PVG SNK Bartop finally done right

[Mikeosoft]

I'm waiting for my AWS cab from the groupbuy and trying to bide my time.  I've been modding xboxs for nostalgia, and finishing my cabs slowly.  I picked up this PVG bartop after searching for one for years and I might have paid too much for it, but whatever.  It was limited to 6 neo geo games, and they were emulated via a custom jamma board with a non-rewitable sd card that was rar'd and password protected. Others have broke the protection, and spilled the info that the games are in fact zipped neo geo roms... There's some sort of check in the code so you cann't just replace another neogeo rom by renaming it the old one...  Although I did put a unibios in it for kicks and that worked weird.

So for the past 2 nights I've been flirting with the idea of removing the stock sd card jamma board, and throwing in an xbox running coinops.
I am finished and here's the result:




One on/off switch, i spliced xbox into switch as well as speaker amp is powered off +12 volt line and ground from xbox.


Xbox system is tsop flashed, m8+ bios with dvd check disabled so no dvd drive (cuts down on size and bootup time), 120gb laptop ide drive with adaptor,  fan speed set to 100% because i'm still figuring out temps.



Xbox to Jamma adaptor fits right where the original board went, footprint matches up perfectly, talk about luck:



Daughterboard doubles as the PSU for the unit, so I cannot break them up.


xbox on the left side wall, xbox to jamma adaptor below and to the left, harddrive behind it.


Decased an old dell speaker system and used the speaker amp to power the speaker, ran the unpowered audio out from the jamma edge because the xbox to jamma adaptor needs 12 volts to power the onboard amp, which this stock PVG powersupply cannot provide via jammaedge:


I pull +12 volts from the xbox psu to the speaker system via the molex connector on the harddrive.  I was worried about buzz from an unclean source, but no problems. Sound is great!

Now i can choose from 3335 games, i have a neo geo library of 620 games, nice upgrade from the original 6 with ---smurfy--- sound...

This is emulation i realize it's far from perfect, hell i still have 2 legit neo cabs for that, but this will make me happy for a while.  None of that shotty chinese 3000 in 1 units that use a VIA cpu and bad caps, locked down and non-user upgradable or customizable.  This is a good solution that is completely reversible back to stock.

Video:

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great work. I've been searching for just the cab for a while now to basically do the same thing.

Look on the bright side. the board on those cabs is worth MUCH more than the actual cab. You can sell it and recoup a large portion of your costs.