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The DiVER's Guide

What is this?

This document contains instructions for setting up a WACCA arcade cabinet with a thrown together OS while still maintaining the functionality of the game. I've written this guide to be as beginner friendly as I could, however there may be room for improvement.

Disclaimer

This process takes a while (around 2-3 hours), there's a lot of tedious setup, and it's a bit of a pain in the ass.

Important!

The instructions on this page are intended only for original hardware! They are not recommended for non-cab setups.

Things you'll need

Helpful things

Part 0: ALLS Extraction and Drive Swap

ALLS Extraction

Warning

Ensure the cab's main power is disconnected, because it should be. This may be obvious, but make sure.

In this part, we need to take the ALLS computer out so that we can install the new drive. Unfortunately it's quite difficult to open the ALLS while it's still in the cab, so we must remove it for now.

Inside the cab, you will find the ALLS firmly attached to the subwoofer. If your cab came with a keychip, you will first want to remove it from the keychip slot by squeezing on the bottom of it and pulling it out. Don't misplace that.

Next, unplug the single connector in the well to the right of the subwoofer and left of the coin box. Lastly, you want to start by detaching all of the cables from the ALLS and then undoing the 2-3 cable ties that are holding the cables in place. The cable ties can be tricky; you want to pull upwards on the tab until it clears the hook and then feed it through in reverse.

Now your ALLS should be free from cable hell. After moving the cables out of the way, locate the 2 screws in the wells to the left and right of the subwoofer and remove them. The entire subwoofer/ALLS assembly should now slide directly outwards towards you and can be removed from the cab to be worked on.

The ALLS PC has 7 screws securing the top panel, 2 on the top, 3 in the front, 1 on the right side, and 1 on the left side (that doesn't look attached). After removing those screws, you can slide the top panel forward and lift it up and out.

Drive Swap

You should now be presented with the drive cage at the top of the case. Removing the 2 screws located on either side of the lip of the cage will allow the cage to be removed from the frame and the drive can then be unplugged from the SATA connectors. There are an additional 4 screws holding the drive to the cage, remove those as well.

You now should have a drive in your possession that weighs more than it looks like it should. At this point, I would heavily recommend taking a full disk image of the drive ON LINUX, just in case anything happens to it.

Scary Red Text Zone

Do not plug this into any PC running Windows, it will turn into a paperweight!

Now you can install the new drive into the cage. Plug the SATA connectors back in, but don't install the cage back onto the frame, unless you aren't using the USB to SATA adapter to transfer files to your drive, in which case you can.

Slide the subwoofer/ALLS assembly back into the cab. Be aware that there is an alignment tab in the back of the cab where the subwoofer slots in. Don't screw the subwoofer down yet, you have to be able to remove it to put the top panel back on later.

There should be a helpful diagram sticker on the front of the ALLS that shows you where to plug all of the cables in, take note of the tags on the cables that assign them different roles. Plug everything back in except the monitor as shown by the diagram, and don't put the ties back on just yet.

Don't forget the funny subwoofer connector.

It's finally time to do some actual installing.

Part 1: BIOS Configuration, Installing Windows

BIOS Configuration

At this point, you should grab your external monitor, ensure it's in a landscape position, and plug it into the DVI port on the graphics card.

Note

None of the other ports worked on my card, but they may work for you. Using DVI guarantees it will work.

You will now want to connect your USB hub to one of the available USB ports and connect the keyboard, mouse, and USB drive with Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 x64 to the hub. From here, plug the cab back into power, grab the keyboard, flip the main power switch located the inside of the cab (not the ALLS one, ensure that always stays on), and spam the Del key until you are prompted for the BIOS password, which is iG4k8yDa.

Once you have access to the BIOS, you'll want to head into the Boot section and change the first boot device to USB Hard Drive (the other USB ones didn't work for me) and the second boot device to the Hard Drive, as shown in the picture.

Do not change anything else!

You risk wiping your TPM key and make it impossible to boot from the original drive if you do!

