ArcadeSD Board review... C-

[clay_cowgill]

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.

Johnny, you need to supply the ROMs for the ArcadeSD.exe program to add them to the SD card. (This is the same as the old Arcadeshop board, unless you bought one of the pirate Arcadeshop boards that were sold with games pre-loaded on them.)

-Clay

 

[GaryMcT]

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

I'll see if I can figure out what's going on here.

 

[mattosborn]

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.

Is there a way to disable the Fire->Demo behavior? It would be nice to be able to turn this off. I'm using the ArcadeSD in a Scramble cab, which ties together the Fire and P1-Start buttons (ambidextrous button layout). So sometimes you press Start and you get a demo instead. To get it to always start a game you have to press and hold the button, which I can usually remember to do, but causes confusion for visitors.

 

[Pac-Fan]

Is there a way to disable the Fire->Demo behavior? It would be nice to be able to turn this off. I'm using the ArcadeSD in a Scramble cab, which ties together the Fire and P1-Start buttons (ambidextrous button layout). So sometimes you press Start and you get a demo instead. To get it to always start a game you have to press and hold the button, which I can usually remember to do, but causes confusion for visitors.

I agree. This has confused others when playing. At least the 60-in-1 flashed "Preview" over the top of the screen in that case.

Either make them do the same as the start buttons or flash DEMO or remove that feature... preferably as a setup option so everyone is happy

Consider: Perhaps in "Free play" mode make it act the same as start--typical for home use, if in coin mode, make it work for demo but flash something on screen saying Preview.

 

[johnny16]

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.

I wasn't bashing your customer service. I was just frustrated because we made a purchase, followed the directions and the games weren't loading. It kept on giving us error messages even though we were doing what the directions told us to. We weren't aware that to get this working we would have to go to another website to download the ROMs. We are not FT computer wizards and don't deal with this on a daily basis. No where did it say we had to supply our own ROMs. We thought the SD card downloads we were doing from your ArcadeSD.exe application would supply us with the needed information. No where in the directions did it say we needed to supply our own, nor would we have known where we needed to go to get them. This is just a hobby for us, something we do to keep the kids interested in classic Arcade games and further on the tradition. When we got the original Arcade shop we followed the directions and had no problems so we thought this would be the same. Perhaps something in the new ArcadeSD board directions could help others in the future avoid the same frustration. We went to the website you referred us to and have now downloaded the ROMs and hopefully have everything working as it should be and are happy with it now. Still like the old menu set up in the original Arcadeshop board better. Not as cheesy.

 

[johnny16]

Johnny, you need to supply the ROMs for the ArcadeSD.exe program to add them to the SD card. (This is the same as the old Arcadeshop board, unless you bought one of the pirate Arcadeshop boards that were sold with games pre-loaded on them.)

-Clay

Clay, thank you for the information. We weren't aware we needed to download are own ROMs from a seperate website as the directions didn't indicate this. Our old Arcadeshop board wasn't a pirated copy but did seem to have better step by step instructions as to how/where to download everything. As we noted to Darin we are not computer wizards who do this on a FT basis. When we received the board we thought that by following the directins it would download everything we needed and be done. We didn't realize we'd have to go thru other websites as well to get the info needed to play the games.