The company which [Eric Wright] works for recently bought a Nintendo VS. It had Ice Climber installed as one of the titles but they asked the vendor if it was possible to swap it out for the Duck Hunt ROM. They had the ROM but not a light gun that would work with the system. [Eric] suggested they buy it with Duck Hunt and hack an NES Zapper to work with the VS cabinet.
Let’s take a step back for a moment. The Nintendo VS was a coin-operated gaming cabinet you would find in an Arcade. Luckily there’s quite a bit of information about the original hardware on the web. Some research helped him discover that electronically the only difference between the arcade and home versions of the Zapper is that the sensor capture is inverted. This was fixed by replacing a transistor in the gun with a jumper wire. The next challenge was figuring out how to wire the gun up to the second controller port. And finally he patched the ROM to work with the incorrect PPU as the right chip was not easily sourced.
Incredibly awesome.
How come I never get to work for companies that buy these sort of things for their employees?
^ this
Im just lucky like that. To be honest though, my bosses started thinking about the arcade cabinets after I had been talking about the cabinets that i drag home and repair (I currently have Stargate, Ikari Warriors, and Pac-Man). I noticed that they were looking at cabinets online and asked what games (or type of games) they were looking for and Tekken 2 was mentioned… i just so happened to know where a Tekken 2 cabinet was that was for sale. They ended up getting the Tekken 2, a NeoGeo, and the Nintendo VS from that shop. I ended up rebuilding the monitor chassis on Tekken 2 and swapping out the game cartridge with a mutli-cart on the NeoGeo and did a bit of work on the VS (such as the zapper). Later on, they found a Cruis’n World and an Offroad Challenge cabinet that I have since rebuilt one of the monitor chassis on and replaced the steering POT on the other.
So I guess what I am saying… you never know what your bosses might go for if you find a a cabinet in decent shape that you can repair for them :)
+1
I contribute regularly to the MAME project and discuss it often with my coworkers, and it was by virtue of that that one of my managers came by my desk the other week: “Hey, suppose we wanted to put together a MAME cabinet, what would we need?”
I once worked at a place that had a foosball table, that’s about it.
I remember the foosball table. It was next to the nicely-restored slate pool table. Which was adjacent to the Bunn coffee machine.
Those were good times.
I have this cab, thank you for posting this Mike! I’ll probably do this mod but it’ll only work on the main side of my VS cab seeing as I put an lcd on the second side because the monitor didn’t work and those sharp XM-1801 monitors are hard to come by.
I have this cab, thank you for posting this Mike! I’ll probably do this mod but it’ll only work on the main side of my VS cab seeing as I put an lcd on the second side because the monitor didn’t work and those sharp XM-1801 monitors are hard to come by.
That dog… why didn’t you shoot it, it would be the first thing I would do if i had a vs. duckhunt machine
you have to wait until the bonus round… and if you shoot the dog you loose all bonus points.
Maybe so, but losing your bonus points is a small price to pay for finally getting the revenge you were never able to get on the NES version!