RAGE!!!

Luke Duddridge
Feb 4, 2015
2 min read

I have been working on this monster of a game today and had great success and hopefully we will get it into one of our cabinets soon. When we got this game board we where shocked at how big it is just take a look yourself:

This monster of a board is about the same size as two Xbox (Original) consoles put one in front of another also the sound amplifier's heat sink is huuuuggggeeeand I'll explain why in bit.

The problem we had with this game was it was not providing sound to the JAMMA harness and the reason for this was that all the Primal Rage cabinets had a slightly different wiring layouts than your standard JAMMA cabinet because they had a seriously loud sound system (hence the huge heatsink) built into them and the developers wanted to be different I guess. Primal Rage uses the " CAGE Total Immersion Audio" system which consisted of two stereo speakers and sub woofer built into the cabinet that would punctuates the high impact gameplay. Most old JAMMA cabinets are normally mono because most early games where made to provide only mono sound but as technology moved on Stereo started to become the standard for games. Developers have since then created there own surround sound set ups and even up to today you can get some modern arcade machines with 5.1 surround sound built in.

Anyways back on to the subject, this game required a special cable to go from the audio PCB to the cabinet to provide the sound, which we don't have due to not having a dedicated Primal Rage cabinet. So after going through the schematics in the service manual I managed to track down the left and right +/- channels on the "CH 31 PCB". I then carefully soldered some kynar wire from the "CH 31 PCB" audio connections to the matching connections on the JAMMA edge on both sides of the PCB like show here:

After some neat soldering I hooked up this monster to our tiny Supergun test rig and hey presto we now have sound! YAY! We may not have the subwoofer booming away but that is something we could add later on down the line to cabinet. One strange thing about this PCB is the start button also is button 1 for the player which is weird but blame the developers for that, all that means is when this PCB goes into a cabinet we will have to piggyback the same button signals for start and button 1 on the cabinet, when you guys get to play it won't effect it at all but thought I would let you know for giggles.

Here is a gameplay video for you to enjoy of my favorite character "Talon":