Open Motion Full Chase

[berty]

I’m kicking off a new open-source restoration project aimed at fully understanding, documenting, and eventually replacing the motion-control system used in Taito’s Full Throttle / Chase H.Q. deluxe moving cabinets. These machines are rare, poorly documented, and notoriously difficult to repair due to the ageing motor control boards and the opaque 50-pin IDC interface that links them to the main PCB.

As many of you would know, I have had one of these cabs for a while and have been slowing working through the resto process that @Kaizen started. (Check out my project thread for more info). Now that Open Motion G-Loc is reaching a good point, I am going to switch the cabs around at home so I can start the next Open Motion release. Open Motion G-Loc will continue to be improved, but given that it is 95% there, I want to move on to another project.

Open Motion Full-Chase will start by building an Arduino Mega-based “sniffer” that sits inline between the game PCB and the motor board. This tool will decode the parallel bus, map all motion-related signals, and give us a clean foundation for a modern open-hardware replacement – similar in spirit to the Open Motion G-LOC project. The long-term goal is a safe, reversible, fully documented motion controller that keeps these cabinets alive without relying on failing proprietary electronics.

Here are some pictures of the sniffer hardware setup.

One thing that I am looking for help with is to have MAME reliably output the motion controls so that they can be seen via MAME Hooker in a way similar to G-Loc. If you can assist with this, it means that I can use both MAME and real hardware for this project.

At the moment, it is just going to be for the original PCBs.

 

[berty]

One of the biggest issues with this project is how massive the machine is. You also need to keep dissembling the machine to get to wires etc in order to test and refine the design the Arduino. To help speed up development, I have used AI to create some development tools.

This is my web based development tool for Open Motion Full Chase which I just completed this week. The tool allows you to play the game ROMS (using the MAME drivers) and then simulates the movement of the carriage in real time. The tool allows you to try different versions of the Motor EPROM and different versions of the game too.

Brett - not sure if you are on here mate, but that EPROM dump that I took of your game has more instructions in it then the one in MAME which is based on Kaizen 's dump. Kaizen, not sure if you are still active here but you will be interested to know that your EPROM still works despite the differences which I don't fully understand yet.

The tool also inspects the communication between the Motor PCB and Game Board and translates the memory addresses into plain English.

The next step in development for this tool is to load an Open Motion C++ or INO file and run the motion analysis platform side by side.

I am really keen to get this machine out of storage now and get it all up and running. I intend on doing an all-in-one solution for this machine - that is a combo of RPi and Arduino that will emulate and run the motion for a number of different games. I am still a long way off doing that, but it's just a matter of time now that I have these tools developed.