I’ve been thinking about whether or not to write a thread but in the end decided I would do one big post rather than piecemeal updates. Sooooo, if you’re bored, or find yourself at a loose end, grab a drink, and be prepared to read, because this is a big one!
Impulse buying in Tokyo:
It was April 2024, and without realising it, I fell down into the rabbit hole after impulse buying an arcade game in Japan. I was over there on a work trip and was meeting a colleague for lunch. I arrived in Ueno so early because of fear of getting lost on the trains but I arrived in plenty of time and figured I would have a browse of some shops on the way. I walked into an old computer shop, which had it been in the UK, would probably have had old Spectrums, Amstrads and Amigas, but being Japanese had computers that I had never seen before. Over in the corner of the shop was a large glass cabinet with what looked like PCBs inside. I walked over curious as to what they were and sure enough, they were all arcade games. One grabbed my eye in particular, it was a large silver box wrapped in pink anti-static bubble wrap with an operator’s manual and marquee art sheet attached to it. The artwork had a spaceship on the front, which I recognised to be the Vic Viper. The game was Gradius IV. I absolutely love this game. I discovered it on the PS2 initially, and realised that I had to get the real arcade version! I had my passport with me so I was able to take advantage of the tax-free price as a foreigner. No sooner had I walked in, I was now leaving with a massive PC sized box under my arm, and I was in central Tokyo looking for the restaurant to meet my co-worker at! I definitely got some strange looks, but even more so when I was carrying it through Haneda airport guarding it with my life.
Gradius IV Hornet....just sat there in the corner of a computer shop in Tokyo....the start of my arcade adventure was about to begin:
JAMMA and JVS?
Roll forward a few weeks and my Supergun. v2.0 from Ali Express arrived and I was able to finally hook the real arcade game to my CRT and bash away on a Sega Saturn control pad. The game play and music was great but I was a bit underwhelmed by the small size of the screen image and the blockiness of the graphics. It turns out, that I was running the game over Jamma at 15kHz, and optimum resolution according to the manual was 24kHz. I changed the dip switch on the game but my Sony Trinitron didn’t support that type of horizontal frequency. I thought about trying to find a compatible CRT to play the game on (which is no easy feat), and then it hit me…….what if I put the arcade game into an actual arcade cabinet! What an excellent idea! But the game wasn’t released in the UK so how would I find a cabinet for it? The game was released in a Konami Windy 2 cabinet. I didn’t even know what that was, let alone what JVS meant!
Hunting for a Windy 2:
I joined this forum to do some research and after a while I put a wanted post out for a Konami Windy 2. I got a reply from a very helpful chap called John Bud, and he had one of these cabinets in storage. He said it was mine if I wanted it and it had actually been for sale for some time already. There were some downsides though, the monitor chassis was missing and the cabinet was pretty battered. John didn’t know if there was anything else incomplete or missing, but was very helpful answering my questions. A deal was done and the cabinet was due to be collected by a shipping company at the end of October 2024.
It looked mostly complete, except for a potentially missing front door:
The rear looked good, a few missing screws and the absence of the original topper:
A few marks down the side from its life as a working machine I suspect:
Definitely its worse side! Deep scratches and damaged artwork, but nothing too disastrous:
Unfortunately, the day of collection couldn’t go ahead as John had to go to hospital due to a recent chest infection. I didn’t realise how ill John was at the time, but we had agreed that once he was out again, we’d get the machine collected again. Sadly, John passed away a few weeks later. We had been keeping in touch with each other right up to the end until my texts suddenly went unanswered :-(
John’s wife, Roz, and their friend Alistair helped me re-arrange for a new collection in the New Year and in February 2025 the arcade machine was finally delivered!
Safely into the garage and most of the wrapping still intact. Looks like the game access hatch was included after all:
For about a month or so afterwards, every time I went to the garage this old arcade machine was looking back at me. I literally had no idea what to do with it or where to start! I love DIY and I do basic mechanical work on my cars so one weekend in March, I decided to see if I could get this thing to work. How hard could it be? I knew I needed a monitor chassis so I set out trying to find something compatible for the 29” Toshiba A68KZN696X monitor. In the meantime, let’s see if I can at least get a video output from the cabinet by using an external screen…
Where to start.....:
First thing I did was to remove the power supply. There was no way I wanted to plug that old thing into my fancy new game. Luckily, the Gradius IV operator’s manual had very helpful wiring diagrams at the back. It also said what voltages the game needed. I was looking for 3.3v, 5v and 12v. The 3.3v isn’t actually used on this particular game but I could at least check for it. Sure enough, the power supply was working great. It took 240v in from the main, passed it through a noise filter and then into a step-down isolation transformer, which then entered the power supply and gave me the respective voltages on the JVS pins.
