Coin Slot on Neo Geo
When I bought my NeoGeo, I didn’t realize the coin acceptor didn’t work. Unfortunately, it was beyond repair, and this bothered me quite a bit. As part of fixing it up, I placed an order with Austin Amusements for a bunch of buttons, and they had clearance mechanical coin acceptors. I mean, I’m not going to set the thing up somewhere where I have to worry about slugs, foreign coins, etc, I just want the “plink” of dropping the coin in as part of the ritual of playing it, so that’ll do right?
As I was doing away with the NRI acceptor, I figured I’d chuck out the credit board as well and just replace it with two coin slots. So I ordered two of them, with switches, for a whopping $9.50 each, along with all new Happ buttons and switches (turns out I don’t like the switches, so the cherries went back in, but that’s another story). The stuff arrived the other day, Duncan and I set about putting the buttons in and everything worked out pretty cool. Later, I messed around with hooking up the first coin acceptor, and ran into a handful of problems.
First up - the NRI is substantially taller than the new acceptor, so it doesn’t fit quite correctly. I figured I’d get around that by trimming a piece of sheet metal to size, rounding the edges, painting it black, and putting it between the cabinet and the acceptor. That’s still on my todo list. Second, there were no instructions included with the mechs, and they didn’t come pre-assembled. The switches don’t quite fit the mechs 100%, and the seller hasn’t responded to email yet. I figured it out from some photos on the internet, and got it so it works quite nicely, except if you drop an Australian $2 coin in, it accepts it without giving credit… I’ll just have to remember that, but for now I have a pile of $1 coins I’m using.
Getting the coin counter working was a whole other thing - it was previously wired to the credit board, so I had to run another wire down to the motherboard to connect it. I tried simply connecting it to the microswitch, which is no good - the input on the motherboard latches it low, so the solenoid inside of it never releases until you power the machine off (it stays half-way between two numbers). That didn’t take super long to work out though.
The absolute kicker though is that the credit board, and me buying the second coin mech, were utterly unnecessary. I’m suspecting that the coin mech and credit board were added for a different board, which required one coin for each player. A European (from what I can tell, any non-US) NeoGeo MV-1 board has no such requirements, it’ll happily accept a coin input on either coin pin, and both players share a credit counter. This means that a single coin mech is enough, and I don’t have to mutilate the front of my cabinet to install the other one. I’ll have to place a piece of metal over it still to clean it up, but the extra holes for the bolts will be covered by the faceplate should I decide to put an NRI-style mech back in later (I doubt it).
So it’s not pretty, but it’s working… the cab is off freeplay now, and I drop a coin in each time I want to play.
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