Wow..it has been a good day

komodo

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View attachment 59190

View attachment 59191

View attachment 59192Good news fans. The Sega multi-vectors are here. I spent a large part of the afternoon testing the Sega multi-vector in my dedicated Star Trek cabinet. Mike, the designer/developer of the kit, brought over a large assortment of parts so that we could first resurrect my dead cabinet and test the various board sets I had in order to be sure we had a good setup.

I can honestly say that without his help, I would be hauling this cabinet to the curb. I have never had so many issues with trying to get a game going again. Without going into too much detail, let me just say this;

If you have a good working Sega boardset in a working cabinet, you will be aces ahead in the conversion. It is vitally important that you have a good monitor, good power supply and a little bit of patience. This kit is incredibly cool and very well designed. It is simply top notch. My kit is a proto/first run that was used to verify the install and setup. We discovered many things in the process of installing it and they will be incorporated in the next batch.

So what does that mean to you? Get your paypal funds in order because the kits will be going on sale next week. Yep, sometime in the next 7-10 days. I will let Mike make the announcement formally and outline the details. I will say this as well, if you are not very good with trouble-shooting the board sets or soldering, you will definitely want to take him up on his upgrade offer.

The kit allows you to play Star Trek, Space Fury, Zektor, Tac/ Scan (sideways) and incorporates a new spinner control. The spinner will replace the rotate buttons in the 2 games that use them and free those up for something else.

I will post 3 photos and then I have to go. Early day tomorrow. Will answer questions tomorrow evening if I can.
 
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I was just thinking....... What about putting other games on there? Omega race, asteroids and deluxe, tempest, and maybe other vectors?

Now that would be wildly awesome
 
I was just thinking....... What about putting other games on there? Omega race, asteroids and deluxe, tempest, and maybe other vectors?

Now that would be wildly awesome

None of those were Sega...

And black and white higher res vectors on a G08? Nah...
 
What if you have a Tac/Scan? Does that mean the other games play sideways?

That is the sort of thing that just might make me pull my Tac/Scan (and a fire extinguisher for the G08 :)) out of storage.

ken
 
With the size of that daughterboard, I'd say a complete replacement CPU board would make a lot more sense....

Well, that was actually stage one. It turned out to be too expensive an option and very time consuming to build. I saw that blanks and the working board. It was indeed even more awesome.

I'll let Mike explain the why's and whatfore's because I am only a pawn in the game of life. (with respects to Mongo in Blazing Saddles) Yes, there were some "sacrifices" if you want to call them that, but I think the main idea was to make it affordable to the masses.

This is the main reason it took so long to implement. The "second" version of the board had to be designed to work with existing CPU boards. I am truly grateful that this exists as I would probably never have played Zektor in a true vector game format. I realize that there are vector mame and ZVG options etc. For total "coolness", this is it for me.
 
I have gotten my Paypal in order... (slamming both hands on the table... one holding a knife, the other a fork, napkin tied around my neck) bring on the meat! :D
 
Pat, is there still going to be a second release in a few months with more functionality? (Was it a sound board or something?)
 
MultiSega

It could be a sound board issue... I don't think this kit does anything to address the sound boards.

Eliminator is included with the rest of the games.

Here is the breakdown:

Star Trek & TacScan = universal sound board
Eliminator & Zektor = eliminator sound board
Space fury = battlestar sound board

For now you will need all 3 sound boards installed in the
card cage to get all the sounds for all games.

You do get speech for all games that use speech.

I am working on the MultiSound card, but it will not be available for several weeks.

After that the XY timing & Control boards will be reduced to a single card.
 
Excellent observation, my good man

Didn't Clay Cowgill make these awhile back, smaller and solderless?

He did. And they were a very reasonable $99. Sounds like a copy of his design, considering the same seperate audio boards are used in both setups for the same purpose/games. If/when the conglomerated audio board is complete, that would be a step up from Clay's existing kit.

Regardless of copycat manufacturing or not, this is a very cool project that hopefully gets refined and improved upon. Now someone get to copying that ZVG! ;)
 
Excellent observation, my good man?

He did. And they were a very reasonable $99. Sounds like a copy of his design, considering the same seperate audio boards are used in both setups for the same purpose/games. If/when the conglomerated audio board is complete, that would be a step up from Clay's existing kit.

Regardless of copycat manufacturing or not, this is a very cool project that hopefully gets refined and improved upon. Now someone get to copying that ZVG! ;)

This board is vastly superior to Clay's.
Clay's board does not implement nor support multi-speech or multi-sound
just a generic i/o port and that's it. Clay modified each game to re-map the
control panel buttons, this board uses origional game code and re-maps with
a CPLD. His board does not support audio mixing of the sound outputs of all
three sound cards, nor will it let you use all 3 sound boards in the card cage
at the same time. There are many more features I have not even listed here
so let's not confuse a crude decade old attempt with a complete solution.
 
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Yeah, I was just remembering there was something like this....never knew what it did/didn't do. Either way, congrats! It's awesome to see this coming around. I'm pretty sure I have an Eliminator boardset sitting in the back of the shop. I may need to dig it out and leave it on Pat's porch sometime. Personally, I'm too scared of burning my place down to touch a G08! :D
 
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