Super Wide Neo Geo MVS Resto / Temporary Mod

[processedmeat]

I picked a free 6 slot Neo Geo MVS that was pretty much missing everything that makes it a Neo Geo machine. 

No marquee, no EL panels, no bezel, no plexi, no coin slot seven segment display etc.

Looking through the various arcade forums online, it doesn't help that the parts for this particular machine is pretty rare and that the 6 slot PCB is probably the most flaky of all the MVS PCBs.  So as I wait to acquire all of the correct parts, I figure that in the mean time I can restore it cosmetically, PC MAME the guts, use a 32" LCD TV for the monitor, and learn how to use a dynamic marquee with a 29" ultrawide IPS monitor that I have lying around.






 

[processedmeat]

First issue I noticed after I brought it home was that the right side of the metal control panel is slightly bent and doesn't line up properly with the other side and with the side panels. 

I tried to re-bend it by flexing with my weight but I can't get it budge.  Any thoughts?

[processedmeat]

As a fledgling arcade enthusiast, I've never had to replace anything in the coin door sans a light bulb.  Can somebody confirm that this is a typical Happ coin entry bezel?

[krangbrain]

As a fledging arcade enthusiast, I've never had to replace anything in the coin door sans a light bulb.  Can somebody confirm that this is a typical Happ coin entry bezel?

I'm pretty sure that's a Coin Controls over/under. If I'm not mistaken, Happs have the opening to insert a coin on the left of the coin reject button -- it goes through the bezel. Coin Controls have the opening that goes through the red coin reject button.

[thomas_surles]

Yeah that's not happ. Search coin entry bezel on ebay and look for a wells/gardner. I just saw one for 2 dollars and some change. It looks like the right fit. You will also need the reject button with the coin slot in the button as said above.

Happ looks like this

[stigzler]

and learn how to use a dynamic marquee with a 29" ultrawide IPS monitor that I have lying around.

This might help for that:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,144734.0.html

Or a simpler version if you're still using GameEx:
https://www.gameex.info/forums/files/file/536-marqueemasher/

[keilmillerjr]

You need to decide if your going to do a restore or custom route first. You will just waste money if you don't know what you want to do.

My suggestion is to scrape the dynamic marquee idea. Have a nice marquee printed on translite and use a backlight. Easy, cheap, and looks good. Use a crt tv. Can get them for free. They look authentic, because they are authentic. Retro games on LCD look like poo. Then either get an mvs with neosd or multicart, or raspberry pi. It's easy to get these to hook up to crt tvs. Emulate only neo games and the limitation of not being able to change modelines without rebooting will not be an issue.

[processedmeat]

You need to decide if your going to do a restore or custom route first. You will just waste money if you don't know what you want to do.

My suggestion is to scrape the dynamic marquee idea. Have a nice marquee printed on translite and use a backlight. Easy, cheap, and looks good. Use a crt tv. Can get them for free. They look authentic, because they are authentic. Retro games on LCD look like poo. Then either get an mvs with neosd or multicart, or raspberry pi. It's easy to get these to hook up to crt tvs. Emulate only neo games and the limitation of not being able to change modelines without rebooting will not be an issue.

Good advice and I appreciate your time in responding.  After thinking about all of the pros and cons for each setup, I ended up deciding on the PC and dual LCD route primarily because some neo-geo games are missing from the all in one carts if go with the PCB and I had all of the lcd hardware around already and also I wanted to learn how to get a dynamic marquee up and going.   

[processedmeat]

and learn how to use a dynamic marquee with a 29" ultrawide IPS monitor that I have lying around.

This might help for that:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,144734.0.html

Or a simpler version if you're still using GameEx:
https://www.gameex.info/forums/files/file/536-marqueemasher/

Thanks for the link to your awesome software.  I ended up using Hyperspin for this build so I ended up using HyperMarquee.  Thanks again for  your time posting this.

[processedmeat]

So once I decided to go in the PC and LCD route, I started playing with HyperMarquee and the EDS software and seeing if I can get it to dynamically display the slot artwork seen a in NeoGeo marquee.  The cool thing about it is that once the game is selected, I can put up things like the Hi Score, Video snap, Box Art etc.



Eventually the ultrawide monitor will sit behind the top marquee metalwork and hopefully the speaker image, marquee and game slots will line up properly with it.

[processedmeat]

Since Hypermarquee doesn't have a wheel option built in that will not only pull up the slot artwork for the game that is focus with Hyperspin but also the slot artwork for the 2 previous games before it and the 2 after it as I scroll up and down on the wheel, I came up with a really crude method to get this work.

I made 5 artwork folders, one for each slot, and using the Advanced Renamer program and an csv spreadsheet of the file names, I renamed the images that went into the 1st slot, two games previous to the one that the wheel is on.  The 2nd slot, I renamed the images one game previous to the one in focus.  The fourth, one game after, and the fifth two games after the one in focus. 

So as a result, all of the images in the five slots of the first photo below are named panicbomber but they each reside in a different artwork folder.  In the second photo, they are all named puzzlebobble2, and in the third, they are all named puzzlebobble.

As I scroll the wheel, you can see the Puzzle Bobble image move from the far right to the middle.  To make the effect more pronounced, I ended up darken the ones that aren't in focus and made the selected game in the middle brighter using the shaders.

[processedmeat]

After getting the dynamic marquee to scroll, I decided to tackle what to do with the screen, once a game was selected.   One thing I realised is that with so many Neo Geo games, the instruction card with the controls is really important.  However,  if I just put the mini marquee, the instructions are difficult to read and not obvious.  I could just go through each instruction card and enlarge just the controls area but because there wasn't a standard design for the controls, it started to look really disjointed and too busy.  Also, making a instruction png for every game didn't seem like an efficient thing to do as well.

I then started looking into CPwizard and found that it has batch export function to generate control png's.  However, as I delved more into it, I noticed that it draws info from controls.ini or controls.xml which doesn't include neogeo games.

So I am at a crossroad where I need to either photoshop 141 instruction cards or go through the instructions for every neogeo game to make a custom control.ini file for CPwizard to use.   Any suggestions?

[keilmillerjr]

Don't worry about the controls. Neo geo only has 4 buttons, and most neo games do a good job of explaining the controls in game.