Well in this post I will at least try to highlight the arcade games and things that have happened in the past many months.
The biggest arcade purchase was my Planet Harriers Sega Hikaru board. If you did not know, Planet Harriers is the Sequel/Spiritual Successor to Space Harrier. This board (like Naomi) is based on Sega Dreamcast but it has a custom graphics chip and quite a bit of extra ram. The power of the board falls somewhere in between Naomi and Naomi 2. From what I have read, in some aspects the Hikaru board is more powerful then Naomi 2. Since the board was originally created to run Brave Fire Fighters, it is able to do advanced fog and smoke graphics as well as a rendering tech called Phong shading.
Sega Hikaru Board (Outside of cage, with filter board)
The biggest problem with the board is it is a very delicate board. If the heat syncs on the processors come loose they can do terrible, sometimes unrepairable damage to the game board itself. The one method that is universally accepted by the arcade community is to hot glue the head syncs in an effort that they will not come loose and kill your rare arcade board.
Due to some very good luck, my board came fully working and was not damaged. The seller (from ebay) had placed the whole setup in a box and individually boxed each piece to protect them even more. It came with the board itself (in metal cage), along with the full control panel mounted to a wooden box with the JVS I/O Type 1 (same one I used for Initial D) mounted inside the box with everything wired up nicely. It also included the power supply which had the third plug modified into a 4 pin molex plug that you would more commonly see on a pc power supply or ide hard drive. There is a small power harness on the I/O that connects to that 4 pin. The biggest problem is all that came to connect the two was a Molex Y splitter which ended up only letting the power supply be a few inches from the control panel. Due to my quick thinking I purchased a 6 foot Molex extension cable making it more comfortable to have the control panel on your lap and not be tethered to the power supply.
Actual picture of the control panel from the auction
One Slight problem I had when I received this board was I had Initially received Error 3. On most message board posts it will tell you that something seriously was wrong with the board and it was costly or near impossible to fix. Luckily for me, it turns out that the rom board had just unseated itself during shipping. I just turned the unit off, pressed down on the rom board and the game came up without a problem. So if your Hikaru board throws an error 3 and you did not do anything wrong or it was not handled improperly, try reseating or lightly pressing down on the rom board. It may fix things just like it did for me.
The only other problem I had with this unit is it was Japan version so all the in game text was in Japanese. I posted on various message board and found out that no one really knew much about converting to USA Region except for the fact that it was not a bios chip swap but an operator code to change the region. I emailed a few people about this and one of them wanted to charge me way too much for just a code. Luckily I messaged Ken from Irepairsega.com and he supplied me the code so now the game is fully in English and I am able to fully read the "How to Play" section which of course is important since I had never played before.
I created a few videos of this game in action which can be seen below. One of them is the intros playing through a few times showing various demo modes. The other is my first full Playthrough with the character Cory. I had to recalibrate the joystick in the test mode to get it fully functional. The seller told me I should do that every time it is turned on.
Intro and Attract Mode Video:
Full Playthrough as Cory (On Real Hardware)
I also bought various other games for my various hardware but nothing spring to mind at the moment, perhaps I will post more later or tomorrow.
