ArcadeSD Board review... C-

barakawins

Well-known member

Donor 2023
Joined
Nov 14, 2004
Messages
2,708
Reaction score
240
Location
Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey
I wanted to chime in and talk about the new ArcadeSD board. I am comparing it to the original arcadeshop board. The Arcadeshop board wins in my opinion. The following turn offs:

I'm not a fan of the new menu screen with icons to hover over to choose game.
The original arcadeshop board has a much better menu selection splash screen.

The games: Arcadeshop board games were included. However, the old issues with the
arcadeshop boards were transferred to this one. For Example: Gorf (screen is still cut off
at the high score area on top). DK Jr., (pipes board on level one looses sound). New game: Gaplus - static heard in sound.

Arcadeshop board - accepts DK Foundry and DKII with splash screens. ArcadeSD does not.

I have to tell you, at $310 I expected a bit more for the first release. This board does have a lot of potential and I do like the idea that the SD card is being used for more games. However, the original game set has to be improved to work properly before more games are added or this will turn into a cheap 60 in 1 quickly. I'm hoping that the games are fixed and that updates continue. The other thing that I think would be beneficial is if you could custom choose if a joystick or buttons should be used as left/right controls. Space invaders, SI Deluxe and Carnival use buttons which are essential to game play.

Overall, I give the arcadesd board a C- for now. I expect a lot more out of this board in the future though. Hopefully the original splash screens will be used as well.
 
For clarification purposes...

The Arcadeshop board did NOT come with ROM's pre-loaded.

I also encourage the OP to report bugs to the proper email address.
 
Just got/installed my ArcadeshopSD. Have to disagree overall--I think the SD version is much better than the original. My setup is a cocktail with 1 leafswitch joystick and 2 leaf buttons per player.

OK, I do kind of like the original AS board's menu a bit better. I prefer having the name of a game visible to relying on the newly-created menu icons. Although scrolling through the new menu is better.

Now for the good stuff. One problem with the AS board was that several games (pacman, bagman, etc.) were unplayable with the 8-way leafswitches. In particular, Bagman would get stuck most of the time when trying to turn corners or make a turn in the middle of a tunnel. The SD board seems to have cured this problem. (I was prepared to adjust the leafs to minimize extent of diagonals but after testing I found it was unnecessary.) Bagman plays perfectly on the SD board; it was unplayable on the AS board with my pretty standard controllers. I'm sure there are other games that have been 'fixed' and play better on the SD as well.

Saved a few high scores, have not (nearly) tried every game! Everything seems to work quite well. Setup was easier (and smarter) of course. I prefer popping out the SD card to pulling the whole jamma card from the cabinet.

About the SD card--saw a lot of discussion about using max 2GB cards, and that 4GB SD (non-HC) cards generally don't work. Well, I had a 4GB non-HC. But, after seeing the size of my rom folder, I decided to install an old (real throwaway!) 256MB SD card. It worked fine. I think it's using less than 20MB for all of the current vertical games. So don't think you need a 2GB card, or even 1GB. Seriously, more storage is not important, and most of the card will be empty. The only reason I can think where you'll need a fair amount of storage is if you throw a lot o mp3's on the card. I won't be doing that anyway.
 
2MB SD memory cards can be had at Walmart for about $9.00... they're just about giving them away.

:D
 
2MB SD memory cards can be had at Walmart for about $9.00... they're just about giving them away.

:D

Even $5-6 at some nearby photo shops. But I have several 256MB microSD cards (with adapters) laying around from old phones, etc. Free and way more than enough storage. :)
 
Just wanted to say that the menu change was one thing I was worried about.
Turns out I like the new menu alot.
I did really like the old menu, but no way would I want it for the number of games that are/will be on this board.
One thing I dont like, and think will be a problem is the push a button to see the demo thing.
I will be running this in an arcade and it will confuse the hell out of people. Maybe you can turn it off? If not you should be able to.

OK, I do kind of like the original AS board's menu a bit better. I prefer having the name of a game visible to relying on the newly-created menu icons. Although scrolling through the new menu is better.
 
I have to say that a HUGE consideration in the original post is missed.
A supported vs. unsupported platform should at very minimum count for an entire letter jump, maybe 2. If the only real complaint is the menu, well, hands down the ArcadeSD still wins out IMO.

The arcadeshop board capacity is ONLY about 40 or so games, will never have any new additions and must be removed or a serial plug run to even program it. As Frizz said, neither of the boards come with ANY ROM's.

