Star Tech Journal

The World According to Beck
Part II
James Beck
Greater Southern Distributing
Atlanta. Georgia
A few more observations from the top, bottom. and sides of the Coin-Op Industry.
SNK
WILLIAMS
The Neo-Geo kit is a bitch to install and only runs
one cartridge the home system is OVER priced
for the market it is aimed at, and so
far the games have been only OK at best.
CAPCOM
The system used by Capcom for everything from
UN Squadron on up has been extremely unreli-
able. almost impossible to repair in house. VERY
expensive to get repaired at the factory. and an
all around pain in the butt.
The new Williams WPC system, kinda' neat if not
completely field tested ... A nice little(?) ASIC that
handles the tasks of MMU (memory manage-
ment unit). decoding. clock conditioning, bat-
tery power handler. and general purpose system
housekeeper. Each board is more of a self con-
tained unit that offloads a lot of the latching and
signal buffering and conditioning from the CPU
board.
('
A self-test/diagnostic/bookkeeping system that could only be the product
of a programmer with too much time on his/her hands ...
Come on guys. lousy placement of critical parts,
a 68000 that is not a DIP and is soldered to the
PCB. no extender cables offered for the ROM
board so at least we techs have a fighting chance.
Poorly documented. low quality work. so-so soft-
ware. and an unwillingness by the US distribu-
tor (or is that the manufacturer?) to acknowl-
edge the problem.
I suggest any operator who is not locked into the
purchasing of one of these "pieces" (if you get my
drift) avoid them. A $125 to $175 cost on an
unmolested PCB repair is TOO steep. We need to
bitch a little.
No more "woops" I accidentally touched the EOS
when adjusting the lane change switch thanks
to an opto-isolation system. the switch matrix is
Op amp buffered in such a manner as to be more
noise AND voltage tolerant, there are even
"normal" everyday active low inputs.
The general illumination is switched through
triacs instead of a relay 5 channels deep, the
lamp matrix is a dream come true (no heavy
power resistors that unsolder themselves), cut~,
trick with the current limiting, too.