Arcade1up Countercade 60 Games MOD - Donkey Kong & More!

RetroRalph·video·16m 44s·analyzed·May 5, 2019

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.022

TL;DR

RetroRalph mods Arcade1Up Countercade with 60-in-1 JAMMA board, questions value at $200 price.

Summary

RetroRalph demonstrates a comprehensive modification of an Arcade1Up Countercade 60-game unit, replacing the stock emulation board with a 60-in-1 JAMMA board to enable games like Donkey Kong that weren't included in the original release. While the mod is technically functional, Ralph expresses reservations about the overall value proposition, noting the $200 price point plus significant modification costs makes the stock unit difficult to recommend unless buyers specifically love the included games.

Key Claims

Arcade1Up Countercade retails for $200
high confidence · RetroRalph directly states 'one game, and it's $200' and mentions this multiple times throughout the video
The 60-in-1 JAMMA board emulation is not perfect on some games
high confidence · RetroRalph notes 'the emulation is not perfect on some of the games, which a lot of you guys know'
The stock Countercade ships with an 8-inch screen
high confidence · RetroRalph states 'The 8-inch screen is significantly smaller than this one' when comparing to the modded unit's 10.1-inch screen
The 60-in-1 board does not have native HDMI output, only VGA
high confidence · Ralph explains 'the 60 in one does not have a native hdmi out it has vga so i ran it into this little guy which i will have links in the description for and this guy converts the vga signal to an hdmi signal'
The mod is not worth the time and expense for most users
high confidence · Ralph concludes 'I would say this is not worth your time to do' and states the modification costs plus the $200 price point make it prohibitively expensive

Notable Quotes

“So you want to play Donkey Kong on your countercade? Arcade1Up won't give it to ya. Arcade1Up can't give it to ya. But Retro Ralph can.”
RetroRalph@ 0:00 — Opening hook that establishes the core motivation: enabling games not available in the stock unit
“it's relatively expensive for what you get, but if you look at other countertop arcades that are in the same price range, you're actually not going to find many that are even in that same price range unless you build it yourself”
RetroRalph@ 0:49 — Contextualizes the Countercade's pricing within the broader countertop arcade market
“I'm not 100% happy with a couple of things, and I'll point those out as we go through”
RetroRalph@ 2:05 — Sets expectation that the mod has compromises due to time constraints
“There's a really cool options menu in this 60 in one board that allows you to change things like the amount of lives things in games like your shooting speed and things like that. So that pretty cool stuff that you wouldn't get in an arcade one”
RetroRalph@ 8:01 — Highlights feature advantage of the JAMMA board over stock Arcade1Up hardware
“I'm sorry if it's not the best quality video capture. It's kind of hard to capture the screen, but it's very responsive”
RetroRalph@ 9:54 — Notes the mod's functional performance despite video capture limitations
“This isn't cheap. It's $200. You have to put a significant amount of investment in this thing to get it the way I have it right now. So is it worth it? I personally do not think so.”

Entities

RetroRalphpersonArcade1UpcompanyArcade1Up CountercadeproductJAMMAproduct60-in-1 boardproductDonkey KonggameMs. Pac-MangameGalagagameSpace InvadersgamePress Your Buttonscompany

Signals

?
community_signal: RetroRalph plans to offer the modded Countercade as a giveaway to channel audience, indicating content monetization and community engagement strategy
high · Ralph states 'I think this would be a cool unit to do that with' and 'I have not done any giveaways from the channel yet'
$
market_signal: Countercade's $200 price point and limited game library perceived as poor value by content creator and likely audience; sentiment from previous review comments was that unit is 'too expensive'
high · Ralph states 'When I did the review, it seemed like most of the comments were that you guys thought it was too expensive' and concludes 'this is not worth your time to do'
?
product_strategy: Arcade1Up Countercade 60-game cabinet offers compact form factor and lower price point compared to full-size arcade cabinets, but limited game selection and smaller 8-inch screen compared to alternatives
high · RetroRalph directly compares the $200 Countercade's 8-inch screen to his modded 10.1-inch unit and notes that other countertop options exist in similar price ranges
?
product_strategy: RetroRalph incorporates volume control potentiometer modification into Countercade, suggesting this is a useful upgrade that could be applied to stock Arcade1Up units
medium · Ralph states 'Now this is actually a mod I think I going to start to incorporate into arcade one I just don know where I going to put this knob but I going to do that' and 'This would be a kind of cool addition to a mod maybe of an arcade one-up'
?
product_concern: RetroRalph's mod quality compromises due to time constraints; acknowledges poor craftsmanship on back panel, improperly mounted volume knob, and unresolved display scaling issues

