I modded a Neo Geo and maybe learned a (mild) life skill along the way.
Would you look at that? It's an original, brand spanking new post from yours truly and it's got nothing to do with housekeeping around here! Yes, it's true, I remembered that blogs are sometimes place where people actually talk about new things going on and not just places to re-run their old stuff in a mad dash before their previous host shuts down. I've still got more reposts to run on here for sure, but as a change of pace, today I want to talk about more recent happenings and one of those happenings involves my recently acquired Neo Geo MVS motherboard. So, let's talk about it!
People who have followed me from Cohost (probably all of you at this point?) might remember me posting right before that site went read-only that I bought a Neo Geo motherboard while is in Tokyo for TGS. As a very casual arcade collector since 2020, it's always been on my shopping list; most of my actual experience with it has been in emulated form, but I certainly played my fair share of cabinets with Metal Slug and the like in it growing up. For as infamously expensive as parts of the Neo Geo collecting scene can get, particularly the AES (read: home console) side of things, the MVS is mercifully much more fiscally gentle on your wallet to get into. Carts for it in comparison generally range from quite cheap when it comes to the super ubiquitous fighting games and the like to certainly pricier than your average home release today, but still in line with average arcade board prices (ie: low triple digits). You probably can't afford to go for a complete set of even the MVS carts without taking out a separate mortgage or two on that house that you want to have; but if you just want a handful of common-ish games you have fond memories of playing growing up, then it's certainly one of the more attainable arcade platforms to collect for overall once you get past the initial upfront cost of purchasing and setting up a supergun, which, these days, you don't have to spend very much at all to get something perfectly serviceable that'll meet all of your needs.
Anyway, for reasons I'm honestly not entirely sure about myself, SNK released a small smorgasbord of different motherboard revisions for the MVS platform over the years. You're probably familiar with the single and multi-cart variants, especially the latter given how often they showed up in those iconic red cabinets, but there are actually plenty more flavors beyond that and they can differ pretty significantly in terms of the on board feature set, or at least stuff that you'll readily have access to without having to do additional mods to it. Since I have pretty humble soldering skills and the like (enough to do some basic cart maintenance and lower difficulty console mods, but I ain't gonna be putting the pros out of business anytime soon), after doing some research on the matter with the help of the ever handy Arcade Otaku wiki, I decided I wanted a motherboard with the following features built in:
- A socketed BIOS chip.
- Stereo audio output capability.
- Headphone audio header.
It's a pretty humble list, but since the most common variants tend to lack at least one or two of these things, it does mean that I would expect to pay a bit more a premium compared to just, say, buying the most vanilla 1-slot off Aliexpress. I had been resigned to just eventually having to auction my way towards having my preferred motherboard sometime, so you can imagine my surprise that while I was casually perusing the main Surugaya outlet at Akihabara that I found exactly the motherboard version I'd been wanting all along: the MV-1F, and a pretty reasonable price relative to what it often fetches online. Considering that same store was also where I bought my Capcom CPS-2 motherboard for a pretty good deal to play my Quiz Nanairo Dreams "cart" (if one of those CPS-2 chonkers can still be called that), I took it as a sign and snatched it up immediately that evening, albeit without any games accompanying it since I didn't see anything there for sale that I either wanted or would've been cheap enough for me to buy anyway just to have something to test the motherboard on my supergun.
Anyway, fast forward a couple of weeks and 6000 yen later, I had a copy of Saurus' Stakes Winner and a handful of miscellaneous modding supplies from Tops, a longtime arcade seller that I can recommend after now having finally bought something from them after all these years. (They even ship overseas and take PayPal for foreign orders!) Stakes Winner itself is nothing to write home about as a game; it's a pretty basic, if pleasant-looking arcade horse racing game in the vein of Namco's Japan-only Famicom release Family Jockey. It's got some light stat-raising elements and interesting ideas about stamina management that attempts to emulate how different types of horses tend to be handled and positioned during real world races, but the races themselves aren't all that thrilling to play through in practice. That's about what I expected, though; again, I just wanted something cheap to make sure the MVS itself worked with my supergun so on the off-chance that anything went wrong electrically, I wouldn't potentially sacrifice anything more expensive in the process.
Luckily, that didn't turn out to be the case; after putting in a little elbow grease and some isopropyl on the JAMMA connector, the MVS booted up and worked like a charm. As a result, that meant I could go on to giving the motherboard the two humble mods I wanted to add to it to make it the best it could be. Specifically, I wanted to replace the stock BIOS chip with what's known as a UniBIOS, which is basically a fan modded BIOS with some extra features, and also put together a headphone connector so I could get stereo audio out of it over a regular old 3.5 mm jack.
