QUARTERLY UPDATE BLOG POST : WORKSHOP UPDATE AND ZACCARIA CABARET

Hello people who read my blog about what I get up to when I have time for projects. It's been a while, as I always write in these blog posts haha. I have been getting up to things but none that are really techy that I can remember.

The main thing I've been getting up to is enjoying spending time with my family and getting the workshop in the garden up to speed so I can get back to working on my scratch built bar top arcade machine.

And because Spring time is here the list of DIY jobs is starting to get longer and longer, life hey! :-P

So, I finished up the inside of my small garden workshop, building my work bench, shelves and bandsaw table / stand etc. Now I have a work space that's dry and I can leave my tools out (although I pretty much always put them away) I can have bit and bob away at the bar top arcade cab whenever I get a spare hour here or there.

I'm really proud of the setup and how much I can actually do in a small shed like it is. When its been raining or dark outside I can still cut down fairly large sheets of wood (not being too daft) in there with some creative placements of tools and me.

I think I have all the tools I need to get my arcade project finished, I just have to learn how to use them! haha. I am learning new and better ways to do things everytime I make a little bit more progress. So much so that I will be re-doing one of the panels I made last year now I know a better way of cutting and mounting it.

Once I have the monitor mounting sorted how I want I think I will post some photos of my bar top cabinet. I get a more and more stoked out with how its looking everytime I get a bit of work done on it.

So enough of workshop-chat. Onto my new arcade cabinet...well, arcade cabinet project! My uncle who I hadn't seen in a long time was having to clear out the storage area he'd rented for years and years. I think he's realised he won't be doing anything with his stored stuff so has been clearing it out. Anyway, he was working his way through and found an arcade cabinet and knowing how much I'm into arcade stuff asked me if I would like it. And I said Hell Yeah!

I went out to see it and move it to my wife's family farm so I can store it hopefully safe and sound. When I got there I was pleased to see that it's a small cabinet so easier to move than my re-wired / resurrected full size woody cabinet.

A little look through the machine when I got it back I was a little disappointed to see that the chassis for the monitor was missing. :-( And when I mentioned it to my uncle he couldn't remember why it would be missing, more than likely years and years back when it was in his shop it would have been sent off for repair and he didn't get it back before he closed up.

Anyway, here is the cabinet :

As you can see, its a Zaccaria Quasar Cabaret. And from the research I've done on the internet there only seems to be one more floating around between arcade collectors in the UK. Pretty amazing that I now have one in my little stored up collection.

You can see in the photos that its had a little bit of a rough life by the scratches down the right hand side but I think with a little cleaning up they wont look half as bad, and a general wash down will do it a world of good! Its got years and years of storage based dirt and grime on it.

I'm going to keep my eye out on the Jamma plus forums for a chassis for the cabinet and see if I can get it up and running. Its missing the control panel artwork but the rear Quasar artwork is in pretty good shape. I'd love to get it back up and running.

The cabinet details are really nice too. The drilled out Z shape lower down on the front panel underneath the coin door.

Im going to post up some images on Jamma Plus and see if I can find out anymore information on this little cabinet. And see if I can source a monitor or monitor chassis for a decent price and get it back up and running and all cleaned up over summer.

And next month....REVIVAL : THE RIVALS!! Whoop! I can't wait. Im really looking forward to this event. All of them have been great fun, especially last years Summer Solstice. Hopefully there will be a Retro Asylum Forum meet up on the day I go. I'd love to meet up and have some high score sessions etc with the peeps on there.

Anway, hopefully I will be a bit more up to date with my blog and bar top progess etc.

Porl''

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2017!!

Well, I was expecting to update this blog a bit sooner than a 5 month gap! wow! How the time and last year has flown by for me. I guess that's what having a little boy brings you. My time has certainly gone into basically playing with him when I get home.

But I have when I've had a little bit of time working on making an area in the garden for electronic tinkering and making things hobby and DIY. At the start of summer 2016 I started designing and making a bartop arcade machine. I'd been seeing a lot of them on the forums I frequent and I really wanted to have a go at making one. But rather than just buying a pre-cut kit I wanted to use the opportunity to teach myself wood working and really try to get my crappy wood work skills up a few notches! I've always been really bad at working with wood haha. But I've always been so impressed with what people can make.

So I started the design and when I was happy with that I got out on the tiny front little patio we have and got some of the power tools I inherited from my Father out and some MDF from my local DIY shop. And when I got a half-day friday from work or an hour here or there I'd get a little bit of work done to the project. The one main issue I was having, other than my slow learning curve was that I would spend a massive chunk of my time setting everything up on the patio and then packing it all away again into our front shed. So I wouldn't get as much done as I'd hope. And also I didn't want my wife and boy around all the MDF dust that was being generated as it's certainly no good for you. I have a nice mask I use to save my lungs!

