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How to mod your Arcade1up into a Neo Geo Multicart system - Part 2

RetroRalph·video·15m 48s·analyzed·Feb 2, 2019
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.023

TL;DR

Technical guide to modding Arcade1Up into Neo Geo arcade system via JAMMA harness wiring

Summary

A detailed technical tutorial on converting an Arcade1Up cabinet into a Neo Geo arcade system using JAMMA harnesses, converter boards, and arcade PCBs. The host walks through wiring buttons, joystick microswitches, power connections, video output, and audio integration, demonstrating a working Neo Geo cabinet mod with Metal Slug and a 161-game multicart.

Key Claims

  • Neo Geo MVS carts are affordable, ranging from $20-$30 per title, in contrast to expensive AES carts

    high confidence · Direct statement about Neo Geo cartridge pricing tiers and availability

  • The Neo Geo board requires +12V, +5V, and ground power connections (not negative 5V)

    high confidence · Technical specification stated during power wiring section

  • The JAMMA harness video converter board used is a high-definition converter that produces clean scaling without smoothing artifacts

    high confidence · Direct observation during Metal Slug gameplay demonstration

  • The 161-game Neo Geo multicart is a China bootleg product (not official SNK), making it potentially unstable

    high confidence · Host explicitly states multicarts are 'hacked' bootlegs and can be 'flaky'

  • There is no input lag when using a JAMMA harness connected directly to arcade hardware

    high confidence · Host observation: 'The responsiveness of the JAMMA harness on the actual hardware is awesome. There's no delay at all.'

Notable Quotes

  • “you're going to wire the part of the micro switch that's closest to the ground pin. That's where your action button is going to go at all times. If you wire it to the wrong pole, it's not going to work.”

    Jon (RetroRalph host)@ 2:51 — Core technical guidance for proper microswitchwiring

  • “the multicart can be a little bit flaky...it's like a China bootleg type thing. So just, you know, you don't expect it to be exactly the same. If you want to have 100% stability and the best possible experience, what I would suggest is just buying the Neo Geo carts and doing that.”

    Jon (RetroRalph host)@ 11:02 — Honest assessment of bootleg multicart reliability limitations

  • “Metal Slug just looks beautiful on this...it just cleans it up. It looks awesome. And it doesn't do anything weird. Like it doesn't do smoothing or anything like that.”

    Jon (RetroRalph host)@ 9:02 — Endorsement of video converter board quality

  • “basically every Metal Slug game is on there, including some bonus sort of hacked versions of them too”

    Jon (RetroRalph host)@ 9:34 — Description of multicart game library content

  • “The solder side and the part side...if it says part side or if you're looking at the board and you're seeing the parts and it's flipped around to solder side, that's not the way that it's going to connect.”

    Jon (RetroRalph host)@ 10:30 — Critical PCB orientation guidance often missed by beginners

Entities

Jon (RetroRalph)personBruce YeagerpersonArcade1UpcompanyNeo GeoproductJAMMAproductMetal SluggamePandora's Boxproduct

Signals

  • $

    market_signal: Neo Geo MVS cartridge market segment remains accessible ($20-$30) compared to premium AES cartridges, making hardware mods viable for budget-conscious collectors

    high · Host cites MVS affordability as key reason for choosing that cartridge type for cabinet

  • ?

    product_strategy: Arcade1Up cabinet converted to native Neo Geo arcade system with aftermarket hardware (JAMMA harness, video converter, 19-inch monitor, custom lighting)

    high · Host demonstrates completed working Neo Geo cabinet with upgrades to monitor size, bezel, lighting, and custom graphics

  • ?

    product_concern: 161-game Neo Geo multicart bootleg exhibits intermittent stability issues ('flaky') compared to original SNK cartridges

    high · Host explicitly warns about multicart unreliability: 'it's like a China bootleg type thing' and recommends original carts for '100% stability'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Use of high-definition JAMMA video converter board eliminating scaling artifacts and smoothing on arcade PCB output

    high · Host notes converter 'cleans it up' and 'doesn't do anything weird' during Metal Slug gameplay demonstration