The AS cannot be updated without loosing High Scores, and if you bought DKII and want to change games... LOL, fork over another $20.

Now all that said, it would be cool if the ArcadeSD menu could be set for "Icons" or "Splash" to allow either menu option to be used. But think about it, asking for an improvement to the Arcadeshop board and you will get.......... <crickets> ........ oh, nothing!

While reviews are a great thing, please consider that Clay and Darin (+others) are actively making that board better and listening to us with feedback. Put your "reviewing" efforts into feedback for them. The platform is what matters, lets get behind them and support what they are doing. If the only way to buy an AS board now is a Chinese knock-off for almost the same price, then let the darn dog die and go with a platform that has PEOPLE behind it.

And while we are doing reviews on unsupported PCB's, when will the 60-in-1 board get even a tweek for sound fixes, play Gyruss on that board and tell me you like it better because the menu is different in a way you like..... <crickets>......... dammit no updates there either.


Now if you want to buy my old AS knock-off board, I'll sell it to you cheap. Saying that, I never had the option to buy from Steve as they were gone before I was into that market.
 
Last edited:
arcadesd

I purchased the new arcade sd board from phoenix. Went to boot the games on to board and gives us errors no rom found. Trying to work through it with phoenix arcade not very quick getting this issue resolved. Not very impressed so far think i might just have to put my arcadeshop board back in and get a refund on the board.
 
I purchased the new arcade sd board from phoenix. Went to boot the games on to board and gives us errors no rom found. Trying to work through it with phoenix arcade not very quick getting this issue resolved. Not very impressed so far think i might just have to put my arcadeshop board back in and get a refund on the board.

I've never had either version so I can't speak to any of the concerns in this thread, but I have watched Darin operate for several years now, and I've yet to see him make the wrong move in customer service.

He does things right.
 
You can't "fix" the 8-way controller controlling a 4-way game problem. The best you can do is force the software to choose a single direction when a diagonal is hit or to send no direction at all with a diagonal (rather than sending both at once). All that fixes is that it stops games that lock right on up with a diagonal from locking up. Every time you hit a diagonal it is still a coin toss if the game is going to do what you intended it to do.

RandyT - The guy who designed one of the most popular mame encoders around went over it pretty thoroughly in a thread on another message board where someone else once again had claimed to have fixed the problem. This is a guy who directly makes his living from interfacing controls. If there was a way to solve the problem then he would have something that solved it. But there isn't, an 8-way stick simply doesn't have enough resolution to map 4 directions onto, and no software in the world can fix that. It can be done with an analog stick nearly perfectly, it can sort of be done with a 49-way (which still unfortunately suffers from a relatively unacceptable percentage of the possible locations being unguessable).

Even console versions of Pac-Man suffer somewhat from the 8-way controls on the consoles, and those were even ported specifically with the 8-way in mind and thus could have extremely conditional controller handling, far past what you can do in an emulator.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,123175.0.html
 
Last edited:
I purchased the new arcade sd board from phoenix. Went to boot the games on to board and gives us errors no rom found. Trying to work through it with phoenix arcade not very quick getting this issue resolved. Not very impressed so far think i might just have to put my arcadeshop board back in and get a refund on the board.

Well my friend you first emailed me on a Friday night;

From: John Fulliam <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, November 2, 2012 10:43 PM
================================================
Then 38 minutes later;

From: John Fulliam [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2012 11:21 PM
To: [email protected]
===============================================================
I was in bed when those emails came but replied to you at 6:45am the next morning.

From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
To: ' John Fulliam' <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, November 3, 2012 6:45 AM

I typed that I am not the tech and cannot troubleshoot the board. I forward tech support to Clay who then replies to me with the answer. I also apologized that you were having troubles.
==============================================================
And your reply 5 hours later was:

From: John Fulliam [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2012 12:03 PM
To: [email protected]

Are we gonna have to wait a couple days for a solution to this problem?
===============================================================

I got a reply from Clay and sent it to you right away;

From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
To: 'John Fulliam' <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, November 3, 2012 1:54 PM
===============================================================

You replied 8 1/2 ours later at 11:31pm and thanked me for the reply and asked for more help. However I was in bed

From: John Fulliam [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2012 11:31 PM
To: [email protected]
================================================================

It's 7:16am here and I have already forwarded your email to Clay and await his response. I came to this thread because someone emailed me to say you were bashing my customer service.

