2014 – February
Purchased Ikari Warriors dedicated cabinet off eBay.
2014 – March
- Purchased Heavy Barrel PCB
- Purchased Guerrilla War PCB
Since those are both rotary SNK games, I figured I’d create a multi-rotary system. Purchased a “6-in-1 MultiJAMMA Switcher PCB w/ Wireless Remote” from jammaboards.com to allow switching between the games. Ordered Jamma extension cables from Bob Roberts. Purchased NOS SNK joysticks (don’t recall where).
Had to build a custom wiring harness to allow SNK rotaries to map correctly to each individual PCB board. I got the boards in August of 2015 described this thread; a KLOV’r named Ghostnuke sold me a pair from an old batch. Building the harnesses to connect each PCB to that board and then connecting the joystick to the them took a few weeks and was very tedious. However, I now can play Ikari Warriors, Heavy Barrel and Guerrilla War on the same cabinet now. All use the original PCBs so this is no MAME cabinet…….well sort of….
I wanted to play another rotary game call Top Gunner (also known as Jakal). It was one of my favorites and I had heard that there was a bootleg ROM version of it where the guns in the jeeps actually were able to be rotated using the rotary joysticks. The production game did not have this feature (and I figured out why later on). I couldn’t find that bootleg ROM nor a usable PCB so I went another route: I purchased an ArPicade and a Jamma adapter which allowed me to run the ArPicade emulator. I then found a .rom file with the bootleg version and now I can switch over to the Jamma adapter connected to the Rasperry Pi.
So now I can play that very rare version of Top Gunner! However, it turns out to be much more difficult to play while rotating the machine gun in the jeep than you might imagine. It’s fun, but I think they made the right call by leaving that rotation part of the game play out of the production game.
2022 – October
I installed an EasyCoinup on this machine since, while the Ikari Warriors PCB had freeplay setup, the Heavy Barrel and Guerilla War PCBs do not. This will make it easy to coinup for those games when they are used via the JAMMA switcher I have installed in that cabinet.
I noticed that Guerrilla War was not rotating when I turned the SNK joysticks for either player; all other games worked fine. Some of the JAMMA edge connectors were loose but re-connecting them didn’t fix the issue. I plan to recap that board today to see if that’s the problem. (SEE UPDATE BELOW)
I also have an ArPiCade installed in this cabinet. I thought something might be wrong with it since, when I booted to that from the JAMMA switcher, the ‘ArPiCade’ logo would appear (sideways) but then a blank screen would appear. It turns out it just takes a very long time to load; I left it unattended for 5-10 minutes and it was working fine when I returned.
The P1 button was not working but it turned out that the wiring had just become detached from the leaf switch inside the CPO so that was an easy fix.
Update: It turns out the Guerrilla War board was not broken at all. I examined the wiring and quickly realized that, back when I installed the ArPiCade in the cabinet, I did not have a set of SNK rotary cables made up to test it with (using the adapter). So I apparently just yanked the rotation cables off the Guerrilla War board, leaving it in a semi-disabled state and forgot about it. I reattached those cables to the Guerrilla War PCB and I’ll have to make a new set to connect the ArPiCade permanently.
Also, I swapped the connectors to the CPO buttons for gun/grenade so now the Heavy Barrel, Guerrilla War and ArPiCade games will all match up correctly. Only the Ikari Warriors has those buttons reversed now. I’ll just tweak that one set of wires later on to get it aligned rather than work to fix those other 3 games. I still have no idea why the JAMMA pins do not align the same for all those different PCBs. Perhaps it is because, while the Heavy Barrel and Guerrilla War PCBs are true JAMMA boards, the Ikari Warriors is an older, non-JAMMA board and required a custom adapter.
