nerdy ramblings about Mortal Kombat
so last week I posted a picture of the test menu on an actual Mortal Kombat arcade board, and I received a few Likes from an interesting array of people. I’m sure a lot of people didn’t really get the significance behind it, because it’s that fucking nerdy for the average human mind to be able to consume. so, as promised, I will provide an explanation for you all. (all 4 of you)
this “Revision 5.0 (T-Unit)” you see is a version 5.0 board. it’s a heavily sought after item in game collecting circles for the very reason that the actual boardset it was produced on is actually somewhat rare. every person that collects Mortal Kombat arcade games or simply the boards that run them, HAS to have this particular item. it’s a fact that average humans that are not total geeks don’t really know that the first Mortal Kombat game was produced on two separate boardsets. a boardset, in arcade lingo, is exactly that: a set of boards. lots of games from the 80s and sometimes 90s were produced on several boards, namely consisting of a CPU board, a sound board, and in other cases like classic Nintendo games, a video board. as the technology evolved these were eventually slimmed down to a single board. but Mortal Kombat was one that was of the CPU board/sound board variety, and the CPU board in particular was what changed over time. back in 1992, Mortal Kombat was produced on the Williams Y-unit boardset, one that was used for several notable games such as Smash TV, Total Carnage, Super High Impact Football, and some others… anyone that’s ever played Midway Arcade Treasures on their PS2 probably encountered any one of these games at least once. the Y-unit was of a design that dates back to 1989, and by 1992, it was a little long in the tooth. it was still a powerful specimen, its predecessor that was used in the game N.A.R.C. was actually the first 32-bit video game ever made, but it was time for something new. that came with NBA Jam, a game that just about everyone’s familiar with, when Williams-now-turned-Midway introduced their latest boardset, the T-unit.
Midway sold a lot of NBA Jam cabinets, I’m sure that comes as no surprise. but they sold a shitload of Mortal Kombat ones as well, and all weird conspiracy theories aside, Midway stopped production of Mortal Kombat on the obsolete Y-unit and started making it on the T-unit in 1993. I can’t really tell you the technical differences between the two, except that I’m guessing the T-unit is of a more improved design. Mortal Kombat II was the second game that came on the T-unit, and well, as you could’ve guessed, Midway sold a shitload of those too. which takes me to my story…
I already owned 3 Mortal Kombat boards (of the Y-unit variety), one of them the seller refunded my money because they thought it was a T-unit board, but wasn’t, and another seller made the same mistake again and basically gave me that 3rd board for free. I wasn’t going to spend top dollar on a T-unit board just to have this version 5.0 (the Y-unit stopped at 4.0, the revision that added Reptile as the hidden character), so I waited… and waited… and waited. one day I found an MK T-unit board on ebay that “had issues”. I figured in the very least it was something I’d be able to fix on my own, and when you consider I won a board that usually fetches about $130 or sometimes more for a measly $12.73, I’d say it was a pretty awesome score. this board had a little bit of history to it: apparently the previous owner had a Mortal Kombat II that just, I don’t know, quit working one day, and they swapped Mortal Kombat 1 roms into it and magically made it work like that, except the game would randomly reset or do other strange shit. that was the condition I received it, this franken-MK, and strangely I was able to fix it just by blowing on the surface mount DMA controller in the middle of the board. apparently dust bunnies can fuck shit up. I had no practical purpose for this in a game room where people are already fickle enough that they won’t even play Street Fighter Alpha 3 or Tekken Tag Tournament, so I wasn’t going to embarrass myself with Mortal Kombat.
some few months later I plugged the board back in to play around with it, and it worked like a charm. until about 30 minutes later, if anyone remembers what a jacked up TV looks like where the picture gets all wavy and moves all over the place, that’s what happened here. that’s when I said fuck this frankenstein board, I’m going to acquire a donor to swap the roms to. what a perfect donor I found: a $40 NBA Jam boardset. it came with all kinds of other cool shit too, like all the original papers that the game shipped with, it even had a laminated tournament chart (which I WILL scan one day). swapping just the roms though yielded me having two game boards that wouldn’t work at all though. completely stumped, I put them back on the original boards and just said the hell with it. now there’s an expert on Mortal Kombat stuff that I know online, he used to go by YourMameMan on youtube until he posted some clips from the Mortal Kombat movies on his account and got caught with multiple registrations to the same e-mail and got suspended. he had a wealth of useful information about the games on there, in addition to many videos of him restoring the games and overall just whooping ass. he’s currently in the Army reserves and is actually over in Afghanistan as we speak, but he still actively posts on KLOV from time to time so I figured I’d message him about my situation.
apparently, NBA Jam has some different graphics chip from the other games, and I kinda draw this conclusion because the NBA Jam Tournament Edition upgrade kit not only includes all the replacement roms for the CPU board and sound board, but also the graphics chip too. so I got the PLCC puller out and swapped the graphics chips and guess what… I have a legit Mortal Kombat 5.0 T-unit and a broke ass NBA Jam. so, that’s the significance behind the picture, that I actually have an MK T-unit that works now. there exists a rom hack for the T-unit board called “MK Turbo Ninja” that I very much would like to get working on there, which is the sole purpose I went after such a board in the first place. now that I’m done geeking out, hopefully your mortal mind can digest some of this nonsense I have shared with you today. as an added bonus, I will include pictures of me fighting Reptile in the Turbo Ninja rom in MAME.
