"fun" with megatouch gold

ElfShotTheFood

New member
Joined
Aug 17, 2007
Messages
3,693
Reaction score
39
Location
point pleasant, New Jersey
so the second megatouch countertop I recently picked up is a gold, that supposedly had a bad monitor, but everything else was good.

I saw the vga port and decided to plug in a regular monitor to the game board, but got nothing but a black screen. next I plugged the megatouch monitor into my sons netbook. it came up out of whack, but I recognized it as not being able to display the resolution of the desktop. I quickly loaded up diablo II and set it to 640x480. it came up looking pretty good after some adjustments.

so now I have a vga touchscreen with a dead gameboard, but it is not really a gameboard, it is a 486 pc. my pc repair skills kick in and I start disconnecting things. after disconnecting the ide cable the machine actually boots. I yank the ps2 keyboard off of my desktop pc and go into the machines bios. I was kinda expecting to see some special megatouch stuff, but there was just ancient 486 things that I barely remember.

so the only other ide cables I can find are the 80 conductor kind used in more modern computers. I should have a couple of the old kind buried in the attic, but I haven't gone to find one yet. the hard drive was detected properly, but when it tried to boot it came up with a bunch of crazy characters and a few bad command or file names, before it failed.

so now what? I will find the old ide cable, but I'll bet it doesn't make a difference. now I have a really heavy touchscreen paperweight. I don't know if it is worth it to spend $88 plus shipping for a new hard drive for a machine that may only be worth $150 or so.

I have read many old posts talking about a legendary "titanium upgrade" on ebay that doesn't seem to exist anymore.

I could put an itx motherboard in this cabinet and make a jukebox or dvr out of it, but I would really rather it stay a megatouch, my family all enjoy the megatouch 4, so I would love to present them with the upgrade and sell the 4.

what do you think I should do with it? is it worthwhile to spend more money on this thing? or is there a better option?
 
IDE cables

Nice find. As far as cables go a local thrift store would probably be good for you. I know as you I still have a few kicking around. Hard drive might still be usable but would need a re-imaging at least. No idea if you can get a 'chd' for megatouch but if the rest is working... Haven't managed to snag one of these yet.
 
the list of chds I found did not list megatouch, but it may not have been the latest list. apparently the megatouch hard drives have a special firmware that makes them not copy correctly
 
I have two emeralds to bad its a gold I would make a image of the drive but I don't think you can use it with out the right security key. some one with more knowledge will probably chime in.
 
ok, so I found the old style ide cable, brand new still in a sealed bag no less. but as suspected, it still booted up garbage.

if I could find another gold hard drive, would I be able to copy it to my drive? mine is an original merit drive, with the correct firmware, (I think) it is just corrupted.

can the hard drive be reloaded from the cd? if so that would be awesome.

does anyone have a copy of a megatouch gold cd they can send me? or know of an iso that can be downloaded?

what really sucks is that I have an ide/compact flash adapter and 1 gb card that is just gathering dust in the attic. I sure would like to use those right now.

I can always turn this thing into a dedicated diablo II machine for my kid, but I'm not sure how much fun it would be paying diablo II on a touchscreen. :D
 
if I could find another gold hard drive, would I be able to copy it to my drive?

If you found another Gold drive you should be able to just plug it in and play.

I scavenged an XL together from misc parts, motherboard, riser card, I/O board, security keys, HDD image.... and all I did was copy the image that I got to a new drive and it fired up and played.
(mine is a Titanium Playboy Edition, which is what I had keys for)

Been a while though, can't remember if I had to format it FAT32 or what, but there wasn't anything special about copying the HDD image to the drive. Maybe it was you formatted it as bootable and then just copied everything over or something, I'd have to look again.
 
You have some options here.

First. There is a gold iso floating around on the internet.
Obviously, I can't link to it, but if you enter "megatxlg" (without quotes)
into a search engine, it shouldn't take too long to find an iso or chd.

Next.
Titanium is one of the last two software revisions for the xl hardware.
Eventually, you may come across a hard drive on ebay.
If you're lucky, you may even find a Titanium 2, but it only offers updates
to the trivia games and more pictures for the picture games, it doesn't offer
any games that aren't already available on the standard titanium version.

Last.
You could just install a pc in the cabinet and run MAME on it.
This would allow you to run most of the pre XL generation and even
up to the 8000 version Midway Touchmaster software.
 
I found the torrent, but no one is seeding it. never found a direct download link that didn't want me to create an account.

I have a bootable hard drive, so I should be able to just copy the corrupted dos startup files back to it, and have it work.

I emailed themegatouchstore, but no reply yet, not a surprise on a saturday night.

for the record the machine has the telco motherboard and monitor.
 
Just out of curiousity, try unplugging the hard drive and see if it still boots like it does now...I vaguely remember that what you see it booting from is a flash or ram drive built into the hardware. It definitely could be that the HD isn't good.

I'm *pretty* sure I have a Gold cd, I didn't get back to the garage since I got a bad muscle spasm in my neck a few days ago and the cold seems to affect it...waiting for advil to kick in, plus now its almost 2am here so I'll look tomorrow (sunday)

Jeff
 
I believe that I also have a CD version, I'll look if the other guy can't find it. If you would, take a picture of what "Garble" comes up on the screen so we can see exactly what your issue is.
 
without the hard drive plugged in it boots like any old computer, and says boot failure, insert system disc and press enter.

here is the pic of what happens after it loads romdos
attachment.php
 

Attachments

  • 0213111036.jpg
    0213111036.jpg
    91.2 KB · Views: 115
The boot screen shows, including the BIOS logo on the MAXX I have...the older v3.02 hard drive booted with PC-DOS, the JADE 2 looks like it uses Linux.
 
is it supposed to show the bios screens and stuff or should they be hidden somehow?

F2 with the MB logo screen up should get you into bios. Its in silent boot mode. that drive does look nice and corrupted. You could always try putting into another computer and scandisk and try to fix errors its a long shot but it might work
 
really old thread bump. pulled this out of the garage recently and tried it out. the hdd seems to be dead, does not spin up at all. but apparently the r00 key i have is not for the hard drive version anyway. i have a few ide cdrom drives still but i cannot seem to find an iso to download. i have read most of the megatouch iso image sharing thread, but gold is not on the new server.


i see that i can upgrade the motherboard to a better version, but this machine is at the bottom of the arcade parts to purchase priority list. also these things don't seem to be worth much at all right now. i can get a working machine on craigslist for the same price as an upgrade mobo, hdd and key on ebay.


any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
I uploaded the keyless titanium xl hdd image (.zip of .img file) to that megatouch thread, buy a cheap 1gb+ compact flash card and CF2IDE adapter and you should be good to go, at least if your hardware is similar to mine
 
I uploaded the keyless titanium xl hdd image (.zip of .img file) to that megatouch thread, buy a cheap 1gb+ compact flash card and CF2IDE adapter and you should be good to go, at least if your hardware is similar to mine

unfortunately that server appears to only have manuals now.


i have the compact flash and adapter, somewhere.
 
Back
Top Bottom