UD-CPS2: Fully Consolized Capcom Play System 2

Tech Talk
421

Sorry. Im on a tablet an it showed pg1 instead of the last page and I thought you were a newcomer to the thread.

Another point of reference is toodles’ fgwidget + 2 psx extension chords which I use for my own personal supergun right now which are priced at a whopping 15 dollars plus shipping. I don’t really mind diy and its an awfully specialized product. I hope you can manage something close to the fg widget price or closer to 30 for it completed.

And of course because we’re all fighting game fanatics we would need a pair (2) so the difference would be between 30 and 100 a 70 dollar difference is nothing to sneeze at.

Honestly, I’m a bit peeved that you used laughs converter as a point of reference since that has ALWAYS been my example of an outrageous price.

You’ve been in the ST supergun threads and the various "what do I need to play arcade ST threads. We’ve iteracted’ , and that’s how I heard of your project when you first conceived of it. I love that such a thing exists now and its always a point of discussion at casual meetups.

But I have mentioned my issue with laugh’s price enough times that you should have picked it up, but I’ll reiterate here:

50+shipping from Korea? Compared to 15 + a little work? Even if you exclude shipping (which is the fair thing to do) the fgwidet is 1/4 of the price. IMO assembling a product does not add enough value to it to quadruple the price(ESPECIALLY when the assembly is so simple). In fact, I’m shitty at soldering and my joints don’t hold for long. I paid someone else to do it, and I still came out under half the cost of the fgwidget

I carry my entire supergun setup and a stick (sometimes 2) on public transit every time the ST community here has meetups. Your consolized cps2 would give me a lot less to carry. And people can bring their own damn sticks since everyone has USB sticks now. But I’m still in school, no job and broke. So my alternative until I can afford the full system is just to purchase your USB converter. That way I can at least eliminate sticks from the list of things I have to carry. I’m hoping for a 30 ish price point for an assembled product and I would get 2

422

Perhaps I should clarify what I mean by DIY version. This will not be DIY in the sense that you buy a bag of parts and assemble the board yourself. It is a DIY version because it will be suitable for DIY applications where people want to easily wire it into their own projects. And being as almost everything on the board is surface mount, I won’t be offering a version that you can solder yourself (save maybe the connectors).

Don’t take the price reference personal. I merely referenced the most popular/known controller adapter for superguns on the market and what people have been paying for it for years. And to put it in perspective, what I am offering is pertinent to today’s controllers, not yesterday’s. I have a hard time believing, my DIY version will cost $50, but I also want people to keep a proper perspective and not give me grief when I charge more than Toodles’ FGWidget (which I hear is a fabulous device, for those of you looking to use retro controllers on your superguns).

As far as the other versions, they will be something of “deluxe” models. More info to come.
-ud

423

Yeah laugh’s PSX converter is a joke…$50 there isn’t even any casing on it…Although i could of afford it, its principle so I asked for it during SRK Secret Santa haha…I never ended up using it…

Yeah $30 seems like a good price IMO. Im hoping some of the TO purchase your CPS2 setup…Lugging around 2 candy cabs is quite bulky.

424

price is not your problem. especially if it offers something unique 5&6 button support

you do not have 50$?

  • go to job.

kit is avaible for 15$

  • learn how to solder

or buy tototec and be happy with 4 buttons

425

I don’t think TOs will pick up a UD CPS2 to be honest unless they are big fans of ST, simply because of the price of an ST board plus the UD CPS2 combined is going to be over $500. Then to get it to work with their streaming setups, they would need a HDMI upscaler too. ST is not a profitable game IMO. The turnout is too small to justify the cost.

It’s hard enough getting them to run ST when the players provide setups. If it wasn’t for the few of us in the UK who travel around, offer setups and run the side tournaments, I really think ST would die, because none of the TOs I know over here add ST of their own accord. I think I would rather leave it to the players to sort out anyway since they are generally knowledgeable about display types, input lag etc. If left to a TO, even if they did buy a setup they would most likely buy some random laggy HDMI upscaler and run it on LCD. At least the ST community is anal enough to cart CRTs around the country and stump up for XRGB devices :slight_smile:

I’d really love to see a UD USB supergun~ I really would like a Killer Instinct and Breakers Revenge board.

By the way, would it be possible to program turbo detection into the drivers of the UD CPS2? Maybe flash the controller LED if >15 inputs per second are detected?

426

Yeah, I’m excited to see what people come up with :smiley:

It’s possible, but that’s not really a feature I care to implement. If TOs were calling out in one accord that there was a need, so be it, but yours was the first mention of it. I’m assuming you are worried about people cheating?
-ud

427

Yeah, all about dat cheating :<
I had one experience of a player who was using one of those fightpads and I thought the way he was acting was a bit off. Kinda sat right up close with the pad under the table, out of view. I thought it was kind of suspect the amount of reversals he was getting and throws he was winning too, but maybe paranoia got the best of me.