pay attention to the score in the last picture. that’s a funny glitch.
the dark ages of online gaming part 1
I’ve seen a lot of crazy things since the summer of 1996. honestly the adventure began a year prior, when I observed this shift in my life from what was all Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games to these PC games. what started out as a big shareware collection with Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen eventually blossomed to Doom and Heretic in that fall of ’95. I remember looking back and seeing that a lot of the other kids in school didn’t even have computers in their houses. as far as I can recall, only one other dude had ever played Doom. so as I opened up Doom and saw the big instruction manual, and the awesome pack-in poster, there was another piece of literature for this thing called DWANGO. and as I read about it, I started reading about multiplayer gaming. apparently it was a dial-up service that you called into, very long distance, I think it was based out of Texas, and you could link up to a variety of other gamers and play Doom deathmatch. I knew that wasn’t an option, and as much as I wished I could find a bunch of other local kids to do that with, well, that just wasn’t happening.
I remember Super Nintendo having Xband, I didn’t really understand the technology at all back then, nor did I ever see the Xband modem, but apparently it attempted to have multiplayer in console games. and then there was Sega Channel, another item that seemed extremely out of reach, because we had probably the worst cable television provider in the galaxy. so what basically happened was, I would go to middle school, hate everybody, come home, and take my aggression out on various monsters all by myself. I’d even play around with the multiplayer settings in the Doom SETUP.EXE and launch deathmatches… only to be occupied exclusively by me, but I could pretend I was playing with other people. I almost pissed myself in amazement when I installed the Doom shareware off my Doom II cd and saw a demo where it was an actual co-op play game. nearly a year had passed by this point, it was the summer of ’96 now, and the Windows 95 version of Doom was released. little did I know I was entitled to a free upgrade to this Doom95, but I didn’t have internet access at the time, and proceeded to have my grandma re-buy Ultimate Doom and Doom II anyway.
if you poke around on these Doom95 discs, you’ll find an installer for none other than Xband. Xband apparently migrated to the PC platform sometime between ’94 and then, and well, I started to get curious. I waited a really long time though, trascending into various eras of installing my own sound card, to getting my own computer, to banging in Doom, Doom II, Final Doom, Heretic AND Hexen. it was May 13, 1997, that date permanently etched in my mind, I decided to install Xband. after the sign-up process though, I was told of some rather unfortunate news that the Xband service was closed, and to check out another service instead: Mplayer. Mplayer, the ire of all that is laggily painful. I remember being rather pissed when I looked at their list of supported games and found Doom nowhere in the list. but something else showed up, something I’d only recently discovered at that point, and the funny part was I didn’t even need the full game, the shareware version would do just fine: Quake. what was even better however, was that I could use Mplayer for free.
what nobody didn’t really know back then though was that America Online was not the premier gateway to the internet that everyone most likely perceived. in fact, America Online was probably the singlemost worst way to access the internet. what was incredibly frustrating was I signed up for this service and I couldn’t play any games, because I got what were called “red rooms”, which meant that my connection speed wasn’t good enough to play in any of the games being hosted at the time. I know, it’s difficult to comprehend, but back in my time, we had to use dial-up, and if you were one of those dickheads with a cable modem or went to college and had access to a T1 or T3, you were very fortunate. I also had an MSN account too, and one day, I was actually able to get a “green room”. now mind you, back in these times, the mouse and keyboard control configurations that we know so well today were not the most commonplace of layouts back then. it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see people using the keyboard exclusively to play, or geniuses like myself that were using Gravis Gamepads. the very first time I played online, I honestly thought I didn’t calibrate my joystick properly. this weird motion effect, that closest resembled that of ice skating, was in fact LAG.
that very day I learned that my journey into this new hobby of mine was going to hurt a little bit. it took quite a bit of experimentation with various internet services, but eventually my cousin and I settled on one that cost $10 a month, had a local access number (you don’t want to know what kind of phone charges I racked up back then) and surprisingly performed rather decently. about the 2nd or 3rd time I played online, I had some guys in this game I was in asking “do you wanna join my clan?” and well, I wanted to be part of something too you know. clearly I wasn’t good enough to join anyone else’s clan, so instead I elected to make my own with a bunch of guys that weren’t really good enough. if anything, it made for interesting conversations, you could instant message each other in what was called the “Pager” which literally made like a pager beeping sound when people messaged you. (fun fact: I pulled this exact sound and used it as my text tone on my previous cell phone) I noticed that a lot of the people I recruited were roughly the same age as me, so it looked like this was the THING to do if you were about 14-16 years old.
