The machine also weighs a lot more than the old DS, and my hands are definitely cramping up playing it. The only really comfy way that I've found to play it for a stretch was to recline on my couch and prop it up on a pillow on my stomach.

Next, this thing is painfully slow to do anything compared to the regular DS. It takes way longer to turn on, longer to shut down, and I've read reports that it loads (old) DS games much slower than the actual DS did. Nothing game-killing here, but again, it's a portable system, so, speed of use is pretty damn important to me.

On the positive hardware tip, the control is absolutely spot-on. The analog is comfy and works great, and this is now officially the first time I've ever opted to use an analog stick for a SF game, which speaks volumes. It's disappointing as a PSP owner to buy another system with only one analog stick, but I doubt there's going to be a ton of FPS on this system anyways...


Lastly, I just want to mention the eye-strain of the 3D. I noticed it quite a bit for the first few hours, and it never "hurt" my eyes really, more like tired them out a bit. But, I can happily say that by day two, I didn't even feel it anymore, and I've kept the 3D at the max setting the whole damn time. So, thumbs up on the 3D.

As for the games... I know these are the launch titles and all, but talk about slim Pickens. I don't really remember the last console I bought that I struggled to find more than one game to buy that looked even remotely interesting to me. I bought SSF4 and Lego Star Wars, and I really doubt I'll be buying anything else from this lineup.


As far as those games go... like the system, it's a mixed bag. SSF4 is just outstanding in every way possible, and outside of the totally static backgrounds there's not a single bad thing I could say about it. It has all the DLC included in it; the new "dynamic view" game mode is great; it's just a fantastic game in every way. That said... it's still SSF4, which I have already played to death...


Lego Star Wars is nice, but again, I've already played 487 Lego games, and there's nothing new here. Actually, there's a
bit less; this one feels very watered down compared to the past few Lego titles I've played. Although I must say, playing the space battle sequence in 3D makes it worth the price of admission.


I'm pretty happy with the system over all, and the built in stuff is all VERY cool. The Augmented-Reality games, 3D camera, etc, all work better than I expected and are a blast to play around with. The only problem is, I'm already feeling the same way I did about the Wii... This thing is being carried by its gimmick, and has very little software to back it up or even warrant a purchase of it right now. The 3D is really cool for sure, but it doesn't really add anything to the games I've played, and once the novelty of that wears off, I'll be holding a more expensive, crappier designed DS with a pathetic software lineup.

Can't say as I can really recommend buying this thing right now. That is all.

A few people have asked me over the years to take some pictures of my MAME cabinet and explain how I built it. Since I recently had to go through a total rebuild with it, I finally got around to documenting some of the process with some crappy photos. Be warned, this is a long process, so it's a long read as well...

This is "her" and I in 1999, when we were both a lot younger and she was in her pristine state, mere days after she came to live with me. To make a long story short, a few months later I stumbled across a retro-gaming website describing a process of hooking a PC to a coin-op, to allow you to store multiple games (ROM sets) on one system. The PC2JAMMA project.

The basic jist of it is this; most coin-op games run on the same system. They all have ROM chips to store the game information, and a large percentage of them can be swapped between machines as the owner chooses. This is why you'll often see different games on a coin-op's monitor then you see on the marquee or cabinet art. The point of the P2J project is to convert your JAMMA rig to attach to a PC, and store more then one game ROM on your system.

Using amazing open-source software (MAME), you can "trick" the cabinet into thinking you are running its internal hardware, when it's actually just a DOS application emulating it on your PC. Once your system is in there, you can install a front-end for selecting games, and expand the library in that machine as far as your hardware will allow.

PC2JAMMA is actually a pretty complicated process, and I have succesfully completed it once, but after screwing mine up so bad that I had to gut it, I realized that you could really stick any hardware you want in there and just bypass the JAMMA (coin-op guts) all together. I've gone through several different sets of hardware in mine over the years from low-end PC's to every console imaginable, right up to the Nintendo Wii (when Tatsunoko VS Capcom came out!) The best hardware so far has surprisingly been the original Xbox. A modified X can run just about every emulator imaginable, right up through CPS3 hardware (Street Fighter 3), is already configured for two to four controllers, and has the ability to read roms off the hard drive or DVDs providing a lot of storage options for your game roms. (My collection is somewhere around 30 gigs at this point.)

