Thursday, March 6, 2014

Star Rider using real hardware

I've gotten very far with supporting Star Rider with Dexter using schematics and partial emulation (in Daphne) but it became time to use real hardware to seal the deal.

First item of business is to convert Star Rider's RGB signal into a JAMMA standard RGB signal.  This involves combining the separate Vertical and Horizontal rising-edge sync signals into a single falling-edge sync signal (which is what JAMMA uses).  I followed a guide I found online that said this could be done with a XOR gate.  I decided to solder everything to a Radio Shack perf board (this thing actually was pretty handy!)

Here is what will go on the other end: a JROK RGB->NTSC converter.  In other worsd, if I get this working, I will be able to make video captures of Star Rider's output on my PC for super accurate representation of what the game looks like.  I am very excited about this.

The actual Star Rider board sets.  These things are MASSIVE.

Didn't have the original power supply for it, so I had to rig something up myself.  I used a 500 watt modern ATX power supply, plugged into Warren's customized ATX MACH 3 power supply PCB.  I then soldered on wires from four connectors to this board.  The connectors plug into Star Rider's wiring harness.  I used a glue gun to secure the wires so they don't easily break off.  Power provided includes 12V, -12V, 5V, and GND.  This literally took me about 6 hours to put together because I made several mistakes along the way.  When I powered it on fortunately nothing blew up!


1 comment:

  1. You have got a real Star Rider Board!! Wow!! It's cool...
    The best thing to try run emulator, getting data from laserdisc.
    If you need my source code to read data from bellow of video layer, said me. Maybe my code help you in order to understand data submitted from PIF board.

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