Went to Acme yesterday for the first time in a while.

The DDR games are A-OK except for that Max 2 seems to have it's screen stretched too large. Parts of the screen are getting cut-off on the edges. You should have the tech resize the image so that it fits within the marquee properly.

So, I had a bit of an...unexpected stop on my road trip and found myself randomly at your fine arcade today, met a few people, played lots of ITG and it was lots of fun!

Originally I was supposed to get a specialty car part installed here, and then leave right away, because I'm doing this big epic road trip, about 2500 miles or so. The car part improves my mileage by around 15% so I figured I'd do that first. Anyway, what happened was that I got here a bit late in the day to get it done today so unexpectedly had a free evening!

Hopefully sometime I will make a more organized trip. Maybe I'll bring Team Ginyu Force with me this time. xD

FYI the GF machine doesn't have any sound - speakers seem to be turned off.

......Any updates on how drummania is doing?

Hopefully GF has sound once again.

DM, the board is off for repair, while we try to figure out what keeps blowing boards.  We thought we had it figured out several times now just to start back at square one.

That sucks.   I hope you guys can figure it out eventually!

I'll still pump a few quarters into the GF for you Bill, however until that DM comes back I just can't promise as much (I get bored of GF a lot faster than DM)...
Hope it's fixed soon!
C

I hear our board is coming back early next week.  we will burn it awhile to make sure it will hold up.  Will keep you all posted.  :-)

Do you know details about the damage to the board?  Is it a consistent part (or parts) that keeps burning out or is it something new each time?  Does DM seem to put out higher voltage or amperage through the relevant connectors than GF, which I assume has a similar setup inside?

I don't mean to jump in and try to diagnose it myself, since you guys are always on top of everything, but I'm legitimately curious, personally invested (haven't played DM in a month after improving by leaps and bounds at S-Con), and my dad did a little bit of work on cable/satellite equipment in the past, so I always get especially interested when this kind of stuff comes up again.  Plus I just can't remember if there was a voltmeter laying around in the warehouse (I snoop around everywhere I go, bad habit of mine) when I tested IIDX with Jerrad back in the day, so I want to make sure all the bases are covered.

Bill, keep me updated.  As soon as that DM drops back, I've got $10-20 with your name on it.
Best,
C

Chris, hang on to those quarters.  :-)

It is blowing the input chips for the I/O.  The old system 573 boards were very bullet proof.  This newer system is very sensitive and fragile in comparison.  Anything much over 5 volts through an input will whack this board.  We have already made many modifications to clean up stray voltages coming in from the cabinet.  Dam, the bars holding all the drums are not even grounded from the factory.  A few more mods, and tests, and hope to take it on a test run once again.  Maybe next week?  A good board just arrived today, but we do not want to rush things just to have problems again. 

Yeah Bill, the PS2 based systekms are, reliabilitywise, a huge pile of crap. There's a reason Konami cut them for V4; they're just really unreliable. The good thing is that, as you probably found out, spare parts for the V3 hardware are pretty easy to come by.

I played on the GF V3 at Acme on Saturday. It was great! The volume could do with a little turning up, but everything worked well. There's a bunch of static and crackling on the machine, but I'm not sure how much can be done about that.

TGM also works great as usual, thanks. Looks like those SakuraCon problems haven't returned.

Pop'n had an "out of order" sticker on it but I'm sure that's been called in by now.

Checkin in...

Anyone been at ACME lately or can comment if the DM is back?
Thanks,
C

It's not.

It's still in the shop.  Trying to make double sure nothing is going to fry this latest board once it heads up there.  Hoping soon, but the project is moving slowly. 

Slowly but surely is better than getting it out fast and crappily.
Glad to hear things are at least progressing well.

Same here. At least it's coming back one day!

I'm not being impatient; just like being updated.
Take your time, Bill!

Updates are being made to the Acme Bowl ITG cabinet.

From 7:00pm onwards tomorrow, MAKE SURE TO MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR ITG USB DATA BEFORE YOU USE YOUR DRIVE ON THE MACHINE AGAIN!

You may lose the ability to upload scores directly to GrooveStats if you don't.

wait, are you upgrading it to r23?

Nope. We're adding the ITG3 and ITG Rebirth packs. Themes are coming next week. Expect ITG3, ITG Gold, the J444mes theme, and the ITG Eternity theme. Also expect a few more songs. If anyone has requests...

Boo, Kevin got me excited thinking the DM was back.

Guess it's good news for ITG players though.

Hopefully. Anyway yeah, people should not come at 6:30 expecting to play. The machine will be running Linux at that time. I think we'll be done by 7:00 though.

That's pretty awesome!
You bet it is!