428

Why the bashing of laugh’s converter and the price point of the UD-CPS2?
If you want one and couldn’t justify the price, don’t buy now. Wait until it gets cheaper or an alternative surfaces or you have enough money.

Every time you eat out, do you complain they charge too much for the food that you can cook at home?

None of these are mass produced. They cost more not because of the material used alone, but R&D, labor and hassle of manufacturing small qualities. You can’t compare these with over the counter drugs or CPUs.

Laugh’s converter was first to market to solve a need from this niche market. Do you prefer NO solution at all prior to his creation?

Toodle’s converter didn’t even get button mapping support until I suggested that to him, and it didn’t come to fruition 1 year+ later.
So before that most pad players can’t even use toodle’s converter effectively.

I own multiple of both and I still prefer laugh’s because of its form factor, although I’d like it to have a different button mapping trigger mechanism.

Anyway, if you can’t justify $400 for a UDCPS2, then bookmark this and walk away. Wait until it gets cheaper or someone else offers a similar solution for less.

429

Actually, many TOs on the west and east coast of the US have already purchased UD-CPS2 and run them at a variety of tournaments. Is it expensive? Yes. But hey, that’s the cost of running a small, niche scene. At the end of the day, if you want your community to thrive, somebody has to put in the time, work, and especially money, to do so.

I would love to have h2h cabs at every major tournament, but that’s far more work, and not much cheaper, than getting UD-CPS2 systems.

430

This is awesome, good work! Would love to play on one of these someday.

431

Oh hey that’s good to hear man! Out of interest are the TOs who bought the systems ST players too? Over here it seems TOs don’t really care about ST and the majority of tournaments that have happened in the UK lately have only happened because players have asked for it to be included and offered setups and to run it. If left to their own devices, I’m pretty sure ST would be dead as a tournament game here.

432

It’s the same story everywhere else. I’m not sure what you mean by TOs. If you mean TOs at major tournaments who only care about headliner games, then no. I’m specifically talking about the TOs of the ST scene. The boys and girls who decide to become something more than a player, and put in work to help organize, advertise, and run ST tournaments on their own.

Few of our major tournament TOs actually support ST beyond giving us the thumbs-up to run tournaments. All the setups, controls, stream equipment/recording equipment, bracket, volunteers, all come from the ST scene itself.

433

Yeah, when I speak of TOs, I mean in the sense that they hire a venue, run an event and run a bunch of games. Doesn’t necessarily need to be a major tournament, it’s just that kind of structure I was talking about. We have some TOs that run small monthly events but I’m still lumping them in as TOs who largely ignore ST. So in that sense, I’m talking about both major events and smaller events here too. Basically people/groups/organisations who put on tournaments for games without fans of said scene needing to take it upon themselves to get games included.

So it sounds like the situation over there is pretty much the same with ST being ignored by the grass roots TOs if you want to call them that.

If we are talking scene-specific TOs such as the great members of our community to take the financial hit and time to run tournaments, then fortunately there are a few of us over here who are committed in that respect.

Jason/DNA set up Grand Master Challenge a while back as a website/resource and has eventually grown into a bit of a community and facebook group. We’ve run some events in the past where we’ve piggybacked larger events, and Jason even went to the trouble of bringing his 2 arcade cabs to events. There’s 3 of us now and we basically act like freelance TOs, going to events and trying to get ST included. I guess in that respect we are a lot like how I understand ST Revival to be. I’m personally running a monthly tournament in a London arcade which is turning out to be a real fun event, although we loosely tie it in with Grand Master Challenge since most of us are involved with both interests, but since the hardware isn’t ours and we have slightly limited control, we keep it “unofficial” if you want to call it that.

So yeah, I’m banging my head against a brick wall wondering why TOs don’t run ST! At the last major here in the UK, ST got a higher turn out than some of the other games, and it’s not the first time that has happened either. It’s a quick game and people are willing to travel from all over to support it. Maybe it’s just not as hype to the uninitiated?

Maybe lack of a decent port and people being reluctant to run HDR is why?

Either way, we are getting some stuff together now to run arcade ST at events and really push for it. We’ve got 3 boards between us, and will eventually have some UD CPS2’s to match (currently mine is on order and Unwanted has a traditional supergun). We’ve got a couple of 29" CRTs already, but I just found one on ebay that is real close to us, so Unwanted is probably going to replace his Toshiba with a Sony. I’ll be buying an XRGB mini and some distribution gear at some point.

The eventual plan is to have 3x 29" CRT setups running 2X on UD CPS2 with the option of having one setup as a head to head and a HDMI out to plug right in to the existing streaming/capture setups.

