Well, I can now forget about using that POS PC CHIPS motherboard.

The board has been tossed around a good bit since it’s purchase in 1998. It has served me well in all it’s functions.

Well, I guess it’s been tossed around a bit too much. Two days ago I hooked a CDROM to it to add more ROM files, and a few console emulators to the system. I was playing with some DOS NES emulators (downloaded off Zophar’s Domain, and everything was working great. Well, it was, when it started randomly rebooting. Then it would lock. Finally, I got nothing but garbage, followed by nothing.

I dissected the beast. I’ll post photos later, but I found that the motherboard had been cracked, and the power supply header was blackened and melted. Ouch.

So now, my poor little cabinet is a VAntAGE cabinet, until I get some hardware with more pony power than my poor little 486! *sob*

On other news…I ordered, and finally received my KeyWiz, a keyboard encoder.

This thing is awesome. It hooked right up to my control panel, and in minutes I had enough buttons wired to play a game of Galaga. Everything worked, except I had to enter credits via a separate keyboard. I’m not sure why, the DIP switch is set to free play, but it doesn’t want to recognize it.

No big deal, it’s not permanent, anyway. I’ll be following this up with a full review on the KeyWiz later, complete with pictures.