I bought a Project Diva Arcade Future Tone Cabinet!

Got it all installed and put back together...



It works well but have noticed somtimes at the during a song and often when entering the initial menus there is a tiny pause. The CPU and GPU usage is low so I thought it may be disk related lag.

It was, the drive Sega used is terrible...



I'm surprised these stutters aren't present on a real setup. I'm guessing by the slow write speed whenever windows has to do any saving for logs and background stuff etc it causes a pause in the game. A real arcade setup makes zero writes to the disk when running and is why it's safe to just switch the cab off without a proper shutdown.

I'm going to clone this drive to the Intel 545s later and see what happens as i never had any issue like this on the last setup when using this drive.

Another interesting issue is that the board cannot boot a GPT disk, it only seems to boot MBR ones when I install windows. However both of the original drives are GPT. It could be related to the TPM which is unaltered preventing it booting anything but the original ones.

 

Drive cloned to the Intel 545s and problem solved, perfect performance now.



The board does in fact boot from a Sata connected DVD drive if the hard disk isn't bootable.

These are the main steps I made to make it all work, my board is still BIOS password locked so there is no real need to get into the bios...

- Convert disk to MBR if you can't get it to work as GPT: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/w...management/change-a-gpt-disk-into-an-mbr-disk
- Install Windows 8.1
- Windows Update - just install driver updates for network and Intel ME.
- Install nVidia Drivers 344.75 https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/79891/en-us/ if using the original 650TI as this is the version the original machine uses.
- Leave all the Nvidia graphics settings at default, but maybe enable adaptive v-sync as this helps hide dropped frames and other slowdowns of slower pcs.
- Install Audio Drivers from Advantech https://www.advantech.com/support/details/driver?id=1-1DPGN3Z
- Run from CMD: "bcdedit /set {globalsettings} custom:16000067 true" to hide the Windows logo when booting.
- Install Visual C++ Runtime: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-US/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist?view=msvc-170
- Install .net framework 4.8 if using newer PD-Loader, I'm using an older one so the included version is fine.
- Run from CMD: "bcdedit -set TESTSIGNING ON" to enable Test Mode so the Amex card works
- In Windows' visual settings set it to "Best Performance" to turn off all the animations and effects, this will appear to skip the brief Welcome / login screen if the SSD is fast enough.
- I set a desktop picture of the Nu logo... https://mikucity.com/cabinet/nu-start.jpg, I also set the start screen accent colurs to black
- Add a shortcut to diva.exe to the Start Menu startup folder, usually C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp set it to run minimised and the black command window that appears before the game starts will be hidden.
- Once you have your PD-Loader settings how you want them set it to skip the launcher so it goes straight to the game on bootup.
- The only way to exit the game when using the JVS controls is to hit Alt-F4 on a keyboard, pressing Alt-F4 again wiill give the shutdown option so you can shut it down properly. I have a cheap media keyboard to do this similar to this... the signal to it's dongle works fine through the cabinets metal door too, plus it's useful for volume control.

 

I think the bitlocker issue is not easily fixed and would need the recovery key entered, something like that would never happen in normal use of the game unless the owner started poking around it.

This won't stop it booting other drives though, which I thought it would otherwise I would have done ths ages ago.

 

I'll do a benchmark with it empty another day, I think it is just very slow at writing by design, the game loaded quickly but took ages to copy in on there from another SSD, both my other SSDs vere quite full and have had a lot of use too.

It did work in GPT when I used a regular spinning hard disk at first to test, but only used this for a few minutes before starting again with an SSD.

It would make the system bootup look the same as in my showcase video I made ages ago.

On the real thing only the Windows spinning icon is displayed at boot, then it goes to the "Step" loading parts, then the Nu logo is displayed before the game starts.

 

I've never seen another PSU that size unfotunately. You should be able to use everything as it is now, just a different SSD if the original is too small for your needs.

The metal drive holder is needed unless you use a board that has an M2 or NVME SSD etc, but it also has the keychip port attached so there would be a hole in the case where it was.

 

You can use the original drive, just delete all the partitions and format it in Disk Management from another PC, the bitlocked parts will be gone. The same Nvidia drivers will work for the 750 but the newest will do just as well

 

Without the bitlocker recovery key it's as good as gone.

Interestingly the other regular HDD has an unencrypted partition "AMFS" that mentions the game name, mine was in fact Sonic & Mario in Tokyo Olympics. I'm unlikley to ever get one of those cabinets so don't feel bad about wiping any chance of getting it to work again.

 

It'll have been 4 years tommorow since I started this thread and today my Nu's PSU decided to blow, got some spare ones but have been digging though my boxes for a regular PSU to test the motherboard before I potentially ruin another power supply.

I was playing just like normal and then the screen went blank but the cab lights and fan kept going - very annoying