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.047

0:00
Hey guys, welcome back. So in the last episode we covered a lot of ground. We learned about arcade printed circuit boards, we learned about converter boards, we learned about jama harnesses, micro switches, all sorts of stuff. But now is where it gets real. We're gonna wire this puppy up. So grab your jama harnesses, don't forget those micro switches, and let's do this!
0:30
All right, guys, let's tear this bad boy up. I did not have an arcade one-up control board, so I decided to use an empty Pandora's box. So we're going to go ahead and start putting in the buttons. So you just, I already mounted the joystick, super simple, but just push in the buttons, tighten them down, and this is probably the easiest part of the process, but, you know, pretty self-explanatory. Just get this thing done. we'll mount the buttons. I'm only going to do four for this video instead of six, but it doesn't really matter. As long as you can wire four, you can wire as many as you need. So that's the micro switch. We're going to put those onto all of the buttons right now. They have a specific way they go. When you look at them visually, you can kind of tell, but make sure the red push button part of it is honestly facing down because if it's facing down, then that's where it needs to be. That's where it'll make contact with the actual push button. So once we get these done, I'm just going to align them in place. It's good to kind of organize them in a way that makes sense. These are going to be the coin and the start buttons. So let's put those push buttons on and put those micro switches in. And that's what we got, guys. There it is. Looks nice and clean for now until we get to wiring. Then it's going to look like a total mess. So let's get to that. So what I'm doing right now is I'm actually labeling the JAMA harness. So I'm using a Sharpie and I'm labeling the pin numbers 1 through 28. The reason why I do that is because right now I don't have that harness that I keep talking about that's labeled. So this will just make it easier. All right. Power wires, we don't need those right now, but we'll revisit that in a little bit. So I'm going to start with the buttons and we're going to start with coin and player 1. So coin is 16, so pin 16, and I'm going to reference that JAMMA pin out for Neo Geo, and then pin 17 is start.
2:26
And we're going to put that on the normally open part of that micro switch, the one that's closest to the ground pin. All right, now it's time to do the joystick. So what I'm doing here is I like to test what is up, down, left, and right so I can see it. even though I know this from doing it a lot, I like to make sure I know what micro switch is being hit so that I'm wiring the right end of the joystick. And again, you're going to wire the part of the micro switch that's closest to the ground pin. That's where your action button is going to go at all times. If you wire it to the wrong pole, it's not going to work. So that takes care of the joystick switches. And now we're going to do player 1, button 1, 2, 3, and 4, which is A, B, C, and D in Neo Geo Talk. So we're just going to wire those up and make sure that you reference your JAMA pinout. Every board is a bit different, so don't expect them all to be the same. That's why I brought that. So now let's just do an overview of the work. You'll see this is just the action buttons, and they're all on the normally open position of the micro switch. so like I said easy to remember the closest one to the ground pin it's always going to be that way so we've got that all wired up and basically we've got you know we've got A, B, C, and D and then we have a coin button and a start button and then the joystick and you can see all of those and I did bend those a bit because I couldn close the Pandora Box case which is okay if you need to Now one little tip here is that we ready to do the ground wire but I didn have enough wire because this is a JAMMA harness I used before So something that I love, these little heat shrink tubes that have a little bit of solder in the middle, you heat it up with one of these heat guns and you can extend a wire easily. So no soldering or anything. It looks awesome and it's super strong. So I would totally recommend those if you needed to extend a ground loop. All right, so now we're doing the daisy chain ground. This is actually a lot easier than you'd think. It's sometimes one of the things that people get tripped up on. Super simple. So you're just going to put it on, start at a point that's probably furthest away to where you need to go, and then just keep wrapping it around. And on your jama harness, this will be all bundled up as a loop, and you're just going to keep going around. But you want to make sure they're all connected. So everything's got to be connected to that ground loop. So had we wired the player two buttons, we would be doing the same thing. So this loop would be extended over there to that side. So for right now, this is easy to show you what you do, but we're just going to go through all these buttons, make sure they're all grounded, and we should be good to go. So I'm going to go through it with you. As you can see, the ground is on every single ground point of this configuration we just set up. And then at the end of that loop, it goes back into the JAMA