OK, well yes I like to keep things original but I have no problem with making a cab a bit more versatile if possible. I've been looking at this kit ever since I found my Galaxian cab. The pound-Euro rate made buying it much more interesting right now. Also, they were all sold out for quite some time. Recently Mike mailed me if I still wanted one and of course the answer was yes.
The kit build quality is very good. It looks very professional. The included cables are top-notch too.
Installation of the kit is straightforward and very well explained on Mike's site (
http://www.arcades.plus.com/MultigameInstall.htm).
For some, the only problem may be that one chip (a PROM) needs to be desoldered and a socket mounted. There is also one wire that needs to be soldered between the kit and the board.
Anyway, pics:
The original board. The red wires on there are because of my "TV-mod" it's just to get some voltages from the board for the SCART connector so has nothing to do with the kit. My board has the first Namco ROM-set on the "well-known" rom extender board that is often a cause for problems but in my case still worked 100%.
Extender board removed, Z80 removed, RAMs removed and PROM desoldered from board:
And everything installed. One note if you get this kit too: Use a simple, el-cheapo socket for the PROM position. The more expensive one's with the round holes cannot accept the relatively thick pins that are always used with these kits. The wires with connectors are included. You need to get a wire to solder to the board yourself.
When I had the kit installed, the coin-counter was constantly triggered while being in the menu. I e-mailed Mike and he said I was probably the first one who actually had a coin-counter connected. It's probably something in the code, for now I simply disconnected the coin-counter. No problem for me.
Next, when I set-up the options in the menu screens and turned off the game and back on again, the settings were back to default. Also, the saved hi-scores were gone.
The reason was simple: I hadn't read all the instructions correctly on Mike's site. All dip switches on my PCB were on, and Mike writes to turn them all off. With DIP-switch 3 you can enable or disable the settings menu. Once I corrected these settings it works fine. Mike explained that when you set DIP-sw 1,2,3,4 ON, it will clear the NVRAM on boot-up(in the unlikely case that the NVRAM data should get corrupted).
Now I could set-up everything. In the set-up you can select what controls your cab has. When you set it up for a regular Galaxian cab (2-way, 1 button) it will remove all the 4-way games from the list. That's nice so players won't get frustrated by any games they select that can't be played with a 2-way stick.
The games you are left with are of course all shooters (except Video Pool) but there are some real gems in the list.
A really interesting game in the 4-way "section" is Mr.Do's Nightmare. A game done by Mike's friend Ivan. It features Mario Bros. music !
On some of the games things are fixed in software. F.I. Frog's music is corrected and colors corrected etc. This improves the games over the "original hacks".
Very well done and it shows that a kit like this is more work than you would first expect.
Here is the video as requested:
Galaxian Multi-Game kit by Macro's Arcade