I hooked up an LCD screen via an OSSC with HDMI to see if anything would be displayed when connected. I changed the dip switches on the Hornet (Gradius IV uses this type of game box) and plugged everything in. I got a picture on the screen saying “JVS not found” and “RTC checksum error. Reset to all factory settings.” Obviously I had no idea what that meant, but because no controls were working, or the coin mechanism, I assumed that the control panel circuit board (I/O board) wasn’t hooked up correctly. I changed the position of the USB cables in the rear of the cabinet whilst testing the joystick and sure enough, I was able to start entering the date. The control panel’s action buttons weren’t working though as they were wired up incorrectly. Once the buttons were correctly wired up I tried again, I set the time and date, and then the game booted up. I even had sound, and the coin slot would send a credit to the game if I moved the small lever where the coin would drop through! Woohoo! I had the basis of a working game and cabinet!
JVS Cabinet check passed:
I decided to try and get some coins to work. The cabinet says 100Y so I grabbed some spare Japanese coins from my holiday pouch and shoved them in! They didn’t work and got rejected. Bummer…..I tried a 10p, rejected. A quarter dollar from the US perhaps? No, rejected. Nothing seemed to work. No coin of any denomination! I know some cabs run on tokens so perhaps this machine was used on tokens. Anyway, I searched online to see if the coin mechanism could be adjusted. Sure enough, after a few minutes I bent a few levers and moved a few screws and just like that, I was able to get the 100Y coin recognised. The coin mech is a lovely bit of machinery that checks the coin for the correct size and weight. If it rotates properly inside the mechanism, it is passed through the centre, and drops down over a small metal lever connected to some electrical wires. When the wire moves, a signal is sent to the I/O board triggering the game to know a coin has been entered, and a credit can be awarded (the game is fully configurable for numbers of credits per coins etc.) Once the coin drops into the coin box and the game has received the credit, the coin counter increments by one. Think of it like an odometer for your car - this cabinet when I got it had taken over 46,000 coins in its lifetime. If each coin is worth 100Y (approx. 50p), then that’s about £23,000GBP! These cabinets sure have the potential to make good money!
The coin mech is a beautifully made machine manufactured by Asahi-Seiko:
I was really starting to enjoy working on this cabinet by now, so I started hunting for some new joysticks and buttons. Sanwa are highly regarded in this instance, and I wanted the authentic Japanese experience. The cabinet already had these buttons fitted, but were pink and yellow. The Windy 2 should have come with white and blue, so I ordered some online from Arcade Parts UK (a new British company that sources authentic Japanese parts and ships them direct to your door with a free packet of sweets inside - excellent service)!
(To be continued on post 2)
Impulse buying in Tokyo:
It was April 2024, and without realising it, I fell down into the rabbit hole after impulse buying an arcade game in Japan. I was over there on a work trip and was meeting a colleague for lunch. I arrived in Ueno so early because of fear of getting lost on the trains but I arrived in plenty of time and figured I would have a browse of some shops on the way. I walked into an old computer shop, which had it been in the UK, would probably have had old Spectrums, Amstrads and Amigas, but being Japanese had computers that I had never seen before. Over in the corner of the shop was a large glass cabinet with what looked like PCBs inside. I walked over curious as to what they were and sure enough, they were all arcade games. One grabbed my eye in particular, it was a large silver box wrapped in pink anti-static bubble wrap with an operator’s manual and marquee art sheet attached to it. The artwork had a spaceship on the front, which I recognised to be the Vic Viper. The game was Gradius IV. I absolutely love this game. I discovered it on the PS2 initially, and realised that I had to get the real arcade version! I had my passport with me so I was able to take advantage of the tax-free price as a foreigner. No sooner had I walked in, I was now leaving with a massive PC sized box under my arm, and I was in central Tokyo looking for the restaurant to meet my co-worker at! I definitely got some strange looks, but even more so when I was carrying it through Haneda airport guarding it with my life.
Gradius IV Hornet....just sat there in the corner of a computer shop in Tokyo....the start of my arcade adventure was about to begin:
JAMMA and JVS?
Roll forward a few weeks and my Supergun. v2.0 from Ali Express arrived and I was able to finally hook the real arcade game to my CRT and bash away on a Sega Saturn control pad. The game play and music was great but I was a bit underwhelmed by the small size of the screen image and the blockiness of the graphics. It turns out, that I was running the game over Jamma at 15kHz, and optimum resolution according to the manual was 24kHz. I changed the dip switch on the game but my Sony Trinitron didn’t support that type of horizontal frequency. I thought about trying to find a compatible CRT to play the game on (which is no easy feat), and then it hit me…….what if I put the arcade game into an actual arcade cabinet! What an excellent idea! But the game wasn’t released in the UK so how would I find a cabinet for it? The game was released in a Konami Windy 2 cabinet. I didn’t even know what that was, let alone what JVS meant!