harness. So perfect. So for now, we're going to wrap up the JAMA harness and put it aside because we're not going to need all these other wires in our way. So let's just sort of get these, bundle them, and get them the heck out of here, for right now at least. But we will revisit them very shortly. So we're also going to remove that video cable because we don't need that right now either. I'm going to focus on the power wires of the JAMA harness. There's our power supply. And keep in mind, the power wires are different. The power requirements are different on different boards. So what are you going to need? first you're gonna need a power cord you could buy one like this or you could just fray the end of a power cord cut it and splice it and you're gonna have a white a black and a green wire so that's basically your neutral your hot wire and your ground these little clips come in handy you could bare wire the power supply however i don't recommend that but you don't need to use these clips i just feel like i feel more comfortable with the connection that it makes and i'm really struggling with this to be honest i covered this i covered this earlier i'd uh i recorded it earlier and i was having a hard time with the clips they didn't want to they didn't want to attach to the wire very good but once you once you hunker these down you will need a you will need that uh wire cutter tool just to crimp those it has a crimper at the end and there you go looks exactly like that beautiful uh and you've got you got all the wires and you're ready to connect it to the power supply so you're going to connect the ground wire first you don't have to do it in this order it's There's just the order I did it in. I then put on the neutral wire and then the live wire, and that was pretty much it. And you're going to see it in a closer picture in a minute. So there it is. If you want, you can pause that when you're doing this yourself just for reference, but that's exactly how it should look.
6:55
And now you're ready to wire the power for the actual JAMA harness. So this JAMA harness or this JAMA board, the Neo Geo, uses 12 volts, 5 volts, or positive 12, positive 5, and ground. Some do use negative five. This one does not so that's all you have to do for this board. That's it. You're done So now we're gonna go on to the video controller piece. We're actually ready to wire that up. So this is simple You just take that Video output from the jama harness and you plug it in it's it's not so you can only plug it in one way You actually can't plug it in wrong and then you're gonna plug the HDMI into that board And I will have links to the boards and all this stuff that we've used here at this point there's one step the F to do that I actually forgot to record is this board needs power so what I do is I wire the board directly into the power supply and this board needs plus 5 and ground so just make sure that you don connect it to plus 12 you burn that board out and that board does come with that connector that you saw there So it a connector that goes straight to the power supply from that board All right, so now we're ready to connect the JAMA harness. Slip that on. Don't be too rough with it. Try to be a little gentle with the JAMA harness. Not that it could break that easily, but I just like to be careful with it. And we're ready now to put in a game. Let's fire up Metal Slug and see if we've successfully done this. If so, then we are going to be rocking and rolling, and everyone's going to be super stoked. So moment of truth, and we have video. So we got it, guys. See, this is, like, not that hard. We're missing something because we have no audio right now, but we will wire the audio in a minute. I just wanted you guys to see a little sample of the gameplay. Metal Slug just looks beautiful on this. And that converter board that converts the signal from the arcade board to an LCD, it's a high def converter board. It actually looks beautiful. Like it makes Metal Slug. And Metal Slug looks great anyways, but I just feel like it just cleans it up. It looks awesome. It looks so good. And it doesn't do anything weird. Like it doesn't do smoothing or anything like that. So it's pretty much as good as you can get. All right. We're going to take Metal Slug out now. and I'm going to put in the multi-cart so I can show you guys a little sample of how that thing works. Fire this thing back up. When I show you this, I will just be aware. The menu for this is kind of lame, so it has this sort of lame menu, but it's cool because you have 161 really good Neo Geo games in a single cart. So I really love this option. I think it's cool, and we'll show you a couple games. Especially cool if you like Metal Slug because basically every Metal Slug game is on there, including some bonus sort of hacked versions of them too.
9:42
But again, the gameplay is great. The responsiveness of the JAMA harness on the actual hardware is awesome. There's no delay at all. It just plays awesome. So I think, like I said before, guys, this is probably an option that you might really enjoy if you like Neo Geo. But also you could just take the skills from this and apply it to really any arcade board for the most part. around the 80s, 90s time period that use JAMA or anything that uses JAMA. All right, so while I'm showing some gameplay, I do want to mention something that we didn't talk about is on the JAMA harness, you'll see something called the solder side and the part side. So the part side is actually pretty self-explanatory, actually. It's the side of the printed circuit board that has the parts on it. So if it says part side or if you're looking at the board and you're seeing the parts and it's flipped around to solder side, that's not the way that it's going to connect. So it's pretty self-explanatory. I just want to make sure I covered that.