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.050

0:00

So you want to play Donkey Kong on your countercade? Arcade 1-Up won't give it to ya. Arcade 1-Up can't give it to ya.

0:12

But Retro Ralph can. Hey guys, welcome back. So before we get into this thing, I want to break down a couple of observations that I've had, you know, over the past, say, two weeks since I got this. So obviously I modded it right away, but I did spend some time with it, a little bit more time than in my initial review with the unit, you know, in its stock form. And I will say, here's the thing, it's relatively expensive for what you get, but if you look at other, you know, countertop arcades that are in the same price range, you're actually not going to find many that are even in that same price range unless you build it yourself. So if you're a real big fan of the initial release titles for this, then I say by all means, and you don't have a lot of space, by all means, this is great. But it's one game, and it's $200. Now they may lower the price eventually, but that's what it is right now. So I gotta be truthful and say that, I don't know, unless you really love the launch titles and you're limited on space, I would pass. what I would do is I would buy probably the full unit if you had, you know, if you had the chance to, um, or investigate other bar top options, in which case on this channel, I've actually reviewed a few and you might want to check those out. Maybe those will meet your needs, but anyway, back to the modification at hand, right? What did I do? So we're going to walk through what I did to modify this. It's by all means, not perfect. I actually ran into a couple of snags along the way and I'm a little disappointed at the, at, at how it turned out, but I got other things I have to do. and other mods and things that I want to get to, so I had to wrap this one up, and I kind of left it as is. But I'm not 100% happy with a couple of things, and I'll point those out as we go through. So let's just go ahead, we'll deconstruct this thing, I'll show you what I did, and then I'll give you a couple final thoughts. Okay, so we'll start from the top. This thing did not ship with the Lit Marquee, so you get what you get on that. So as we scroll down, you'll notice that it's running what says ICAID, which is the 60-in-1 JAMMA board. So it's got many games on it, and I'll have a games list in the description But it's a fun sort of, I'd say, arcade classics board, but the emulation is not perfect on some of the games, which a lot of you guys know. So I didn't really change anything about the control panel. What I did do, though, to make these games work is my start button here for player one is actually going to be a credit button and a start button. So that way I didn't need to drill any additional holes. and then the player two button ends up being my fire button or jump button depending on what game you're playing if it's donkey kong it's jump obviously if it's 1942 it's shoot so anyway so that's that's kind of it and there's something that i didn't you know didn't take care of is there's no bezel around this however this monitor did come this 10.1 did come with a monitor you know sort of a bezel attached to the screen which doesn't look that bad but i think if i was gonna sort of perfect this mod i would go get some plexiglass and maybe consider doing something with this because there's holes and various things or patch the holes and maybe paint this or something like that. So as we go down, I didn't modify anything here. You've got the speaker, the stock speaker. I just wired that in to the JAMMA board. So no issues there. I did, however, put in a volume screw. You'll see the volume screw is actually tilted a bit. That was a last minute thing. It kind of broke or moved on me. It didn't break, but it moved on me because I just hot glued in place, so that was because I was tugging on it, but anyways, I didn't have time to fix it, but it'd be an easy fix, I'd just have to take the glue off and remount it, so no big deal, but it does work pretty well, actually. So you can put the volume up and you can put the volume down Now this is actually a mod I think I going to start to incorporate into arcade one I just don know where I going to put this knob but I going to do that It's actually got a little circuit board amp on it. You could do this mod to a stock one-up. So this would be a kind of cool addition to a mod maybe of an arcade one-up. So we'll focus more on this. I might just do a review on this particular mod just since I don't know if that's been covered by others As you can see there's the side of the unit When I come around back, this is one of the things I was a little disappointed about so I