My Xbox crapped the bed a few months ago, and rather then get another one and modify that as well, I decided to rebuild it this week using an old PC I had laying around. This is not exactly a step-by-step on how to do it, but it's a surprisingly simple process depending on the hardware you use, and there is a wealth of information out there on the individual steps. I scoff when I see the MAME cabinets sold on the net for thousands of dollars, as any shmoe with some basic soldering skills can build one for a few hundred bucks over the cost of the cabinet. (FYI, I paid $350 for mine over ten years ago)

Breaking it down to the basics, you have three things to connect together to get this up and running. Controllers, audio, and visuals. You can also opt for network access, which simplifies adding more games and allows you to run some special builds of MAME that support online multiplayer; my current build is attached to my home network, and I am greatly enjoying the ease of it set up this way.

To start out with, in my opinion the best thing to do is just rip outthe original monitor. It's a tough decision to make, but the extremely limited resolution of the standard arcade monitor is a big enough problem when emulating newer games, and when you couple that with the difficulty of rewiring it to hook to a pc, you're just better off yanking it the hell out of there as far as I'm concerned. I personally had no trouble with the idea, because I blew up the internal monitor during one of my first test runs of the modified system. Helpful tip, if you do decide to keep the original monitor, be sure to turn off the windows screensaver before you plugit in. I found out the hard way that the 3d screensaver the system defaulted to isa much higher resolution then the monitor will allow. *Poof, smoke, black screen...

As far as replacing it goes, that's just as simple as deciding what hardware you intend to run in there. When I have a PC as my guts for her, I use a regular CRT computer monitor; for consoles, I have an older analog TV with RCA inputs. Once the screen is in there, the easy part is over, and it's time to give her a brain. Using a console as the brains of the operation tends to be a lot easier in my experience, but the sheer number of emulation options on PC makes me always head back to it eventually.

Depending on the era of games you want to emulate, you don't really need any crazy hardware to get your system to a happy place. If you're looking to play polygonal games like Tekken or Virtua Fighter you'll need a pretty darned good processor and a ton of RAM, but if you're content with Asteroids through Marvel Vs Capcom, a low end PC will get by just fine. I'm currently running a 1.4gig AMD with 1 gig of ram and a crappy onboard video card in my system, and it is more then enough for my needs. The MAME software does not utilize video cards, so processor power and memory are the only real concerns.

I'm going to describe the process from here as it relates to hooking up a PC, but it's really no different with a console system.

Converting the cabinet over is really just a matter of creating your own "adaptor" between the JAMMA controller hardware and your system of choice. Since I'm using a PC, my visuals are covered by attaching the monitor inside the cabinet to a VGA extension cable, and plugging her into the PC; it doesn't get much easier then that.

The controller modification is really the beast of this project, and after many years I've finally nailed down the easiest way to make this interface. If you're severely lacking in hardware and coin, you can actually do this with a keyboard, but I speak from personal experiences when I say just don't... Shell out for a controller or two and you'll save yourself a world of pain.

The basic fundamentals of electronics come into play here, so it's important to know that all joysticks and control pads work on the very simple concept of one positive (live) and one negative (ground) source connecting to complete a circuit and send that button press to the CPU. You can see this in my crappy photo here of a button from the underside view. There are three prongs coming out of this button to connect different electrical sources to, with the one double set being the same signal (I have no idea why they do this.)

It doesn't really matter which side you wire positive or negative to, as long as you keep it straight. I personally use the single prong as the positive and the double as the negative, because controllers will often share their negative source; but I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

Basically your going to connect a separate wire (doesn't really matter what kind or gauge, I use anything I have lying around) to each positive and negative prong for each button, including the four buttons that make up the controller/joystick. You can buy fancy little plugs that will actually snap over the JAMMA button ends all neat and nice, but I typically just twist wires through the holes of the prongs andcover it with a ball of solder.Once you have a positive and negative wire coming off of each button, you need to do the part that hurts, connecting said wires to something you can plug into a PC.

As I mentioned earlier, you can do this with a standard keyboard, but it is not fun. You have to trace the tiny little lines of the keyboard circuits from each contact circle under the key all the way back to the main computer chip that plugs into the computer itself and splice in a connecting line, twice, once for each key's + and – charge.

The nice part of doing it this way is that you can pick which keys to connect to, and make all your control options using the default settings for your emulator. That way you never have to configure any buttons, and have all your needed functions at your fingertips. The problem here is that keyboards can only send so many signals at once since they share so many common grounds, so, if you try to play a game that requires pressing more then a certain number of buttons at a time, you can encounter some problems. If you're looking to play Pac-Man or something, you probably won't have any issues though.

