, though. It's not really meant to be something that you add games to. It's really meant to be custom-made for the Taito Type-X 3. So what you do is you take the original spinning hard drive out of the Taito Type-X 3. Once you burn this image to this 1TB drive you put it in I put it on an SSD They don recommend putting it on a spinning drive plus i don know why you use a spinning drive in 2023 so just put that thing on an ssd and and you're good to go there's a couple modifications you need to make to the tato type x3 to actually make it run actually have to go into the bios and you have to disable security but you also have to set the hard drive to ide mode and then that's it and then it boots right up so pretty cool there's really nothing you do after that so I'll just show you really quick some of the games I'm gonna turn the volume up here so you can actually hear it the speakers on it are actually really good too I was pretty impressed with the speaker quality on this so let's see we'll go unfortunately like I said I need to upgrade some of the components of it to in order for me to play the more modern games so I actually have an i5 CPU on order and also a GPU on order that should just be a drop-in replacement although if you do update or flash the BIOS on the type x3 you can actually add pretty much any video card that's compatible with with the motherboard so I just did SNK SNK versus Street Fighter SNK versus Capcom Capcom versus SNK too I forgot what I did so um on some of the games to put in a coin yeah you press a and then and then the button oh shit no damn she's kicking my ass Damn it. Alright, well, she kicked my butt. There's tons of games. So that was part of the Naomi set. So there's SNK vs. Capcom 2. There's also Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Virtua Tennis. You know, there's actually Afterburner Climax is on here. You know, one of my favorites that's on here. Let's see if I can find it. This is actually one that I played at Galloping Ghost. And I never saw it anywhere else. Let me see if I can find it. I actually bought the PCB for this. but it's a bootleg. I was going to build a dedicated cabinet to it. That's how much I like it. Although I got kind of ripped a new one for liking it. So hold on, where the heck is it? Talking all this smack and I can't find the damn game. Yeah, here it is. So Contra Evolution is actually on here. The only other place I've played Contra Evolution was actually at Galloping Ghost. Now, Galloping Ghost imported the actual Contra Evolution cabinet. They didn't make many of them. The game was a cell phone game and they did make an arcade release. Now the board I bought from AliExpress is actually, it's right here actually. I'll show it to you really quick. This is actually a bootleg of the board, but it does have a Gemma Edge connector. It's on here. It's a complete remake of Contra, but with modern day graphics. I never played it on the phone. I just played it at Galloping Ghost and was like, oh my gosh, this is so cool. I mean if you're a fan of Contra there's no way you wouldn't like this. All the original play mechanics are here so I'm excited to see that this is on that image. I also feel a little bit dumb for going and buying that box when it actually on this image but whatever Spread was always my favorite gun in this game You know what funny about this game is the stress of playing with a friend too I used to play this on the NES mostly. I never really played the arcade version of the game. It was always on the NES. But super cool that this is here. It does maintain the original aspect ratio on any of the retro games. So none of the retro games are stretched. There's some CRT filters. They look okay. They're not bad. Let me see if I can find an example of that. So I'll just play the original TMNT. On the original TMNT you're going to notice it actually does like almost a curved, you find that a lot in coin ops builds, it's like this curvature that's trying to make it look like a CRT. It's actually kind of cool though. I don't think it looks bad on a modern display to be honest and that's tough because most people screw up scan lines but it actually looks pretty good. Like it doesn't bother me, normally scan lines on games bug the crap out of me. Yeah, so it's all here, man. There's a lot here, and it's pretty exciting. So I'm going to probably do more videos on this as I get to the point where I'm ready to do the upgrades on the PC. I pretty much already ordered all of them, so they're all pretty much ready to go. This is the Vuelix Diamond Blue. Pretty cool cabinet, you know. Check out Hadouken Arcade. He sometimes is slow to respond, but he's bringing in new inventory from Japan all the time. I think this will be one of those cool staples to have in my arcade because I can't just keep buying every dedicated cabinet. So like I said in my prior video, I need to be really selective as to the games I bring in. So something like this will actually scratch the itch for other games that maybe I don't want dedicated cabinets for or the modern fighting games. So I'm really excited to get that upgrade going because I really want to play Street Fighter 4 and 5 on this. There's also a bunch of these other games that I'm not really as familiar with. There's like a ton of awesome games that I don't even know. There's some great Type X3 stuff on here. Like Samurai Spirits looks really cool. I've never played that before. So I'm kind of excited to maybe check out some of these titles too. There's also a lot of really great shmups on here. So anyways, it's going to be really fun to explore this. It's the Artex Multi 4.1. You can Google that. You pretty much find what you need there. Just Google image and you'll find it. But anyways, this is a theme on the channel. So while it's super hot here in Arizona, I am going to do a little bit more of the Multicade emulation stuff. So be on the lookout because I'm going to preview one of the newer Rec Room Masters cabinets. Because Rec Room Masters is actually back, believe it or not. My buddy Carlos, who runs the company Arcade-1, he bought the rights to Rec Room Masters cabinets. And man, the control panels on these things, they were already awesome when it was Rec Room Masters, the original company. He took it to the next level. So I'm excited to show you guys that. So my next video will probably be on that. And then we're going to do light guns on the Pandora's box 10-year anniversary. So we've got a 10-year, I don't know, whatever the hell that 10-year thing is called. Anyways, hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, give me a thumbs up. Consider subscribing to the channel. Put your comments below. I want to hear from you. And that's it for now. We will see you on the next one. Thank you. _(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: a2d880ed-609b-4688-bd37-f7f6203ae2e2*