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Darksoft CPS-1 Multi: Preview / Sneak Peek / Information - FINALLY!

Have been happily waiting for this, for a few years now. Cannot express how ecstatic I am for this to finally be hitting the market.

It's pretty much assured that I'll have one cab strictly setup for CPS 1 and 2 only now, and I feel confident it's gonna see plenty of play with just those two.

Thanks to DS/APOC/Mitsu, and all involved with the project, for this long awaited beauty.
 
Aurich said:
I'm gonna just address the elephant in the room, because I'm really curious to hear other people's takes:

My excitement level for this has dropped since running my Mistercade. I love real hardware! But the CPS1 core on Mister is really strong, and still getting subtle improvements (shout out to my man Loïc for the work he did on Strider's stars).

I've got a 12Mhz Dash board, Hyper Fighting, that I could convert. But I honestly wonder what will run better, 10Mhz games on my 12Mhz board, or Mister?

You could say "well there's a project to remake the Forgotten World spinners, and you probably can't run those on Mister!" and well ... that turned out to not be something that was able to be addressed here.

I know Mistercade's aren't technically shipping yet, I have a release candidate beta board. But I think they're ready to go, in the next week or two. And we have an AP member selling a competitive product that's available now. And I'm spacing on the link for that, my apologies. Point is, there are good jamma options now.

Maybe I'll get this still. Big Darksoft fan here. But it's not as slam dunk for me now. Mister is kind of a limited project, arcade-wise. I'm still buying real boards, just picked up two this week. But CPS1 is something it does well.

Thoughts?
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My think about Mister is that is a really good, powerful and accurate option but for me it’s like: music vinyls vs. iTunes, or physical books vs. eBooks.

That kind of romantic feeling is still there in the original hardware/stuff
 
Bummer about Forgotten Worlds. I think a lot of interest in the repro spinners is going to go out the window with the lack of support for that.

Darksoft has been sitting on hundreds of official QSound chips? Crazy.
 
Nebula said:
My think about Mister is that is a really good, powerful and accurate option but for me it’s like: music vinyls vs. iTunes, or physical books vs. eBooks.

That kind of romantic feeling is still there in the original hardware/stuff
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For sure.

One thing about real, tangible things is you often appreciate them more. I respect that this shouldn't be another FPGA conversation, I'll steer clear of that. But I think it's good to discuss what's important to our hobby souls.

I sold a lot of my records, but I kept a couple shelf fulls of ones that have meaning, and every once in a while I pick up a new boxed set or special release just to have it. I've got the Halloween soundtrack on orange vinyl, and you know, I'm going to put it on today and enjoy it.

I buy a lot of books on Kindle, I'm out of shelf space. But I have a whole row of the Sandman Slim hardcovers, and I always buy the paper versions. Just because I enjoy having them, not sure how it even started.

Putting in a PCB is a deliberate act, like putting on a record. It takes more intention. Scrolling through a list of games on the Mister is easy and cool and also a bit ... numb. Multiboards are a great compromise between that physicality and reality of being so low on space to store everything.

So I guess really what I'm saying is I'm talking myself back into wanting this. :D
 
Darksoft said:
Do you want to waste an original cps1.5 just for the case?
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What do you mean waste? It would have the multi in it, the BEST use of the case as far as I'm concerned! I also plan on using an authentic Punisher PCB for the conversion...
 
Keroro1125 said:
Exactly why I'm hoping someone makes aftermarket cases, so it avoids situations like this. Whether it be through 3D printing or injection molds I'd be more than happy to support aftermarket cases.
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I've got a full CPS1.5 collection (minus MBD, that one is hard to find), but I plan on getting a few extra, doing multi's in them, then tossing out the old crappy original PCBs. I guess if the multi doesn't fit, I can probably use an exacto knife to trip any plastic that is in the way!
 
XtraSmiley said:
What do you mean waste? It would have the multi in it, the BEST use of the case as far as I'm concerned! I also plan on using an authentic Punisher PCB for the conversion...
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You cant use the A Board from a CPS1.5 as it doesnt have the sound section populated. Also the CPS1.5 shell is very nice and should IMO be kept where it belongs. There are a lot of people willing to make nice cases for it.
 
Wraith said:
So is there no more possibility of a duel 10mhz/12mhz oscillator functioning with this multi?
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Yeah, my donor board is a 12hmz Dash, I'm not entirely sure what that means for most games which weren't natively 12mhz. I need to pull it out and verify it's compatible with the specs too.

But does that mean they'll run slightly faster or different?
 
I think supposedly you can’t tell the difference but technically slightly faster.
 
djsheep said:
The multi will run on both 10MHz and 12MHz boards. It will play the games natively as they are on original hardware. If you want complete 100% accuracy you'll need the board the game was designed for, however either motherboard should play the games with no issues. I've been testing with a short 12MHz Dash board and there's been no glaring issues whatsoever. I've heard the same from other testers with a 10MHz running.
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Excuse my ignorance but I am a complete n00b with CPS1 equipment - up until a few days ago, I didn't have CPS1 h/w.