4:43

Did put in a single switch to turn it on and off, but when I was doing the mod I got really impatient at night and wanted to get through it really quickly and I actually cut this board up quite a bit I had to hot glue it back together So I'm not really happy with that But this is a single on-off switch and I'll show you when we remove this panel What the back of this looks like actually camp with a pretty cool idea Which was based on a power strip I found on Amazon which I'll have a link to in the description So let's unscrew this and I'll show you what's behind it. Alright, so let's take a look inside So when I remove that back panel, you will quickly notice this power strip right here So what I did was I bought this power strip from Amazon and then I cut the ends of it off and then wired it into a single switch right here so you can turn the whole unit on and off. I really needed two plugs. I needed one for power to the JAMMA board, you know, to that 16-in-1 board, which you see right there. And I needed another one to power the video controller board. And actually, this little amp that does the potentiometer to turn the volume on and off, that does need power too. So I needed to use a splitter as well. So you'll notice there's like a little power splitter here. So it splits the power coming out of this to two separate places one go into the controller board as you can see there and then one running up to the volume control knob let's look in here closer so when you do this jama board in here it is very tight i'm not gonna lie it's extremely tight so there's your sorry for a little bit of a shadowing there's your 60 in one jama board and i've been using the press your buttons uh jama harness so it is labeled in english which is that let that focus really quick. It is labeled in English. It's not focusing because I got that zip tie. I didn't cut. But anyways, trust me when I say it's labeled in English. I'll have links to the JAMA board or the JAMA connector and the JAMA board itself. So what I did do, and it's going to be hard to see this, but I did get a VGA to HDMI converter for the 6DN1. So the 6DN1 does not have, you can't see it back there but the 60 in one does not have a native hdmi out it has vga so i ran it into this little guy which i will have links in the description for and this guy converts the vga signal to an hdmi signal that then gets run up to the video controller board here sorry it's focused on that wire the video controller board here i will say i had actually a lot of problems with that video controller uh this is the third one did mount this power strip right here on the side the one for the JAMMA board right here. This has got, it just has double-sided tape, and I used a bunch of little wire ties to get everything all clean and tidy, which actually, when you look back, you know, despite this wire that comes across the front, it looks pretty clean in there. So, that's really all there is to it. There's the video controller board, there's the 60-in-1 with the JAMMA harness, and I did not use an arcade power supply because the 60-in-1 does have the option to use a Molex connector, which is what's on the end of this power unit. and then there's obviously a ton of JAMMA wires that don't need to be used for this because it's obviously not a six button games it doesn't have stuff like that so I just cut that off the other thing you'll see was that was a last minute modification is you'll see these two there's a red and a black wire here there's a really cool options menu in this 60 in one board that allows you to change things like the amount of lives things in Galaga like your shooting speed and things like that. So that pretty cool stuff that you wouldn get in an arcade one So I thought that be pretty neat to expose those features so I am going to show you that in a moment here when I turn the unit on so I swing around front show you some limited gameplay because 60 and ones there's a ton of reviews on 60 and one boards on the internet no need to really do that but I'll show you some of the unique features okay so if I didn't mention this before I want to do this before I show gameplay that I did use the stock controls so everything is just spliced and hooked directly into the JAMA connector so whatever those button functions are are tied right in. I did run a single ground to everything so you'll see this little connection right here is actually one single ground so I created a ground loop but I just tied them all together for simplicity reasons just to keep it simple. Alright so I'm gonna lower that down and I don't need to look at that anymore. So when you first power up this unit, let me just scroll up a little bit, when you first power up this unit you're gonna to get this iCade screen. It does do an initialization process. It takes like a minute or two. So when I hit, when you kind of, it doesn't do anything. You're not going to feel any response from it until you press a coin button. So like I said, the credit button is actually player one. So when I hit that, it brings you back to the main screen and then allows me to navigate through the games. So anyways, once you hit that, if you want a game, you can select, hit that player one button again, and there you go. I don't think the volume is turned up right now, so I'll have to do that really fast. There you go. So I'll show you in a moment just gameplay briefly, just so you can kind of see it. And like I said, I'm sorry if it's not the best quality video capture. It's kind of hard to capture the screen, but it's very responsive. I do notice, I did notice one thing about it that's very interesting, and I can't really understand the phenomenon, is that, oh, I almost got hit there. There's a really weird phenomenon on where I feel like this joystick works better with the stock encoder for whatever reason than it seems to with the 60-in-1, and I don't really understand why. Ooh, that was really lucky. All right, let's get the princess, and then I'll move on. Oh, shoot, I messed up. All right, I should be able to get there in a second. All right, I'm going to press my luck. Ah, all right. Anyways, didn't make it. So the one thing about the 60 in one I should tell you is there is no way to get back to the main menu. You have to die. So that's just one of the bummers of 60 and 1 so I'm going to let this thing kill me and then we'll get it'll it'll actually force us back to the main menu it does give you an option to put in your you know your name and stuff for high scores so anyways let's uh let's go back to the main menu and let this guy die all right so once it says game over you'll see it'll just shoot you right back to the main menu you see the music will play so here's the thing I'm going to lower this real quick so you can hear me. Here's the cool thing about this mod. What I did was I took this, I'm sorry again, it's a little bit dark. I took the on and off switch and made it the test switch. So the switch you can go and change the dip switch settings. So check this out. So in order for me to access that, I need to turn the switch on and then I need to reboot the unit or I can shut the unit off, turn the switch on, turn the unit on, whatever order you want to do it, it doesn't matter. So I'm going to turn this unit off. I'm going to flip that switch.