On the way home from seeing some friends halfway through the summer season my wife mentioned the idea of getting another shed, probably from somewhere like Gumtree and turning it into a workshop. She'd noticed that I was spending ages with all the setup and pack down and that sometimes I got rained off which was always a little bit of a bummer. And even more of a surprise she found a shed locally that had just been put up on the site for a staggering £20! It was a small shed but we only have a small garden so it should be perfect. I phoned the guy up and we picked it up in the evening that week. It was hairy getting it home on top of the van we borrowed but it got home safe and sound and we then set about at the weekends repairing all of the old rotted wall, roof and floor panels. Which there were a lot of!!

 

Eventually we got all the parts repaired and excitedly started building the shed in the now cleared location at the bottom of the garden and we ran into a few hick-ups. The first being that the floor didn't fit the sides at all!! It was from a different shed! So with a bit of thinning and then extending the floor it fit. How annoying. So onto the roof. Well the roof didn't fit either! So we modded that to make it fit too. For £20 we appeared to have bought a floor from one shed, walls from another and the roof panels from another! 3 SHEDS haha!! But it all sits nicely now and the progress of moving it from a garden shed towards a workshop has really gotten going now.

I've build a small workbench and bandsaw stand from 2 old bed frames that my neighbour and brother were throwing out. And just have some shelves to make now to fit all the other bits and bobs of tools and I'll be carrying on with the Bartop project. As well as making a bath shelf to house all of my son's bath toys and an under stairs toy box.

So that's really what's been keeping me busy of the last half of a year. It's been quite exciting as I'm learning new things all the time and the Workshop is going to open up a few more opportunities for projects etc.

I did go to Revival this year too and took a load of photos which I'll just post below. It was a brilliant day!! I loved the talks I sat in on that Retro Asylum hosted and played as many games on as many machines as I could. It was so good! I fell in love with Defender as well. I'd only ever played the home version, possibly on my Atari 2600, I can't quite remember. But the arcade game, WOW! So cool! I saw some podcast celebrates around the show as well. Shaun and Vic from the Ten Pence Arcade Podcast. I was a little too scared to go and chat with them though, I can never think of things to say. And I also saw and spoke to Alex Crowley who was an original host of Ten Pence. He'd taken some of his arcade cabs to the show and I had a good go on them. The Sheriff upright cocktail being my favourite although I did really enjoy Space Launcher too! Both simple games but so playable and addictive!

Here are a few photos of the day :

Again, I absolutely loved the day and can't wait for the Revival event that will hopefully happen this year! And hopefully it's close by as well so I can go.

So that's a basic catch-up to my blog of things that have been happening this year. Projects have slowed down but they are always floating around in my head and just waiting for the time to strike haha!

Have a good new year folks!

Porl''

CAPCOM CPS2 ALL-IN-ONE BLACK MARVEL VS CAPCOM BATTERY CHANGE

Hey guys,

I've finally done it! I've finally grown the balls to tackle the battery change on my Capcom CPS2 All-in-one black metal case Marvel VS Capcom game. I've done a battery change on a regular CPS2 board, the plastic cased A board which you can do without the game connected but when it comes to the All-in-one games their different...

....you need to change the battery while the game is on!..

...WHILE IT'S TURNED ON!!!

haha, yeah that's why I've been putting off doing it. You need to keep the game on while you desolder the old battery and then solder in the new one. I mean, the process of changing the battery is super simple but doing it while the board is propped on its side so you can get easy access to the top and bottom makes it a lot more delicate. If you press too hard on anything the board will move, potentially slide and you can touch other parts of the board by accident with the soldering iron or your hand and short something. Or cause it to lose power, which while the battery is disconnected will just brick your game and it's phoenix time. Which is what I didn't want to happen.

So I set myself up as best as I could and did everything methodically and checked my work at each stage just because I wanted to be super careful and I love this game and really don't want to knacker it up.

Here you can see the offending battery, which to be honest was still in good shape. No leaking or bloating or anything. But it's been in there since 2011 and I wanted to get a fresh one in to help prolong the life of this game in it's original form.

Sorry this image is a screenshot from the video I made documenting my progress with this swap (see bottom of this post for video). I forgot to take a photo of it propped up as I was psyching myself up to go for the desolder haha. So this is how I had the game propped up. I electrical taped both sides of the edge of the board that's touching my hobby mat so that the game couldn't slide out from under itself. That would be pretty disasterous! And you can hopefully see its leaning against my plastic main soldering box. It's pretty heavy and with it leaning towards it the game can't fall forward as I work. And you can see the Jamma edge on there too.

