I recently ordered a bunch of parts for impending arcade machine goodness. One company I ordered from is Ultimarc, who makes various keyboard and mouse emulators as well as the only video card in existance that is made for working with 15kHz arcade monitors. I ordered the ArcadeVGA board and some PCB standoffs for attaching the computer motherboard to the inside wall of the cabinet.

Today, they arrived via DHL. DHL shipped them inside one of those non-rigid plastic bags. I opened the bag to find a small cardboard box which was no longer sealed. There was a piece of tape that should have kept the box together, but it had snapped, probably due to deformation of the box during shipping. Partially hanging out of the box were the PCB in an anti-static bag, the baggie of standoffs, and a CD sleeve with the driver CD in it.

Note that there was no packing material (e.g. foam, bubble wrap, etc.) inside the box. Also, the CD sleeve wasn't sealed, so the CD was mostly out of the sleeve. The back panel plate of the PCB had gouged a big trench into the CD. The metal layer was flaking off the CD to the point where I was not willing to see if the necessary bits were still readable. Besides, due to the fact that the CD sleeve and box had both failed to contain the CD, and that the shipping bag was not hermetically sealed, there was lots of small scratches all over the CD from random shipping debris.

As far as I can tell, the ArcadeVGA board and standoffs are fine, but the CD is a total loss. I went to Ultimarc's website to download the drivers and it said to "just use the ones in the CD." Great.

Luckily, the guy behind Ultimarc kicks ass on customer service. He answered my bitchy email within 15 minutes and provided me with links to online versions of all of the content on the CD.

One other oddity... there is an RCA connector (2 conductor) on the ArcadeVGA that is labeled "S-Video." The S-Video video bus requires 2 signals and two grounds (you could probably share the grounds in a pinch, but that's still three conductors. Besides, all standard S-Video connectors have 4 pins plus the shield ground).

No.

Geebus.