Hunting for a Windy 2:
I joined this forum to do some research and after a while I put a wanted post out for a Konami Windy 2. I got a reply from a very helpful chap called John Bud, and he had one of these cabinets in storage. He said it was mine if I wanted it and it had actually been for sale for some time already. There were some downsides though, the monitor chassis was missing and the cabinet was pretty battered. John didn’t know if there was anything else incomplete or missing, but was very helpful answering my questions. A deal was done and the cabinet was due to be collected by a shipping company at the end of October 2024.
It looked mostly complete, except for a potentially missing front door:
The rear looked good, a few missing screws and the absence of the original topper:
A few marks down the side from its life as a working machine I suspect:
Definitely its worse side! Deep scratches and damaged artwork, but nothing too disastrous:
Unfortunately, the day of collection couldn’t go ahead as John had to go to hospital due to a recent chest infection. I didn’t realise how ill John was at the time, but we had agreed that once he was out again, we’d get the machine collected again. Sadly, John passed away a few weeks later. We had been keeping in touch with each other right up to the end until my texts suddenly went unanswered :-(
John’s wife, Roz, and their friend Alistair helped me re-arrange for a new collection in the New Year and in February 2025 the arcade machine was finally delivered!
Safely into the garage and most of the wrapping still intact. Looks like the game access hatch was included after all:
For about a month or so afterwards, every time I went to the garage this old arcade machine was looking back at me. I literally had no idea what to do with it or where to start! I love DIY and I do basic mechanical work on my cars so one weekend in March, I decided to see if I could get this thing to work. How hard could it be? I knew I needed a monitor chassis so I set out trying to find something compatible for the 29” Toshiba A68KZN696X monitor. In the meantime, let’s see if I can at least get a video output from the cabinet by using an external screen…
Where to start.....:
First thing I did was to remove the power supply. There was no way I wanted to plug that old thing into my fancy new game. Luckily, the Gradius IV operator’s manual had very helpful wiring diagrams at the back. It also said what voltages the game needed. I was looking for 3.3v, 5v and 12v. The 3.3v isn’t actually used on this particular game but I could at least check for it. Sure enough, the power supply was working great. It took 240v in from the main, passed it through a noise filter and then into a step-down isolation transformer, which then entered the power supply and gave me the respective voltages on the JVS pins.
I hooked up an LCD screen via an OSSC with HDMI to see if anything would be displayed when connected. I changed the dip switches on the Hornet (Gradius IV uses this type of game box) and plugged everything in. I got a picture on the screen saying “JVS not found” and “RTC checksum error. Reset to all factory settings.” Obviously I had no idea what that meant, but because no controls were working, or the coin mechanism, I assumed that the control panel circuit board (I/O board) wasn’t hooked up correctly. I changed the position of the USB cables in the rear of the cabinet whilst testing the joystick and sure enough, I was able to start entering the date. The control panel’s action buttons weren’t working though as they were wired up incorrectly. Once the buttons were correctly wired up I tried again, I set the time and date, and then the game booted up. I even had sound, and the coin slot would send a credit to the game if I moved the small lever where the coin would drop through! Woohoo! I had the basis of a working game and cabinet!
JVS Cabinet check passed:
I decided to try and get some coins to work. The cabinet says 100Y so I grabbed some spare Japanese coins from my holiday pouch and shoved them in! They didn’t work and got rejected. Bummer…..I tried a 10p, rejected. A quarter dollar from the US perhaps? No, rejected. Nothing seemed to work. No coin of any denomination! I know some cabs run on tokens so perhaps this machine was used on tokens. Anyway, I searched online to see if the coin mechanism could be adjusted. Sure enough, after a few minutes I bent a few levers and moved a few screws and just like that, I was able to get the 100Y coin recognised. The coin mech is a lovely bit of machinery that checks the coin for the correct size and weight. If it rotates properly inside the mechanism, it is passed through the centre, and drops down over a small metal lever connected to some electrical wires. When the wire moves, a signal is sent to the I/O board triggering the game to know a coin has been entered, and a credit can be awarded (the game is fully configurable for numbers of credits per coins etc.) Once the coin drops into the coin box and the game has received the credit, the coin counter increments by one. Think of it like an odometer for your car - this cabinet when I got it had taken over 46,000 coins in its lifetime. If each coin is worth 100Y (approx. 50p), then that’s about £23,000GBP! These cabinets sure have the potential to make good money!
The coin mech is a beautifully made machine manufactured by Asahi-Seiko:
I was really starting to enjoy working on this cabinet by now, so I started hunting for some new joysticks and buttons. Sanwa are highly regarded in this instance, and I wanted the authentic Japanese experience. The cabinet already had these buttons fitted, but were pink and yellow. The Windy 2 should have come with white and blue, so I ordered some online from Arcade Parts UK (a new British company that sources authentic Japanese parts and ships them direct to your door with a free packet of sweets inside - excellent service)!
(To be continued on post 2)
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