Daytona USA

One of my few dedicated single game machines is SEGA's Daytona USA. A racing game developed by AM2 and released originally in 1993. My machine is the upright version and was released in 1994 to advertise the SEGA Saturn. Daytona was one of the highest grossing arcade games of all time and was a very detailed 3D arcade racing game. Despite having a lower polygon-count than its predecessor, Virtua Racing, Daytona's 3D-world was fully texture-mapped, giving it a more realistic appearance.

I was never really a fan of racing games, Atari's Pole Position was about my limit but Daytona had something else, the sit-down deluxe cabinet felt great and in really big arcades four players could race simultaneously without any noticeable slowdown of the game. If I was gain to have a racing machine in my games room it had to be this, there was no other choice, it's a classic part of arcade history! I know Daytona USA can be a fussy machine, the SEGA Model2 is a funny bit of hardware that often fails, is hard to repair and has expensive parts. For these reasons I paid a bit of cash and bought a working machine.

I picked up this 180kg machine and with the help of a few friends got it home. I plugged it in and flicked the switch, great all was well. Later that day I went into the service menu and changed the coin settings. When I exited the screen froze and wouldn't return to the game. All I got was the dreaded "knitted cardigan" pattern of a dead Daytona, I was gutted, I knew nothing of Model2 hardware!

I was stumped and didn't even know where to start, so I did the usual thing and check all the voltages and continuity on the connectors, all seemed to be well. I removed all the PCB's and had a good clean then I took out all the chips, some had slight corrosion, so I gave then a very gentle sanding to show clean metal and replaced them, still nothing!

I'd heard that problems such as this were often due to the small controller board below the main game circuit boards. I decided to try replacing this and ordered a new one. I fitted it and the machine booted! My joy was short lived however as I realised I now had a major steering issue. At first I realised there was no acceleration, then that when I steer right I accelerate, left I decelerate, and the pedal does very little.

This was also visible in the values on the input test screen, I did a continuity check from the potentiometers to the IO board and they seemed to connect through fine. I cleaned and checked the potentiometers, but they were all working as expected. After reassembling the steering, brake, and accelerator were all showing FFH and not responding at all!

After some thought I figured it be a dodgy filter board, SEGA house their PCB's in cages and connect them to the main machine via filter circuit boards, all input and output to the cage go via these boards. I got a new cage with a complete set of filter boards attached and transplanted the internals from one cage to the other. To my surprise it booted and everything worked fine!

This wasn't the end of my Daytona troubles though as I still had intermittent problems with the control panel. I finally narrowed this down to the test button inside the coin door, the pins on the back of it had no insulation, they had become bent and were occasionally shorting out! 

Game Screenshots