A few things to note. Clay is 2 hours behind me, so it's only 5:16am there. Clay works through the night and generally isnt up early. It's the weekend and not all of us work on the weekends. We have family and other obligations to attend to. There is no 24 hour hotline for troubleshooting boards. If that were priced into the boards no one would want to pay for it.

I do not make the Arcade SD however I was overjoyed when Clay approached me to sell this board. He makes amazing products and the reliability on this board is extremely high. I can tell you we have swapped out less than 10 boards for issues during the warranty period and only 1 board after the warranty period for a sound issue that the user blew the audio portion with an improper connection.

If there were ongoing issues with reliability and customer service issues I can walk away from my agreement with Clay. However it's not the case and I plan to ride this out. You should read some of the emails we get from people. It's almost comical. But we still treat them the same way as anyone else.
 
Just speaking for myself I had an issue with my board and Darin got back to me only hours later, and had the issue resolved within a few days once the next batch of boards came in, so I've got nothing but good things to say about their tech support.
 
picard_facepalm.gif


Suffice it to say that most here would probably give Darin & Co. a reasonable amount of time to take care of this situation before taking the issue public... but what do I know?
 
I like the new menu scheme. Not once has someone visiting my basement arcade been confused about how to switch games since it always falls back to the menu.

Someone mentioned a possible option to turn off attract mode with buttons. It's pretty common for folks to try to start the game with the buttons. They eventually figure it out, but I'd prefer that the buttons did nothing at the menu screen.
 
I was gonna buy 2, but have held off after hearing you could not boot into a title on powerup. Can someone explain or point to a youtube video of what the attract does when powered on? I personally cannot stand having to walk around to certain of my games i have a multi in where on powerup and have to chose something just to avoid screen burn from a static menu every time.

Also thought the point of this over the other multis was accuracy of the games much like jroks... Maybe my assumption was wrong, but i wondered why out of curiosity the last midway stuff was even bothered with if it had to be hacked for the sprites and instead other full games worked on? I'm willing to pay more for an accurate multi most definitely, and not wanting to start a flame war, but are there differences over a xxx in 1 multi then with this (an honest question) then if some of the accuracy is being sacrificed?....
 
I like the new menu scheme. Not once has someone visiting my basement arcade been confused about how to switch games since it always falls back to the menu.

It's a good thing that it does since it apparently has a tendency to jump into a game without the user telling it to do so. That happened to me multiple times while playing with the ArcadeSD board in your Double Dragon JAMMA cab, Gary. I'd be flipping my way through titles on the menu screen and it suddenly decides to select one and go into it, even though I didn't specify to do so. Found it off-putting.

Game selection isn't bad overall. Sound emulation is kinda bad on some games, most notably Zoo Keeper.
 
It's a good thing that it does since it apparently has a tendency to jump into a game without the user telling it to do so. That happened to me multiple times while playing with the ArcadeSD board in your Double Dragon JAMMA cab, Gary. I'd be flipping my way through titles on the menu screen and it suddenly decides to select one and go into it, even though I didn't specify to do so. Found it off-putting.

Game selection isn't bad overall. Sound emulation is kinda bad on some games, most notably Zoo Keeper.

I'm glad you mentioned this! I thought it was just me. Maybe it's timed out of being in the menu and is going into attract mode? Maybe user input doesn't reset the countdown to attract mode?

I put a 4-way panel on today. Makes a lot of the game better than when you played it. I really need to wire up 49-ways in there to do the right thing.
 
I'm glad you mentioned this! I thought it was just me. Maybe it's timed out of being in the menu and is going into attract mode? Maybe user input doesn't reset the countdown to attract mode?

The menu does of course choose a game to go in to attract mode if it sits idle long enough. If the timeout isn't getting cleared by a control press, what was described could indeed happen. That having been said, I just tried it here and it seems to act how I expect it to. (If idle for ~6-7 seconds it starts cycling, if you touch the joystick it stops and waits another 6-7 seconds.)

The only things that come to mind off the top of my head would be if maybe you have very few games loaded after ~7 seconds it could go into demo mode and rather rapidly land on a new game to start a demo. The other possibility that comes to mind is that if the fire buttons are pressed when a game is selected in the menu it will immediately jump in to 'demo' that game.

If someone can come up a way to definitely trigger the behavior in question I'd be interested-- as it is, I can't seem to make it happen here.

-Clay
 
Back
Top Bottom