Save and exit with F4 and select Yes when you are done.

Installing Windows

Once your BIOS is correctly configured, it should reboot and put you into the Windows installer. Start the installation, and if it asks you for a product key at any point, skip it. Next, it will ask you what kind of Windows install you want; pick Custom and you should be presented with the partitioning screen.

You will want to create a new partition on Drive 0 that is the default size (the entire drive). It will notify you that it's creating additional partitions to help with Windows, and then you can continue to the next step.

From here, it will install Windows, which should take about 5 minutes or so. Once Windows notifies you that the system will be rebooted, remove your USB drive from the hub and wait for the system to restart. Windows is now installed on your machine.

Once the system has restarted, it should prompt you to answer a few questions about configuration. The keyboard configuration should be the same as your preferred keyboard. For the privacy settings, just turn everything off, you don't need any of that. It should now ask you for a username. This doesn't really matter, I just made mine WACCA. Leave the password blank so that the system will automatically log in and press Next.

Wait a few moments, and you should be presented with the Windows desktop. Ensure the files mentioned in the preface are your USB drive, and insert it back into the USB hub. You now want to run the 7-Zip installer, as many things will require you to extract archives. Once you've done that, open 7-Zip, go to Tools > Settings, and change all the extensions for your user to 7-Zip.

Next, you'll want to run the MAS script. To extract it from its archive, you'll want to use the password 1234. After you run it, you'll want to select KMS38 and then select the first option. This will prevent Windows from screaming at you to activate it after a few days.

Now, we can move on to installing the drivers that are necessary for interfacing with the various hardware of the cab.

Part 2: Prerequisites Installation, Set Up Serial Ports, Group Policy Changes

Prerequisites Installation

Run the installer for the Nvidia Display Driver, making sure to only select NVIDIA Graphics Driver, you don't need GeForce Experience, because that shit sucks. Select Custom Install, uncheck everything, then click Next. Wait for this process to complete, you may see your screen flicker.

If any of the installers prompt you to restart, select Restart Later. Install the FTDI driver, Management Engine, Chipset, and Audio drivers.

Now install the both Visual C++ Redists, and the DirectX Redist. Specify a path for the DirectX Redist (I usually use C:\DX), and run DXSETUP from that folder to install.

Serial Port Setup

Next, you should modify the buffer sizes for the COM ports on the ALLS. This is something that's done by the stock ALLS system, and it didn't seem to make much of a difference with or without it, but you might as well change it just to be sure. Press Win + X, and open Device Manager from the list that appears. Open the Ports section, and do the following for COM ports 1-4:

  • Right click, click Properties
  • Click Port Settings
  • Click Advanced...
  • Ensure that the Recieve Buffer is set to 14, and the Transmit Buffer is set to 1
  • Click OK to confirm

Group Policy Changes

Next we will disable OneDrive and Windows Defender, as both of these are high memory background processes that will just suck up processing power for no real reason, since this machine isn't a typical PC setup. To disable these components, do the following:

  • Press the Win key, type group, and open the entry that says Edit group policy.
  • Navigate to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components, and select OneDrive.
  • Double click on Prevent the usage of OneDrive for file storage
  • Change it from Not Configured to Enabled and click OK.
  • Navigate back to the Windows Components section, and select Windows Defender.
  • Double click on Turn off Windows Defender and set it to Enabled as well.

You should now reboot the machine from the Start Menu to make sure all the changes have saved correctly.

Warning

Do not power cycle the cab until after the computer has shut down, as the changes may not save correctly.

Part 3: Screen Rotation, Audio Setup, Game Setup and Configuration

Once the system has rebooted, right click on the desktop, choose NVIDIA Control Panel. Navigate to Display > Rotate display, and select either Portrait or Portrait (flipped), depending on the direction that your monitor rotates. If your monitor has a resolution greater that 1080p, navigate to Display > Change resolution and change your resolution to 1080 x 1920.