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Depending on what revision of motherboard you get, sometimes the BIOS chip is fully soldered and it's therefore a much bigger song and dance actually replacing it. Luckily, in my case, it's as simple as just taking a flathead screwdriver, popping off the old chip and plunking down the new one in its place. Pretty damn painless, if I do say so myself! And, whaddya know, it worked like a champ when I tested it, giving me extra setting screens and in-game cheat menus to futz around with. As someone who's spent many years watching Jeff Gerstmann play around with the UniBIOS in his own consolized Neo Geo, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't gratifying to finally get to experience the fun of it for myself. The UniBIOS itself is by no means necessary to have for a home setup, but it does have some much appreciated features in terms of region switching and whatnot for those who want to access, say, content locked behind different versions of games, and given that it's a very cheap upgrade to do yourself on the whole, it was ultimately a no brainer to throw into my motherboard. Plus, the sticker my chip game with just gives my motherboard a little more personality, I reckon.
That left me with just the matter of the headphone audio output to take care of. On most Neo Geo MVS motherboards that support headphone audio, unfortunately, it doesn't come with a jack built in. Instead, all you get is a four-pin JST header on the lower left edge of the board. I assume it's because the expectation was that said jack would be located on the front of the cabinet itself, the wiring of which being what would actually connect to the motherboard itself. In practice, what that meant was that I was going to finally have to learn to crimp wires to put an adapter together, which was going to be a new skill for me to learn.
As part of that order from Tops that I mentioned earlier, I bought multiples of both the necessary JST plug and the crimping terminals themselves so that I could have some spares to practice. The process itself is pretty simple, but after trying and somewhat failing to steadily crimp anything using the crimper built into my wire stripper/wire cutter, I ended up buying a dedicated crimping tool with a ratchet embedded that holds the terminals in place for you so you don't have to constantly squeeze, but not over-squeeze while lining up the wire into the terminal. It still took more time and a little trial and error to get right than I would've liked, but overall, the crimping process itself was pretty painless thanks in large part to the ratched tool. Before long, I had crisp stereo audio piping out of the MVS and into my headphones, just as nature truly intended.
And... that's about it! I pretty much now have exactly the MVS I've envisioned using for years and it didn't take all that much blood, sweat, and tears to pull off, either! Which, honestly, is true for a lot of basic game modding and maintenance stuff, I've found. I'm happy to leave the really tricky stuff requiring advanced tools for the pros, but as someone living in a country with far fewer people offering such services compared to the west, I knew that when I moved here I'd have to learn to be self-sufficient when it came to doing at least basic upkeep of my retro game stuff like this and, even as someone who still has a hard time remembering the difference between watts, volts, and amps, the actual hands-on stuff has generally been a lot less scary and difficult to pull off in practice than I imagined, especially since most stuff that I'm interested in performing has guides online that can be readily found. All of which is to say, you don't have a degree in electrical engineering to look after your old games and if you've ever wanted to dabble in it yourself, I genuinely encourage you to give it a shot! Even something as basic as putting together this headphone adapter can prove to be satisfying to pull off because it's something you made work yourself, rather than having to rely on someone else's help.
As for the MVS itself, my actual ambitions for it beyond this aren't too grand. I have a few carts I'll hopefully pick up in due course, most notably Neo Turf Masters and Money Idol Exchanger, two games I have an incredibly soft spot for. But, otherwise, for anything else, in all likelihood, I'll source, shall we say, an alternative cart from overseas that I trust won't wreak havoc on my system and call it a day. For as fun as it is holding such hefty cartridges and plugging them in, I remain a man of limited financial means who already gets into enough quagmires because of his arcade inclinations. The last thing I need is to get a bad Neo Geo collecting habit that makes me broke in a foreign country.
As a final aside, I'll also quickly mention that I also picked up a Neo Geo CD controller to go with this MVS board, as well. The great thing about most arcade superguns is that the Neo Geo controller plugs are the prevailing input standard and while I typically use a Sega Saturn adapter to play most anything else, it just felt right that I should get a proper SNK controller of some sort to play this thing, right? And I'm glad I did! The CD controller is by no means my favorite controller of its vintage, but it feels good to hold in the hand and that trademark SNK clickiness in the stick gives it a unique charm. One that I wouldn't want replicated across every controller, mind you, but a charm nonetheless. Like Unibios chip, hooking up the controller was as simple as plugging it straight into my supergun as is, no adapters necessary, and it works perfectly! The MV-1F also, conveniently enough, has on board controller ports of its own, too. There's no reason to use one over the other, but that's probably where I'll keep my controller plugged in simply because it's a novel thing for me to be able to plug a regular retail control into a big boy arcade board that probably saw many years of action at a real Japanese game center in another lifetime.
Anyway, that's it for this edition of Tom's Arcade Antics! Look forward to more Cohost content this week! I reckon I've got at least another couple of days to go before that migration will be complete. Now that I've finished porting over the dating sim-tagged posts specifically, I'm manually combing over my entire posting history on the site for anything else interesting I want to carry over. I doubt I'll have too much more to post since the bulk of my long-form writing was dedicated to dating sims and galge in general, but in any case, once that process is complete, I'll run another announcement post on here and then from that point on, it'll be all new stuff all the time from me! Look forward to it, gamers! 😌