Arcade Talk 24/7/365

o1s1n

Well that was heartbreaking.

Half way through the final mission in Metal Slug, still on one credit, not only that, I had only been hit once in the whole game, so had two lives left - 'this is it!! I'll finally 1CC the bastard!!!'

Girlfriend comes down the stairs and starts talking to me.

'ARGH! A LIFE'S WORK ALMOST COMPLETE LEAVE ME BE FOR THE NEXT 10 MINUTES!!!'

Too late. Was enough of a distraction, even if it was only for a second. Both lives instantly gone.

CiDeRmAn

Is she not your fiancée rather than girlfriend, and as such does she not have new game ruining rights?
Hmm, wait til your married!

o1s1n

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Is she not your fiancée rather than girlfriend, and as such does she not have new game ruining rights?
Hmm, wait til your married!

I hate the word fiance so never use it!

There are game ruining rights and 1cc ruining rights... 1cc is a whole other leqgue!

o1s1n

:eek:

CiDeRmAn

WTF?

Hmm, I suspect that this not a genuine AWSD.....

o1s1n

Someone posted it for sale over on AO - you can probably imagine their response

unky chop chop

And so it begins...rebuild of the Moonbase cocktail I got of keith.

Starting to come together slowly,very slowly!

MrVestek

Here lads I have a question... why did I decide that messing with the boot sector (to disable Windows Driver signing enforcement to get the TopGun III working on the new cab's hard drive) was a good idea?

Now the thing won't boot. Stayed up until 3am trying to repair it. Looks like it's time to nuke Windows and reinstall all over again.

Pooh.

No idea Achilles!
I have problems of my own

So I swopped out a neckboard on the working polo monitor I have.had to desolder and resolder a ribbon cable but it all went well.
Screen looking good but not perfect.tiny bit of hori wobble.
so I capped most of the chassis.TBH I was a bit sick of looking at it so I didnt finish the cap kit.

Stuck it back in and still the slightest bit of wobble but it was perfectly playable with bright vivid colours and good blacks.
I was happy to leave it.

So I said I'd soke test it.
left it on for 5 or six hours Saturday and not a bother.
Left it on for 8 hours on Sunday and somethings givin up the ghost.

I have all colours but its realy washed out and blurry.
Maybe the remote pots are shot.

Oh the joys of it all

Myrddin

Achilles wrote: »

Here lads I have a question... why did I decide that messing with the boot sector (to disable Windows Driver signing enforcement to get the TopGun III working on the new cab's hard drive) was a good idea?

Now the thing won't boot. Stayed up until 3am trying to repair it. Looks like it's time to nuke Windows and reinstall all over again.

Pooh.

Rule #101 of Mamecab's. Never, change anything on them once finished, they're just waiting on a reason to give trouble

One of the lads here gave good advice recently about keeping a ghost image of the working setup, so it's always there to fall back on. Though I'm not sure a ghost image goes as far as looking at a bootsector?

KeRbDoG

Achilles wrote: »

Here lads I have a question... why did I decide that messing with the boot sector (to disable Windows Driver signing enforcement to get the TopGun III working on the new cab's hard drive) was a good idea?

Now the thing won't boot. Stayed up until 3am trying to repair it. Looks like it's time to nuke Windows and reinstall all over again.

Pooh.

I'm fairly sure that in all windows versions you can re-write the boot sector (Master Boot Record or 'MBR') in the recovery mode once you still have the windows installation disc via the Recovery Console using the fixmbr command.

MrVestek

Yeah I know that but it's very hard to actually get a CD drive connected into the cabinet as there's feck all space.

What I ended up trying to do was boot a windows recovery session over the network from my server (remote deployment is awesome) but it recovered the MBR and pointed it to the wrong bloody hard drive (regular drive, Windows was still installed).

At that point I said 'feck it' and passed out on the couch whilst watching YouTube. :P

*edit*

I just remembered... when I ran the installer trying to do a repair install it instead for some reason started installing a new copy of Windows to the same drive and moved all the older stuff to Windows.old.

Think my only recourse now is to boot into a version of Linux, move everything back where it's supposed to be and then fix the mbr. Ohh the joys.

All I wanted was to install a poxy lightgun! :-(

Bloody EMS not paying for driver signing.

KeRbDoG

Windows 8 i take it? I don't have any issues using unsigned drivers on WinXP/Vista/7. Maybe you just needed to change the Windows security settings to allow you to use unsigned drives and just notify you that you are installing at your own risk

o1s1n

You all say I'm mad wasting money on original PCBs...no boot sector issues with my Dinorex pcb, no siree! :pac:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqqUULExeGk

o1s1n

Tried to 1cc Metal Slug again there yesterday and also got half way through the final mission before getting mangled. So maybe that previous occurrence was more down to my own ineptness and not my lovely missus wondering did I want something to eat. (on reflection, that was a tad rude )

Also made me realize I really need to change the sticks in that cab. Been playing on the Pony for so long with a lovely new Seimitsu that the SNK ones feel like a stick in a bowl of cement.