13:37

Lives, extra lives, how many points to extra lives, and then bullet speed. I think bullet speed is really fun to play Galaga at fast. So that's just me. It's just fun to play it that way. So anyways, you can toggle through all these. But just remember, when you're ready to commit those to memory, you just hit the player one button and it saves them. So at this point I don't have to do anything and that will persist every time I reboot it So it's always going to be that way The only thing you have to remember is you have to remember to shut this switch off again So you switch it off and now I reboot it and those settings are good All right, guys So i'm going to quickly cycle through the games really quick so you can see what other games are on here And then i'm going to just give you my final thoughts So, you know, there's a lot of games on here that people really like so miss pac-man is one that i'm really a big fan Of that's on this board, you know donkey kong obviously Donkey Kong Jr. is on here, Donkey Kong 3 is on here, Galaxian is, Dig Dug, you know, there's quite a few games that we all like, Space Invaders, so, you know, if you wanted this in one cabinet, and, you know, if you're only going to buy one of these, and you wanted to have access to a lot of the games that they're selling as individual games, Arcade 1-Up, they're all kind of here, Burger Time, so lots of great games, lots of great classics, and, you know, they play fairly well. So they're not bad. But in conclusion, I think, here's the thing I got to say is that this isn't cheap. It's $200. You have to put a significant amount of investment in this thing to get it the way I have it right now. So is it worth it? I personally do not think so. It is only worth it to me if you love the games that come in this cabinet and you're okay paying the $200 for just those games and you're okay with the small screen. The 8-inch screen is significantly smaller than this one. You will notice there's one thing I didn't even really talk about. There's this black band on the top. It's because the only controller I could get to work with this did not have an auto mode. So there was no way to auto center the screen. And when I did vertical and horizontal orientation, it will not change. And that might be because I'm using the VGA to HDMI converter. I am not sure. I didn't take the time to troubleshoot that. So with that said, in conclusion here, I would say this is not worth your time to do. but if you like the stock unit, go with it. It's kind of fun, but only if you love those games. If not, I would look for alternatives. So if you like this video, please like the video. Please subscribe to the channel. Hit notifications to be informed of future videos. And I wanna hear your comments on this thing. What do you guys think? Is it worth it? When I did the review, it seemed like most of the comments were that you guys thought it was too expensive. So this just raises the price to do something like this. So it's gonna be up to you guys to decide, is this something you wanna do or not? but I think I'm going to offer this unit as a giveaway to someone. I have not done any giveaways from the channel yet and I think this would be a cool unit to do that with. So anyways guys, that is it for now. I appreciate you watching and we will see you on the next one.