Does this mean that 10MHz games running on a 12MHz board would technically run faster? I'm not really sure what the impact of the game is as I'm really not well versed enough to be able to tell.

I suppose that current issue exists in today's world with the CPS1 in that if you change the game from a 10MHz to 12MHz A board, then it'd still have the same issue as the multi (assuming you can change the games as easy - I'm only assuming it's like the CPS2 where games are interchangeable on the B board)
 
I also have a prototype and have been testing a lot. This multi is incredible. Especially the work done to support cps1.5 games. To me this is a must-have.

I'm just going to point out a few things that might not have been mentioned yet. This multi has been a huge undertaking and there is still a lot of work to do for perfection. In its current state it is ready to release but not all motherboards currently work. More details on that in a but.

As for the Q sound chips, the protos have them installed. There is no "huge stockpile" of Q sound chips. However the manufacturer of the chips sold the architecture to many companies. Capcom specific chips a re-branded Q sound however there are several chips by the same manufacturer that do the same thing and can be used. That is an option as well as a fpga-based solution. I'm not sure which will be available at sale time.

Currently the kick harnesses for cps1.5 are on the filter board and the harnesses for cps1 are on the pcb near the C-board. We are trying to add a cps1 kick connector to the filter board. It will probably require a wire harness between the multi and filter board but I feel the kick connector should be closer to the jamma edge since a lot of people will have cases made.

Additionally I plan to offer custom filter boards. More details later.

Now for the A-boards. The intention is to have the multi work on EVERY motherboard. The multi was produced and tested using the short boards with the assumption that the long boards wouldn't require anything extra. A few days ago we found it doesn't currently work on long boards. However we did no additional troubleshooting since we are concentrating on other issues. It is quite possible the issue with longboards will be resolved before release but if you want to be guaranteed a day 1 working multi get your short boards ready.

Keep in mind this is still a prototype with kinks being worked out. I can't foresee any of these issues not being fixed. So don't panic if you have longboards.
 
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mR_CaESaR said:
Excuse my ignorance but I am a complete n00b with CPS1 equipment - up until a few days ago, I didn't have CPS1 h/w.

Does this mean that 10MHz games running on a 12MHz board would technically run faster? I'm not really sure what the impact of the game is as I'm really not well versed enough to be able to tell.

I suppose that current issue exists in today's world with the CPS1 in that if you change the game from a 10MHz to 12MHz A board, then it'd still have the same issue as the multi (assuming you can change the games as easy - I'm only assuming it's like the CPS2 where games are interchangeable on the B board)
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My experience with running conversions of the 10 MHz games on 12 MHz boards is that the games run the same - Capcom’s coders wrote the games to accommodate the higher clock speed. I believe 1941 is the only game people have mentioned that runs differently with the higher clock speed, and a patched ROM would likely take care of it.
 
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Darksoft said:
You cant use the A Board from a CPS1.5 as it doesnt have the sound section populated. Also the CPS1.5 shell is very nice and should IMO be kept where it belongs. There are a lot of people willing to make nice cases for it.
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Ah, gotcha. No worries, I have plenty of regular CPS1 boards (short, long, 10, 12 etc) so it shouldn't be an issue!

I have a spare CPS1.5 case with no label which I was holding for this one, but I guess I can make it a dedicated game too, but hey, if it DID fit, it would have been epic, this is going to be the second best multi IMO (behind CPS2)!
 
benime said:
Does this mean a later version may include it?
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I passed on being a beta tester on this multi because I could not dedicate the time to properly test it out, I'm simply too busy irl running 2 businesses and taking care of family. As much as I would have jumped on this it would not have been fair to Darksoft. Also, since spinner support is not implemented yet and I'm in the middle of testing the repro spinner with real hardware, makes sense to finish that up.

I've been in talks with Darksoft about spinner support. Support should be able to be implemented later on either as an addon/revised filter board or maybe as a whole new revised multi. Darksoft never stops improving his multis, so Im sure this will be addressed at some point. I will tell you this, having played both the real thing with spinner and the patched roms with buttons. Only way I will play this game is with the spinners, its a whole different experience and the way it was meant to be.

I envision something simple like this, adding a passthrough 8pin connector on the filter board for the spinners. Although not really necessary, you could have the connector internally and get connectivity out elsewhere mounted to a case.

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This multi has been a huge undertaking, the features and integrations that have been accomplished are simply amazing, it has been a while and at this point, I just want to see this multi be released. IT"S TIME :thumbup:

nem said:
Bummer about Forgotten Worlds. I think a lot of interest in the repro spinners is going to go out the window with the lack of support for that.
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Im sure DS will add support to his multi as I stated above, but then again, only he can answer this for sure :D . The spinner will be produced regardless as plans are in the process to make an addon replacement encoder for it to be functional with Mame/PC/consoles/ etc. I have also been in contact with a few of the MiSTerFPGA CPS core devs and it seems likely that they will also be implementing spinner support.
 
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