Now, press the Windows key, type real and open the Realtek HD Audio Manager. Change the Speaker Configuration from Stereo to Quadraphonic, right click on the pink jack, and select Connector Retasking.... In the window that appears, choose Rear Speaker Out and disable the auto popup dialog. Press OK on both dialogs.

After that, shut down the system and flip the main cabinet power switch (by the test and service buttons). This is mostly to make sure the file system changes are journaled correctly, as if they aren't, connecting the drive to another computer will cause all files transfered to it afterward to disappear when the system is booted again.

Now, detach the new drive from the system and connect it to your USB to SATA adapter, and then to your computer.

Scary Red Text Zone

Again, as a reminder, do not under any circumstance connect the original drive to a Windows computer!

Once you have connected the drive, create a WACCA folder on the root of the drive, and then inside of it create another folder called Reverse (or whatever version you're using).

Unsupported versions

As of August 2023, SDFE 1.00.00 (Launch version) and all versions of SDHN or SDJE (Chinese version) do not work with the configuration laid out in this guide, due to missing support in ST.

Copy the game files into the directory you created. There should be folders named bin, pxbin and WindowsNoEditor in the folder, as well as a few files. Navigate to the bin folder, and extract the ST zip into this folder.

If you are configuring a version that is pre-Lily (WACCA or WACCA S), you need to open the start.bat file with a text editor, and change Mercury-Win64-Shipping.exe to Mercury.exe.

If you are not using the provided ST build, you will need to make some changes to segatools.ini: - Change enable to 0 under the [touch] and [elisabeth] sections - Add enable=0 under the [io4] section - Add an [aime] section at the bottom and add enable=0 on that as well

Eject the drive, plug it back in to the cab, and power the cab on.

We need to make additional configuration changes, but the files haven't been created yet, so you have to launch the game. Navigate to the folder you installed the game in, and launch it by running start.bat. A big W should appear, the game should start, and the lights on the cab should light up. Both LED and Touch checks should be successful. It should then hang on the Network check, at this point you should press Alt+F4 to close the game.

Open the file explorer again, and navigate back to the bin folder. There should now be an appdata folder. Navigate to appdata\SDFE\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor, right click on Hardware.ini, and click Edit. Add OfflineMode=True under the [/Script/Mercury.MercuryNetworkSettings] section and save the file.

Start the game again, and note that the game now skips the network check and loads to the main menu successfully.

Press the test button to open the test menu. Use the volume buttons to navigate up and down, and the test button to select. Navigate to Device Test Menu > Test of Sound-Speaker. Ensure the speakers are working by selecting Replay BGM Sample, picking LEFT + RIGHT. Plug some headphones into the jack to ensure that you can hear something from them as well. It will be quiet, but you should hear something. Once you have finished testing that, select Return.

Navigate to Test of Input Machine and ensure all the panels light up as you touch them. Press test and service buttons at the same time to return. Navigate to Test of Output Machine, select Control Panel LED and ensure it lights up the front panel. Select Aime Reader LED and ensure that it also lights up. If it does not, consult the troubleshooting guide.

Return back to the main test menu and navigate to System Setting > Closing Time Setting. Go down to All Days of the Week and change it until all the times on the page say OFF. Select Apply Settings and Reboot. This will not actually reboot the system, it will only close the game.

If you are setting up multiple versions, repeat these steps for each version.

Follow the setup instructions for the WACCA Launcher and then return here.

Finally, you need to configure the cab's display for this new setup. Close all the programs you have open, and then reopen NVIDIA Control Panel and navigate to Display > Rotate display. Disconnect your monitor from the GPU and connect the cab's DVI cable. Press Alt+Spacebar, press M, and click and drag the window to the part of the display you can see. Rotate the display to Portrait (flipped) and press Apply.

Reboot the system and the game should now start automatically. Congratulations, you've now set up your cab!

TODO: Instructions for reassembling the cab

Last update: October 25, 2023