Bits and pieces about candy cabs, arcade games and such
Realizing GD-ROM cases were missing pocket for inlays was a real disappointment. No place for any nice artwork 😦
Anyway something had to be done and since I recently got one of those label printers I thought I’d at least could print some spine labels for the cases.
There, now they’ll look way better in the bookshelf 🙂
The cutest Chun-Li evah is borrowed from GameInformer
SPACE INVADERS STYLE IN HONOR TO IT’S 25th ANNIVERSARY
In a post from a month back 8-4 Ltd. shared this year’s round up of “nengajou” (Christmas cards) from the Japanese gaming industry. A whole lot of awesomeness themed around the new year’s Chinese zodiac – the Snake!
Enjoy all the Christmas cards in their full glory here.
Thank you 8-4 for sharing!
8-4 is a video game localization company based in Shibuya, Tokyo. When they’re not lovingly translating your favorite RPG or junior-high ballet trainer/dating sim, they enjoy hunting monsters, recording podcasts, and making their interns perform live re-enactments of scenes from Chaos Wars.
Netbooting your Naomi is about to get Raspberry flavored. 
For a while now I’ve been thinking about different ways to netboot the Naomi. Yes, it’s quite handy being able to load games from your nearest computer but why not take it further?
How about doing it from your arcade machine? Pretty handy, no?
I had a Raspberry Pi lying around I didn’t know what to do with so I thought what if it had a display and some way to control it? After some search I found an expansion board with a 20 x 4 LCD display and some buttons from BitWizard. The Naomi Pi was born.
The general idea is to hook it up with keyboard and monitor for some easy config (setting up IP addresses the mounting NFS volume etc) and then setting it up inside the cabinet for easy loading of games.
Stay tuned for updates 😉
Back in September I began looking for a better solution than bubble wrap for storing game PCB’s.
I found some cardboard boxes that could handle most of the PCB’s I had and did spine labels for them. Never got as far as printing them though. 
Even if the boxes came out fine and looks way more decent than bubble wrap they aren’t optimal. About 1 cm (½”) too deep for my IKEA Billy book shelves but they’ll have to do for the moment.
Last week I finally did a couple of test prints of the spine labels and while they do look good I still think I can do better. 
Meanwhile I’ve been pondering on how to store System 246/256 games. The answer was obvious: PS2 boxes with memory card holders. Perfect for holding both DVD and Magic Gate dongle (since they’re housed in PS2 memory card cases). 
Still needs some tweaking but as a first draft they look promising 🙂 
My daughter seemed to find the eraser more intriguing than the cases though. Should I take it as they need a bit more work? 😛 
The NVS-4000 Power Supply Unit found in some New Astro City cabinets (and perhaps others as well) are considered the Rolls Royce of PSU’s by some.
While it does lack a -5V output it is a behemoth boasting numerous inputs and outputs and the capacity to deliver enough power to drive a full NAOMI set up with JVS/JAMMA adapter and GD-ROM. It also has a built in stereo sound amplifier.
I’m not going dive deep into the hard data in this post. For now I’m just posting the pictures I took when I opened it up a couple of days ago for a clean up and a bit of troubleshooting regarding the wiring of the mono sound output.
The PSU with the cover and front/back panels removed.
Top view of the PSU with cooling plate removed.
The amplifier (a Sega Model 3 Stereo Amplifier is mounted upside-down below the PSU in the NVS-4000-01.
Lastly a picture of my now labelled loom from inside the PSU.
Picked up these two beauties yesterday
A pair of Guilty Gear XX 1L5B control panel overlays for Sega cabinets (Astro City, Naomi etc) panels. Compared to most other fighting games the GGX uses a rather unusual set of controls: Punch, Kick, Slash, Hard Slash and Dust. The overlay can be applied to a normal 1L6B panel since the licensed five button panels are quite hard to find.
Been sorting a heap of MVS carts the last few days. Need to reclaim space and they’ll be up for sale really soon.
I’m currently in the process of testing the games and checking for boots/broken games.
Preliminary list of titles as for now is:
Note! Some games already have reservations and I’m expecting to add more games in a near future so the list will probably be changing.
Please feel free to contact me if you’re interested in any of the items. Either drop a comment here or a DM on Twitter to @HSBallina.
This is the first in a series of articles about the Sega NAOMI system. Later posts will cover the hardware (I just love taking things apart :P), connecting the NAOMI to JAMMA cabinets, setting up the NAOMI with a GD-ROM and netbooting (loading games from a server).
The Sega NAOMI (New Arcade Operation Machine Idea), first shown at JAMMA in September 1998, is the successor to the Sega Model 3 platform.
It’s based on the same hardware components as the Dreamcast game console. Though the NAOMI has twice the amount of system memory and video memory and four times as much sound memory as the Dreamcast. Multiple units can be linked to improve graphics performance or to support multiple monitors. The NAOMI Universal Cabinet was developed specifically for the NAOMI system and can house up to 16 units.
Another key difference between the NAOMI and the Dreamcast is how the game media is handled. The Dreamcast streams the data from the GD-ROM while the NAOMI arcade boards features 168 MB of solid state ROM or GD-ROM’s using a DIMM board and a GD-ROM reader. The contents of the disc is downloaded onto the DIMM board’s RAM on start up. Once the disc has been read the game is run from the RAM for better performance and reducing the mechanical wear on the GD-ROM reader.
Even if the system is turned off the game will load from the RAM when powered on again. Only if the game data in the RAM gets corrupted of if the system’s been powered off for about 72 hours the game will again have to be read from the GD-ROM.
Unlike Sega’s previous arcade platforms the NAOMI was widely licensed for use by other game publishers. Besides Sega about 20 companies has produced titles for the NAOMI system including Capcom, Namco Bandai, Tecmo, Cave, Sammy, SNK, Jaleco and Koei.
Taito launched their G-Net system (based on Sony’s PlayStation hardware) the same year as the NAOMI and, as Sega, tried to license it widely to developers. While the NAOMI became a huge success the G-Net never really made it and only some 20+ titles were ever released for the G-Net.
The NAOMI uses the newer JAMMA Video Standard (JVS) for I/O. The JVS uses a USB A port for inputs and VGA for video output. The NAOMI is able to output graphics in VGA and CGA resolutions. There are three different I/O boards available for interfacing the NAOMI with JAMMA setups. Two were manufactured by Sega and another from Capcom.
The Capcom JVS/JAMMA converter is preferable since it offers a voltage converter for the needed 3.3 V line, and audio amplifier with volume control, the JAMMA connector and a JAMMA+ kick harness compatible with CPS2 and CPS3 games.
| CPU | Hitachi SH-4 32-bit RISC CPU (200 MHz 360 MIPS / 1.4 GFLOPS) |
| Graphic Engine | PowerVR 2 (PVR2DC) |
| Sound Engine | ARM7 Yamaha AICA 45 MHZ (with internal 32-bit RISC CPU, 64 channel ADPCM) |
| Main Memory | 32 MByte |
| Graphic Memory | 16 MByte |
| Sound Memory | 8 MByte |
| Media | ROM Board (maximum size of 172MBytes) / GD-Rom |
| Simultaneous Number of Colors | Approx. 16,770,000 (24bits) |
| Polygons | 2.5 Million polys/sec |
| Rendering Speed | 500 M pixel/sec |
| Additional Features | Bump Mapping, Fog, Alpha-Bending (transparency), Mip Mapping (polygon-texture auto switch), Tri-Linear Filtering, Anti-Aliasing, Environment Mapping, and Specular Effect. |
Game lists for the NAOMI system are available at
New Astro City 