Gone off at a bit of a tangent now, sorry, but yeah UD CPS2 is going to make a big difference to the UK ST scene, we will make sure of that :wink:

434

TO from Northwest Majors for ST was a joke. It was consider a main tourney game but they didn’t run the brackets. The players ended up having to do it, chasing around players & we ended up finishing around 1am. It would have been better if it was just made a side tournament that way we didn’t have to pay for the venue fee & put that in the pot instead. The guy didn’t even hold the door for us when we had to remove the head 2 head candy cabs, he had the look like “can you hurry up & leave so i can lock up.” haha

I think these UD CPS2 will be pretty awesome all though i prefer arcade cabs then arcade sticks…

As for laugh’s converter $50 is too high of a price for it period. If the price was more on point, more people would buy it. Most converters ranges from $5 to $25 but for some reason PSX to Jamma is $50. Also when ordering you would usually have to order 2, so that’s $100+ shipping to make those picky arcade stick users/pad players happy…

435

I think for most people that is the case. I think everyone (save Afrolegends, lol) would prefer playing on a nice cab if possible. But when it comes to ease of use, not many people are keen on throwing their cab in a truck very often. Most anyone can throw a CRT and a UD-CPS2 in their car pretty easily. I brought 2 CRTs and multiple UD-CPS2s in my little hatchback to EVO this summer :smiley:
-ud

436

Guys who run major tournaments, which usually requires renting out a gigantic venue and handling several responsibilities across MULTIPLE games, don’t usually cater to ST. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that the game gets a fairly low turn-out along with lower entrants than most modern games. TOs only hold major tournaments for the newest and hottest games that still nets a high turn-out in order to stay relevant.

Grass roots TOs are the regular dudes who are just willing to put in the effort to benefit their specific scene. So basically, you gotta find out the responsible, self-motivated individuals, who want to step up their efforts. You gotta find talented players who want to go from, “Well, I guess I’ll just show up and play the game” to guys who are more like, “Man, this game and this scene is too good to let it dwindle. Let me see what I can do to make it better.”

Because at the end of the day, it’s just not enough to play the game. You have to learn how to pull in new players, retain your current players, come up with interesting and exciting events, advertise the event both before, during, and after it happens, and get a good cycle going with consistency. We can’t rely on the mercy and whim of major TOs to help us out. Gotta do it ourselves.

Honestly, if you’re getting tourney numbers higher than the headliner games, I would get a serious conversation going with the heads of your scene. Don’t wait until they offer to give you guys more support, go to him, provide a solid gameplan and reasons for why ST needs to have more prominence at major tourneys, and get the conversation started.

Actually, Afro doesn’t mind playing on cab. I’m pretty sure he does it because Damdai hates playing on anything that’s not an arcade cab, lol. Pre-match mind games are delicious.

437

I can’t speak for other people. But I wasn’t bashing the price point of UD-CPS2. In fact, I think the UD-CPS2 is quite reasonable. I just can’t afford it.

I think Laugh’s converter is unreasonable, ESPECIALLY after toodles added mapping to his FGwidget. And for UD’s USB converter. I was just putting up my opinion on what I would expect and like a price point to be.

… and then more bashing of laugh’s price point and how it STILL hasn’t lowered… =/

For me, I, in a way, am waiting for a cheaper alternative. because I don’t need the full setup (yet). So I’m waiting for the USB converter. (hopefully Sub $30)

438

Couple of questions actually.

Did you decide to replace the stock fans in the end? I think there were some concerns about reduced air flow from the silent fans, but to be honest I don’t think that is an issue. For one these boards will now be used open air, instead of inside a cabinet with resricted airflow and two, do the components even get all that hot? I was just thinking that none of the consoles of the time had fan cooling (until PS2 era maybe) and even PCs of the time only had a tiny 40mm fan on the CPU.

Oh also, once the PS4/Xbox One controllers are understood, could you see yourself adding these, providing they don’t have any stupid security chips in them?

439

Can’t recall if I stated it explicitly in this thread already, but yeah, I replace every one. You should see the condition of some of them. The other day I got one that wouldn’t even spin, and not because there was a power/electronic issue, but there was this layer of crusty grime that had built up to the point where the blades were fused in place.

I opted not to go with the “silent” ones because they are simply too expensive. If people bug me to install them, I’ll do so if they pay the difference, but it’s just not worth dropping $15 on a fan. I am using legit manufacturers like Panasonic, etc., just not going nuts with the Papst silent model. The fans I’m using are at least spec’d for lower noise than the stock Nidec fans that usually come in the CPS2, so that’s a bonus.

To be honest, I’ve done zero research on it, as there is no an immediate need. I will certainly look into it in the future, though.
-ud

440

I don’t think there is a lot of difference in noise level between what you are using and a comparable Papst fan? There is a really low noise one, about 16dba but it’s only about 11cfm, compared to 17cfm of the other popular Papst model that matches the original spec closest.

I would be fine fitting a lower cfm fan in a stock motherboard because I honestly feel that would be fine given it’s not in a restricted environment and they are easy to replace, but I wouldn’t risk a UD board.