Recording on Arcade Machines 1: DJ Max Technika

Stream Arcade Machines Article 1: DJ Max Technika

This article will be a series covering ways of successfully getting footage from an arcade machine. The first machine we are going to look at is the DJ Max Technika machine. While this machine is quite old and the franchise pretty much killed by Neowiz, it is still one of the most difficult machines to capture on if you don’t know what you are doing. The first thing to point out is that this machine has several layers of encryption. It has them for both visual and audio so you have to be careful where you decide to split cables.

Visual:

A HDMI or VGA capture card will do here. Depending on the machine’s type it might have a VGA or DVI port depending on the Graphics card model. If it has a DVI port then uses a DVI to HDMI cable or adaptor. However keep this on Standby. The machine will not start normally when you plug it into screens which are not native to the machine or its driver settings. So if you plug this into your capture card before the game actually starts up, you’ll be left with a blank screen with no signal. So the trick here is switch the cable of the machine after the game has started (Preferably when it gets to the title screen). Use the port that is feeding the signal to the top screen directly into the card, this signal can’t be split so you’ll have to lose the top screen as a display. This will ignore the security protocols of the machine on start-up and it will directly feed into your capture card.

Natively the screen’s resolution will be 1280x768 which means if you have your capture card set to 720p, you’ll have a part of the screen cut off so make sure your capture card can display this resolution. Make sure your capture card can also rotate its image because when DJ Max Technika shows up on your capture card, the image will be upside down. Once you are able to flip the image, visually you should be ready to go.

Take note, if you plug a secondary monitor into the system which is connected to the capture card, it will cause the video feed to die.

Audio:

The audio is pretty simple as in you don’t have many options. Plugging out any audio cables from the back will cause the visual feed to cut out so it’s best to leave them alone. Use the audio jack at the front and use a 3.5mm to RCA adaptor and use line in audio into the capture card. This is relatively straight forward and should be easy to do. If you find the audio is too low or high, use a mixer to manipulate the sound volumes as it passes through.

That’s it really when it comes down to it, when using the machine like this you’ll have the top screen unavailable but you’ll have the image on your computer which is a decent trade off because the top screen does no effect gameplay. Next time is Pump it Up.