before I shut up, I have another story. one of the rooms that was a fixture in the Quake lobby was this one called “PEPPERS PINEAPPLES”. the grenade launcher in Quake was also dubbed in one of the death messages as a “pineapple”, meaning the grenade was like a pineapple. at least I could see how it’s shaped like one, and it’s a friendly and humorous name for it, right. well, the guy that made these rooms was named PEPPER, and when he got ahold of the grenade launcher and a bunch of grenades, he would spam them all over the place, hence, PEPPERS PINEAPPLES. he was pretty good at blowing people up, so I decided to pursue this guy to join my clan. he said yes to my request, and in the mail one day I received my Microsoft Office 97 disc and it apparently had HTML editing capability built in, so I said fuck it, I’m gonna make a web site for our clan too. I made profiles for all the people in the clan, including their ages. now this guy wasn’t exactly the greatest speller, and he typed in ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME, so when I asked his age and got “64″ as the response I was pretty much like “uh, dude, do you mean 16?” and he said “NO 64″ and there it was, I met my first senior citizen gamer. 
a couple years later when I was with another Quake clan (MinuteMen of Anarchy) we had some kind of partnership with this other clan that was, for lack of a better way of describing it, a clan full of middleaged and really old people. yeah, PEPPER joined them. I heard some amusing stories about that man from Minnesota, apparently in his 60s, he still played football. I lost touch with every single one of those people unfortunately, and by this time that would mean that he’s like 78 years old if he’s still alive.
I don’t think you’ll hear many stories like that in the modern era of online gaming, considering the average age is 11, and they’re all a bunch of racist punk ass kids from trailer parks. more about my exploits to come soon, I hope.
latest arcade projects/acquisitions
I haven’t talked about my arcade game collection in a long time, so, now I will again.
back in January, a seller on KLOV was selling off his Mortal Kombat 2 cabinet. if I was able to pick it up locally, I would’ve had it for $100. I was able to get the guy to have his dad bring it to me though, so tack on gas money. it came with no monitor and no control panel, which I had extras of. the monitor was pulled from a Terminator 2 I got in a trade, and the chassis that was mated to it was junk, so I threw a working one on expecting the tube to be shot and well, surprisingly the tube is in immaculate condition for being 20 years old. after all the talks of running a Multi Kombat configuration I settled on just leaving it a dedicated Mortal Kombat 2 instead.
there exists a rom hack for Mortal Kombat 1 that makes it into turbo, otherwise known as Mortal Kombat Turbo Ninja. the best version of this only runs on the Midway T-unit version of MK however, so in my ebay conquest, I found a semi-working T-unit board and I won it for a measly $12. it was not without issues, which is why I got it for so cheap. the game would reset over and over during various states of gameplay, which a power off/power on would not make it snap out of. the solution was actually very strange, a dust bunny was lodged in the DMA chip, and upon its removal the problem went away. since I haven’t operated this board for any extended period of time, another problem arose where the video goes wavy like a broken TV. I haven’t gotten to the root of this yet.
I acquired another NBA Jam board as a donor to just swap the MK roms into, but it didn’t take, so I have to do a little more research on the swap. as a bonus, I got a complete JAMMA harness pulled from an NBA Jam cabinet. (see next)
another project of mine was turning a Hanaho HotRod SE controller into a JAMMA test rig. I’m almost there… the JAMMA harness I had mated to it previously was scalped and a big piece of shit. so I installed the NBA Jam JAMMA harness into it and now I’m making some progress. I have to wire up the controls still and figure out a way to make the video output go to switch between a standard RGB connector (for video game monitors) and a TV output (for hooking up to a TV).
I have rebuild kits for various parts on Defender and Space Invaders Deluxe, two games I acquired in a trade. I’d be somewhat embarrassed to throw those out on the floor, but with how much action my Donkey Kong and PlayChoice-10 have been seeing lately in their new home in the game room, maybe there’s some kind of potential for these old dinosaurs to still make money.
we shall see.
I was able to assemble Multi Kombat, and later disassembled it because the board I mounted it to was too big and overall the whole thing was just too impractical. that K7000 monitor I put together for MK2 though worked perfectly fine when switched to all the games without any adjustments at all. that’s an awesome piece of machinery right there.
I’ll throw up some pictures soon enough. that is all for now.
OMC 3.0: Coming Soon
George and I are hard at work at reworking OMC for the future documentary. In addition to going over all the content we’ve amassed over the years, we’re working on an all-new site design that’s more conducive for what we’re doing and writing up new content to fill it with.
Although the archive bar on the right says differently, OMC has been online since 2008. Up until a little while ago, we operated as a blog for multiple people, talking about whatever was going on in our lives. With the introduction of the documentary/film, however, we realized that we needed to convert OMC into a full-time website for the project. And thus, our current efforts were born.
Parts of the current site may be broken or even look sparse, but trust me, we’re working on it. It’s all part of our plan.
Politics, History, and Video Games
As mentioned before on OMC, the world of politics has involved itself in the video game industry as often as it can ever since the first game was released. Many politicians feel the need to censor this branch of entertainment because it violates what they consider to be moral. But the real question is: what’s moral and immoral and who gets to say?