10:42
One thing about the multi-card I will say, I will be quite open on this, is sometimes the multi-card can be a little bit flaky. And I guess that's to be expected. It's kind of a hacked thing. It isn't like SNK came out with that. That's actually something that, you know, it's like a China bootleg type thing. So just, you know, you don't expect it to be exactly the same. If you want to have 100% stability and the best possible experience, what I would suggest is just buying the Neo Geo carts and doing that. And I just remember this from the first video. MVS carts are pretty affordable for the most part. You can pick up titles from $20, $30, you know, even someone, so you can find someone selling a lot for pretty cheap. But yeah, the AES carts are really expensive. So that's another reason why I really enjoyed getting into the MVS stuff. All right. So something we didn't cover yet is audio. So audio is gonna be on pin 10. And so every primary pin has a backside pin, right? So there's the, like I said, part side and solder side. So the way this works with the audio is pin 10 is the positive lead to the speaker and the opposite side of pin 10 on the other side of the board is actually the negative lead So these arcade printed circuit boards all have audio amplifiers on them so you don need to add an amp but some people want to because they want a better audio experience. And if you've seen my previous videos, I'm kind of an audiophile, so I kind of get excited about good audio. Sometimes I go overboard. but yeah and then basically once you have it hooked up you'll have audio and then there's a potentiometer right next to it that you can adjust with a phillips head screwdriver to make it louder or softer whatever however you want the audio to be so you can also you know there's other things we'll do in future episodes in future episodes I'll show you how you can take this out to an amp and you know do do do an amplified speaker system if you want you know if you're not happy with the output that comes out of that. But if you want an easy modification, you could literally wire that straight to even your stock arcade one-up speaker or a single speaker that you have in a cabinet and you'll get audio out of it. And it sounds pretty good. It's not the best. It sounds better going into an amp, obviously, but it's not bad. So just keep that in mind as an option when you guys are exploring this and going down this path. Well, that's it, guys. You guys have all graduated and you are super jama arcade board studs so that's all i had for you guys i think all i'm going to do now is i'm going to show you the neo geo cab which i based on what we just did and then we'll uh we'll wrap things up all right guys i promised you'd see a working product so this is my arcade one-up neo geo mod so basically what we just did but in the cabinet itself. Now I put some touches on it, like this one's got a 19 inch monitor, which I do have a video on how to start to do that. This one has the bezel, which I haven't covered in the video yet, but are in the, on the channel yet, but I will shortly. The control panel, that was, this was when I was getting a little ambitious. I don't think I actually took the right amount of time to make this right. So I think I'm going to redo this. I'm not really that happy with the way that came out. The Litmar key is by a buddy of mine, Bruce Yeager. Very nice guy and awesome that he did that. It looks really good. He evenly distributed the light out, so it's not easy to do.
14:10
I just have the Metal Slug 4 card in, so that's pretty much it. I put some custom graphics on the front. I've yet to finish the sides. The sides are still Street Fighter. This was a Street Fighter cabinet. So that's that. I'll swing around back, but it's nothing pretty right now because I haven't cleaned up the video or cleaned up the wires on this guy. Sorry guys, I'm going on like not a lot of sleep at the moment, so I'm a little bit loopy. Put the light on so you can see. That video controller definitely should not be like that, so I'm going to fix that. And yeah, the wiring is all down here. There's the power supply. I have to clean up the JAMMA wires there's the Neo Geo system and there's your video controller all stuff we covered so hopefully this inspires you guys to do something similar I've been really excited to share this one in particular with you guys and I think I think Neo Geo is one of those fun systems a lot of people like it and hopefully you guys take this and run with it and do something similar so anyway if you guys like the video please subscribe to the channel please like the video and hit that notification bell so you can be informed of future videos but as always guys I really appreciate you guys watching I appreciate all the support of the channel and we'll see you on the next one
15:45
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