Philippines = awesome quirky stuff

Hi everyone,

Thought that I may share however it may be common knowledge.

Anyhow... Last summer I took my first trip to the Philippines and one thing catching my attention was the "pay to play" home console games.

I recall in around 1990 when a Korean owned store near us in Niagara Falls (when I lived in Canada) had a setup where you would insert coin to play sonic the hedgehog or (oddly enough) the genesis version of altered beast.

So same thing I noticed in the Philippines but on a huge scale.

The little markets which are haywire with activity will have a little spot where there are old arcade cabinets with modded systems.

One of them was obviously an xbox (original) console with a huge hard drive worth of games ripped to it. It even had a standard old xbox pad bolted down to it so you couldn't actually pick it up.

What surprised me was the amazing shape the controller was in. It was worn down but was not abused at all, in all likelihood due to the fact that putting money into the game was a very big deal for the kids lucky enough to play it.

I saw more xbox than anything like that but there were also multicart versions of nes and snes games that were the same where you would pay to play and the console had a little led (think of the time circuits on back to the future) that counted down time remaining....

Also saw plenty of nintendo clones (all in one units) abd the ammout of pirated ps2 games is just insane.

Another thing there that may seem strange to (at least) north Americans was the gaming centers set up with ps3 abd ps2 systems on nice 32 inch 1080p sets...

They charge about (if I recall correctly) P80 (just under $2 use) for an hour and allow you to save profiles on the hdd or a memory card.

The consoles are almost all imported from japan because Sony only started to ship "official" ps3 there last march and they even have the nice capcom tournament sticks for street fighter... However the most popular game there is without a doubt tekken...

They also have some Internet cafes where they set up illegal world of Warcraft servers but eventually blizzard shuts them down.

All in all I could go on, but do you want me to? I'll post a pic soon when im off the iPhone.

 

sorry, i never did see any of those cabinets before so i thought it was rare.
i fail at posting to assemblergames forums ha ha.

 

Me as well, because there ain't no pictures.

 

The sad truth is that the people who can't afford gaming deserve it the most as they don't just wreck the consoles.

 

Consoles hacked to function as arcades is pretty obscure. Interesting to me, at least. Got any pictures, lvsteven?

That Genesis-based arcade machine in Canada you saw would've had a Mega-Tech board inside it. It doesn't differ significantly from a normal Megadrive/Genesis, it just has some extra hardware to handle the pay-to-play mechanism, and outputs to a second screen (on top of the cab) to show the player how much credits and time they've got left.

 

I have a photo I know that isn't the closest but more of a far away shot. Wasn't possible to get near the machines while they weren't in use so its just a cabinet shot.

The price was somewhere around 5-10 pesos for 10 minutes Which is around 11~22 cents American...

The price depended in the game you were playing. Full 3d dragonball z on an xbox commanded a higher price.

What I recall reading (and I haven't been able to find the article since) was that In the late 80s and early 90s the Philippines had a huge piracy market due to NO official console releases in the country. Those who could afford to import from japan were few and far between but imports from china are the biggest market in the country and those were all pirate versions.

When I get home I will try and find the photo of where/what kind of setting the cabinets were in.

I know I can find it. That was our first vacation where I actually organized my photos lol!

 

Any idea where those originated? Eventually they had different games in them as well. Was a it Korea? The only import shop i had been to while living there was in downtown Toronto and they also had one.

It was similar to this one but NOT AS NICE... this looks like a real release by sega, mine did not...


Flash forward to 2003 and i recall in vancouver more imported stuff, specifically a bunch of DDR machines that all had Japanese on them and explicit warnings about export outside of japan being prohibited.

Little afterward... Way back then Canada would get games after the USA. The coolest thing ever was going to a friends house whom had super Mario bros 3.. Way before anyone else.

We had to hunt down a snes in Canada that was imported from the USA. Strange but it was different back then for gaming.

 

The Mega Tech is official Sega. 8 slots and slightly different cartridges from Megadrive releases. They were reasonably common in Europe I think - a local pizza place had one near me.

 

Photos...

Here are some pictures of the modded cabinets. You can see the LED counters for time limits, and the one bottom photo i blew up, you can see the xbox controller strapped down to the cabinet.

 

Those are great shots. I think we can rule out official hardware

Looks like Mortal Kombat on the first pic. I can't actually see the countdown LED, can you point it out?

 

Okay, here is a better explanation of what you are looking at.
The kill switches are on lots of things. Mainly because power there is also precious, and they dont turn the games on unless someon wants to play, so at the surface you as a westerner (or me for that matter heh) would think they were not working.

Those skinny little plugs are powering these machines. They are full cabinets with old CRT monitors and fans etc...

It was hard there to find a grounded plug. I ended up breaking the grounding prong off of a laptop charger.

These are modified for their location i suppose!

 

I love the size of these cabinets. It's just tall enough for the kids. Maybe one day, I'll have one built to this size with a small Mame PC or Xbox in it.

The Xbox cabinets with controller harnesses are very common in Mexico. In some poor neighbourhoods in Guadalajara, you will probably find at least one cabinet outside the grocery store or pharmacy.
I love your pics. Pretty cool stuff.

 

added to that the fact that when it rains, it pours (literally speaking)

I love that place soo much. looking at those pictures, i want to go back there so bad. I am pissed off i am not there now.

 

I love that they bothered to make the DBZ marquee art.

The rig should be pretty simple if it's just checking coins and triggering hard power on and off (or cutting the pad), but still, I wonder who's making them, or if it's a custom per unit thing. Did that DBZ machine show the normal Xbox boot sequence?

 

No it was a custom front end for a modded xbox. Like a bright green menu with a huge list of games.

Chances are they are made in the Philippines since they are all in English and most stuff Imported would be an Asian language. As the main language of business there is English for the most part and the machines are English And the games are set with the hardware needed for their pesos it's likely made there.

The other snes systems are run of the mill multi carts with standard xx-in-1 type menus that work when money is inserted.

The other stuff that you can buy is all Chinese junk. Same quality as here but costing too much in my opinion.

 

These days anytime someone mentions the Philippines to me I think of balut...

Sega made to my knowledge a SMS and Genesis home cart->Arcade dealy thing. Pop in a bunch of carts and let the rest of the thing handle coins, play timers and such. The rom for the SMS model was dumped by SMS Power IIRC and I wouldn't be surprised if the Genesis edition wasn't as well.

Using an XBox for these purposes is a really good idea as you can modify the hell out of the BIOS to have a boot-up sequence for whatever you'd like, flash it onto the TSOP and use a large CF card or something for the harddrive for stability (or not). Building in kill timers wouldn't be that challenging particularly with a well directed electronics engineer. With a bit of work and clever software you could easily convert a PS2 into an arcade setup even more so with games already setup like their arcade counter parts.