Nowadays I use controllers for my interface, specifically the big old fat, original Xbox controllers. You can just as easily use PC game pads, but they tend to be more expensive, and made from lower quality parts. The beautiful part about using Xbox pads is that they are mad cheap these days and very easy to come by in used bins and second-hand stores. Since Xbox is a Microsoft product, it's relatively painless to connect one to a pc, and requires nothing more then an extra usb cable, some wire twisting, and downloading a set of drivers. Read about this process here, and get the drivers right on the page, it's very simple.

Now it's decision time again. If you want to play full on two player games like Street Fighter and MK, you're going to need a second controller, and you're gonna have to make another USB adaptor. If you're making a Pac-man machine, or even something as simple as Gauntlet with only a button or two per player, you can usually get away with only wiring up one controller, splitting the buttons between the players, and remapping them later in the software.

Once you have the USB adaptor(s) for your PC created, it's time to dissemble the controllers and start connecting wires. Since you're going to remap all the buttons later in MAME anyways, it doesn't matter what buttons you actually connect to what, but for ease of use I tend to try and connect stuff logically, it makes configuration later a lot easier. For example, I connect the start button on the controller to the start button on my cabinet.

To make your interface, you need to find the positive and negative connections for each button on the controller's circuit board and solder a wire directly to each one. This is much easier on an Xbox controller as they are huge and plain to see, and on some, even labeled on the board. The target area is generally a small silver circle, separated by a little squiggly line to keep the connection from happening. When you press down on the control pad you make a circuit between the points, and that signal gets sent back to the CPU.

Soldering a wire to each side of the circuit is easier on some controllers then others, and often times I've found that they have a fine wax of shellac like film over the connections that prevents you from directly wiring to the metal. I'm no electrician, so I'm probably misunderstanding what that substance is (flux?), but regardless, you have to scrape it off to make a clean connection to the board. I'll usually do that carefully with a small screwdriver or knife; you just need to expose enough raw metal under it to solder on your wire.

I know this picture leaves a lot to be desired, but you can get a basic view of what my jinky wiring job looks like on an actual Xbox controller board:

Once you have a wire connected to each positive and negative line, you just attach those to the wires you soldered to the underside of the buttons, and you're most of the way in business. Again, I'm not the anal-retentive electrician, so I'll often just twist these wires together and throw some electrical tape over them, but you can certainly build wiring harnesses or at the very least solder the wires together if you so choose.

Once your controller is hooked up, run your xbox2pc drivers, configure your controller(s) in the included interface, and you're ready to go. I won't bother explaining how to setup or run MAME because of the wealth of information already out there, but once you have it running its as simple as enabling controllers, and going into the tab menu to remap the buttons.

You can add as many games as you can acquire the ROMS for, although MAME is a living program, and the supported romsets do change every so often. You can leave your system alone and not update your roms, but updates to MAME frequently include new playable games, so it's a bit of a trade-off. I at one point had the complete romset of several thousand titles, but these days I keep it down to the 1500 or so that I really enjoy. =P

The last step is audio, and you can choose how far you want to go with that was well. My cabinet has a nice audio system built in, so I opted to tap into that, but you can just as easily use a set of PC speakers or even the internal audio of a TV set if you use that hardware.

Hooking up the audio is just another set of wire twisting; I took a cheap two speaker and subwoofer PC set, and cut the lines an inch or two before each satellite speaker. A quick splice into the speaker wires coming from the cabinet and I have that nice fuzzy arcade sound.

The only downside to this conversion is that it doesn't account for the lighting inside the cabinet, so, if you want the marquee to light up, that's a whole other ball of wax. I can turn on my cabinet and light my marquee, but the massive capacitor (?) in that thing sucks more juice then I'm willing to pay for just to light up a sign, (the thing hums.) I intend to splice the wires going to those lights to a standard lamp plug one of these days when I get around to it, seeing the marquee light up is actually pretty cool.

This is my current finished product, although I'm not really happy with the monitor right now. That was the only one I had handy that would fit, and it's painfully small for the space. I intend to replace it with a larger one eventually, (and paint it black), but I'm too busy playing Galaga at the moment to care. You'll notice an extra button on the top left hand side in this photo; I added that in to access the configuration menu of the emulators without having to go to the PC.

I would also normally crack open the back of her and stuff all the hardware inside the unit, but I'm in the process of moving, so I haven't bothered to move the behemoth machine out from the wall yet. The PC standing to the left of the cabinet will eventually be tucked away neatly inside, and the wires strewn out from under the glass will stay inside the machine. That's really all there is to it; I welcome any questions on the process, as long as it's not, "where do I get roms"...

This undertaking took me several years of trial and error, but it was well worth the effort in my opinion. I can't wait to do it all over again as soon as I find the right cabinet(s). Next time I need something with a roller ball or a dial, because it is next to impossible to play TRON with a joystick.