Hi. My name is Jeremy.....and I'm an alcoholic.... *cough**crickets chirping**cough*
Seriously though, I don't drink alcohol.
Anyways, my name is Jeremy and I go by the moniker Mitsurugi-w. I've used this name since around 1996 when the first Souledge arcade game came out. I always used Mitsurugi and I was good. Good enough to win several tournaments in the game.
I have always loved video games and I got my first arcade game when I was in the 7th grade. It was an American woody cab and the game was called Mat Mania. It was the coolest feeling having this full-sized arcade machine in my bedroom. It was my first arcade cab and of course it had issues. It would take about 15 minutes for the monitor to warm up and get unscrambled. Eventually the monitor got so bad it wouldn't sync. I thought I had no choice but to trash it and that's what I did. Of course I know now I could fix it in about 15 minutes with a cap kit. Either way it was the beginning of my love of coin-op collecting.
I began teaching myself how to work on the machines. How to check voltages etc. The first place I got any advice was a place called Star Tech Journal. I needed help with fixing my Virtua Fighter monitor. It had vertical collapse. I mentioned up there that I wanted to teach myself how to repair monitors. One of the more experienced members there said I might as well teach myself how to skydive. lol. Well needless to say it's not that difficult and I got pretty good at fixing monitors. And it's hard to explain how good it felt when I fixed that Nanao monitor myself without paying someone else to do it.
And with the confidence that learning I could repair things brought to me I changed the way I collected and began buying non-working machines and fixing them up myself. I saved a ton of money that way. I've increased my collection a lot over the years. I have more than 20 arcade cabinets, 2 pinball machines, and a token machine that I repaired myself just in my house. That doesn't include the mini storage units I have with project cabinets in them.
My favorite games have always been fighting games. The first time I played Street Fighter 2 it changed my life. I had never played anything like that. Throughout my teenage years I would begin collecting arcade pcbs. Ebay was in it's infancy and deals were easy to find. I bought almost every pcb for every game that I liked in the arcade. This included Neo-Geo, CPS2 and CPS3. I hated the suicide battery that was on Capcom's pcbs. Luckily around 2001 a solution was found for CPS2. But CPS3 was another story. The carts would seemingly die so easily. Like if you bumped the pcb while it was powered on it would die.
Well go back to sometime in 2013. A guy named Darksoft began working on cracking CPS3. I followed his blog intently and checked it several times a day. Eventually he began experimenting with replacing the custom Capcom SH-2 with a standard SH-2. Darksoft had a theory that a standard SH-2 would work and would make decrypting much easier. He asked in his blog if anyone could replace the SH-2 and do some testing. I had absolutely no experience soldering surface mount components but I said "Sure. I'll give it a go." Now I must admit, a 144-leg chip is a HORRIBLE first component to learn how to surface mount solder with but somehow I made it work after a few tries. The SuperBIOS was born, I gained a great friend in Darksoft, and the rest is history as they say.
Over the last few years we have worked on several projects together and I even designed some of my own pcbs which I never thought I would ever do. I have even learned so much about modern PC-based arcade systems and I have a great deal of respect for them now. Darksoft and I continue to work on projects together and we have several future projects already "on the board".
I guess you could say these forums are our most recent project.
You may wonder where the name Walsdawg Arcade came from. Well, my last name is Walski. I played football (real american football) in high school and my teammates called me Walsdawg. The name just kind of stuck. I own two restaurants now and the name of my management company involves the name Walsdawg. I also call my home arcade the Walsdawg Arcade. So now you know!
Thanks for reading,
Jeremy aka Mitsurugi-w
Seriously though, I don't drink alcohol.
Anyways, my name is Jeremy and I go by the moniker Mitsurugi-w. I've used this name since around 1996 when the first Souledge arcade game came out. I always used Mitsurugi and I was good. Good enough to win several tournaments in the game.
I have always loved video games and I got my first arcade game when I was in the 7th grade. It was an American woody cab and the game was called Mat Mania. It was the coolest feeling having this full-sized arcade machine in my bedroom. It was my first arcade cab and of course it had issues. It would take about 15 minutes for the monitor to warm up and get unscrambled. Eventually the monitor got so bad it wouldn't sync. I thought I had no choice but to trash it and that's what I did. Of course I know now I could fix it in about 15 minutes with a cap kit. Either way it was the beginning of my love of coin-op collecting.
I began teaching myself how to work on the machines. How to check voltages etc. The first place I got any advice was a place called Star Tech Journal. I needed help with fixing my Virtua Fighter monitor. It had vertical collapse. I mentioned up there that I wanted to teach myself how to repair monitors. One of the more experienced members there said I might as well teach myself how to skydive. lol. Well needless to say it's not that difficult and I got pretty good at fixing monitors. And it's hard to explain how good it felt when I fixed that Nanao monitor myself without paying someone else to do it.
And with the confidence that learning I could repair things brought to me I changed the way I collected and began buying non-working machines and fixing them up myself. I saved a ton of money that way. I've increased my collection a lot over the years. I have more than 20 arcade cabinets, 2 pinball machines, and a token machine that I repaired myself just in my house. That doesn't include the mini storage units I have with project cabinets in them.
My favorite games have always been fighting games. The first time I played Street Fighter 2 it changed my life. I had never played anything like that. Throughout my teenage years I would begin collecting arcade pcbs. Ebay was in it's infancy and deals were easy to find. I bought almost every pcb for every game that I liked in the arcade. This included Neo-Geo, CPS2 and CPS3. I hated the suicide battery that was on Capcom's pcbs. Luckily around 2001 a solution was found for CPS2. But CPS3 was another story. The carts would seemingly die so easily. Like if you bumped the pcb while it was powered on it would die.
Well go back to sometime in 2013. A guy named Darksoft began working on cracking CPS3. I followed his blog intently and checked it several times a day. Eventually he began experimenting with replacing the custom Capcom SH-2 with a standard SH-2. Darksoft had a theory that a standard SH-2 would work and would make decrypting much easier. He asked in his blog if anyone could replace the SH-2 and do some testing. I had absolutely no experience soldering surface mount components but I said "Sure. I'll give it a go." Now I must admit, a 144-leg chip is a HORRIBLE first component to learn how to surface mount solder with but somehow I made it work after a few tries. The SuperBIOS was born, I gained a great friend in Darksoft, and the rest is history as they say.
Over the last few years we have worked on several projects together and I even designed some of my own pcbs which I never thought I would ever do. I have even learned so much about modern PC-based arcade systems and I have a great deal of respect for them now. Darksoft and I continue to work on projects together and we have several future projects already "on the board".
I guess you could say these forums are our most recent project.
You may wonder where the name Walsdawg Arcade came from. Well, my last name is Walski. I played football (real american football) in high school and my teammates called me Walsdawg. The name just kind of stuck. I own two restaurants now and the name of my management company involves the name Walsdawg. I also call my home arcade the Walsdawg Arcade. So now you know!
Thanks for reading,
Jeremy aka Mitsurugi-w