There's also a really important diagonal shooting move I can't pull of in Metal Slug properly because of it. Yes, that's what's causing my failure...!

MrVestek

What is it they say about a bad workman always blaming his tools? :P

MrVestek

KeRbDoG wrote: »

Windows 8 i take it? I don't have any issues using unsigned drivers on WinXP/Vista/7. Maybe you just needed to change the Windows security settings to allow you to use unsigned drives and just notify you that you are installing at your own risk

No Windows 7 actually. Windows 7 enforces driver signing on all drivers, you have to do some BCD hackery to disable it or boot Windows in development mode. Pain in the knackers.

Funny thing is I did the exact same thing for the other hard drive in the unit when that had Windows on it and it worked fine.

Bloody Windows...

Myrddin

Achilles wrote: »

No Windows 7 actually. Windows 7 enforces driver signing on all drivers, you have to do some BCD hackery to disable it or boot Windows in development mode. Pain in the knackers.

Driver signing checks can be disabled via the F8 boot menu I thought?

KeRbDoG

Seems that would need to be done each boot - but, there seems to be a simple solution which is just a once off command. Not ideal but works. Unsure what the MRB hack was that borked the machine in question

MrVestek

KeRbDoG wrote: »

Seems that would need to be done each boot - but, there seems to be a simple solution which is just a once off command. Not ideal but works. Unsure what the MRB hack was that borked the machine in question

That's just it. That command right there. BCD Edit. BCD is the Windows 7 boot loader. If it decided to write the command incorrectly or whatever bye bye Windows.

Anyway I didn't worry about it last night, got a call from a mate asking to meet up after work and we went and pulled an Avatan instead. (that's getting pished to you and me).

I didn't have a compunction to come post on this thread either, I did the sensible thing and went to bed! Or crashed and burned to bed if herself is to be believed.

Optimus Prime

A bit of topic form the above just thought id mention it though. Got this command off a guy on a Windows 7 Course i did a few years back. Its pretty good. It increases the boot time on windows 7 by optimizing the way the files are run on startup. try it out. Run it from a command prompt.

defrag c: /b

MrVestek

keithgeo wrote: »

A bit of topic form the above just thought id mention it though. Got this command off a guy on a Windows 7 Course i did a few years back. Its pretty good. It increases the boot time on windows 7 by optimizing the way the files are run on startup. try it out. Run it from a command prompt.

defrag c: /b

Probably not a good thing to do on an SSD though. ;-)

Myrddin

KeRbDoG wrote: »

Seems that would need to be done each boot - but, there seems to be a simple solution which is just a once off command. Not ideal but works. Unsure what the MRB hack was that borked the machine in question

Nope I've had it disabled in the past & it remained disabled after reboots etc. A message appears on the desktop to alert you to the fact the checks are disabled.

KeRbDoG

EnterNow wrote: »

Nope I've had it disabled in the past & it remained disabled after reboots etc. A message appears on the desktop to alert you to the fact the checks are disabled.

Yea learn something new each day

MrVestek

EnterNow wrote: »

Nope I've had it disabled in the past & it remained disabled after reboots etc. A message appears on the desktop to alert you to the fact the checks are disabled.

That's after you edit the BCD, not when you use the F8 option.

K.O.Kiki

o1s1n wrote: »

Tried to 1cc Metal Slug again there yesterday and also got half way through the final mission before getting mangled. So maybe that previous occurrence was more down to my own ineptness and not my lovely missus wondering did I want something to eat. (on reflection, that was a tad rude )

Also made me realize I really need to change the sticks in that cab. Been playing on the Pony for so long with a lovely new Seimitsu that the SNK ones feel like a stick in a bowl of cement.

There's also a really important diagonal shooting move I can't pull of in Metal Slug properly because of it. Yes, that's what's causing my failure...!

SNK sticks are Seimitsu LS-30/LS-32 hybrids.
http://nfgworld.com/mb/thread/580

Myrddin

Achilles wrote: »

That's after you edit the BCD, not when you use the F8 option.

Never edited the BCD in my life, just telling you what I know I disabled the checks using the F8 menu in order to install motionjoy drivers, the checks remained disabled throughout restarts/reboots, I had to manually enable them again to get rid of the nag message.

o1s1n

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

SNK sticks are Seimitsu LS-30/LS-32 hybrids.
http://nfgworld.com/mb/thread/580

By 'SNK ones' I meant the sticks in my SNK cab...not that they were 'SNK sticks'

The sticks in that cab are LS-32s - however they're extremely old and need replacing.

MrVestek

EnterNow wrote: »

Never edited the BCD in my life, just telling you what I know I disabled the checks using the F8 menu in order to install motionjoy drivers, the checks remained disabled throughout restarts/reboots, I had to manually enable them again to get rid of the nag message.

WHY DID NONE OF THE GUIDES I READ MENTION THIS?

godammit...

Myrddin

Achilles wrote: »

WHY DID NONE OF THE GUIDES I READ MENTION THIS?

godammit...

It might have just been a fluke on my end, I don't really know, but all I can tell you is the checks remained disabled until I manually enabled them again I didn't need to disable them on every boot for Motionjoy