And SUCCESS!!! Here you can see the game working with it's fresh new battery in place! WOO!! The actual swap was a simple job in the end, I was just super careful with how I put the solder sucker on there etc to desolder the old battery. I did have a little bit of a heart attack when I was cleaning the last bit of solder of one of the pads that looked like it might be obscuring a bit of one of the holes and it might make pocking one of the legs through a little tricky. I didn't realise but the games music had stopped! I looked over to my TV and the screen was frozen with the small Capcom logo in the middle bottom bit of the screen and the rest of the screen had a Patent number, Patent number text written all across the screen. I thought for sure it's dead and I'd moved the board too much or something. I was gutted. Well I finished putting the new battery in and trimmed its legs. Then I turned it off because I'd have to turn it off at some point to put the game away. And when I turned it back on the flippin' thing worked!! Man I was so happy! haha

So I did it! The battery change didn't take very long at all in the end and now I'd done it it's not that scary anymore. I must admit that I couldn't find much at all about changing the batteries on these boards just comments about doing it while the game is on. The only real posts I did find ended up being from a Blog written by the guy who owned this game! I bought it off him via Arcade Otaku. I recognised the scratches on the metal casing. So this game seems to be the poster boy for the battery swap :-P

Below is the video I made of the battery change each step of the way. Except for the actual battery swap. I was too scared to do that on video in case I messed it up worrying about talking on camera or if the camera was in focus or had fallen over etc.



So there you go, I wanted to post up something about the swap I did as information is fairly scarce on swapping out the batteries on these boards. And hopefully it'll help if you have an All-in-one and want / need to change the battery on it but don't really know how to go about it.

Good luck and see you soon

Porl''

WWF SUPERSTARS JAMMA ARCADE GAME REPAIR - PART ONE

Hi everyone,

Okay, its really really been a long time since my last post! Man lots have been happening over the past half a year and I've not really had the time to do any retro based projects as we've been doing a lot of re-arranging at home and painting and building etc. I have still been playing my retro consoles and getting some games every now and again but no where near the level I had been.

Well I had an afternoon free yesterday and decided to get my WWF Superstars board out of my little rack of games and decided to start trying to figure out the sound issue I showed in my last video.

I video'd yesterdays progress and made a quick video. This is the first part as I haven't fixed it yet but Im hoping to get back really soon. And it wont be an 8 month wait haha



Hopefully post again soon

Porl''

NEW YEAR AND SOME NEW PROJECTS

Hi All,

A bit of a late Happy New Year! but there you go. :-)

I've been quiet again on the old blog front, the time keeps flying by which is a little worrying when you think about it. Over christmas I don't get much time to do many geeky projects as we're out busking with the kids Brass band that me and my wife volunteer for. Always good fun getting out there and playing the classic christmas tunes!

Well its a new year and I want to get cracking with a couple of Sega based projects and 1 arcade game project.

Currently the 2 Sega projects are on the go which I will no doubt make a post about when they are all done and finished. I'm just waiting on an ebay purchase to finish the larger of the two projects wiring then I will be onto the final touches for it. I'm really pleased with it so far, mysterious huh? :-P

I also have an arcade game project which I made a quick video intro for which is at the bottom of this post.

While I was working on one of the Sega projects I was watching some of the arcade and retro console repair videos that I subscribe to on YouTube and I started getting the urge to have another go at repairing an arcade game.

So off I trotted to one of the arcade forums I go on and snagged myself a board with some issues. Mainly this games problems are in the sound department. The game is WF SuperStars :-D I used to play this loads at Mr Man's video shop on Rosliston Road when I was a teen so its got a great nostalgic feeling for me.

Its going to be fun to tackle issues in the sound area of a Jamma board as I've not poked around those areas yet.



BUT, I need to get some of these other projects finished first before tackling WF. :-P

So catch you guys on the next post which will hopefully be a nice completed projects post.

Porl''

SEGA MEGADRIVE SONIC THE HEDGEHOG USB DRIVE

Howdy Y’all,

I’ve not had much time this past 2 weeks to play with making my Neptune hook-up wires unfortunately and I’ve been getting myself down with doing ebay searches for Sega 32x’s on there and seeing how expensive they are now. The prices of them have really shot through the roof and they seem to be becoming more and more unattainable which sucks. I’m still searching though as I need to get a working one to finish the Neptune off.

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. Its about a little mid-week recycling project that I’ve been thinking about. I like most megadrive owners / collectors have a couple of spare Sonic the Hedgehog 1’s knocking about that no-one wants and I’ve been feeling that its such a shame that such a great game is just gathering dust getting absolutely no love as there are so many of them about.

Well I had the idea that the cartridges are around the same kind of size as some usb portable HDD’s so I thought I could use the casing to house a HDD and make a geeky drive to carry around. Getting one of my spares out and looking over it I saw that they are a bit too small so I did some research on the internet to see if people have made retro game USB drives and saw that some people sacrifice some awesome looking Nintendo games to use the cases to house the drives. And when I saw this I actually thought its such a shame that the actual game, the physical chips and board are just getting binned so that the cases are empty enough to make room for the HDD’s to fit in. So I opened up my Sonic cartridge to see if there was anyway I could keep the game in there and hopefully make it playable still while also being a USB drive.

Once opened you can see that the actual game board doesn’t take up all the room inside the cartridge and the space available is just a bit bigger than a USB pen drive with some room to spare around the sides. This is a pretty good result as I have a spare USB pen drive knocking about that I don’t use as I always end up losing them seen’s they are so small. And it was also free as I got it in a promo goody bag gift.

I found some sticky back velco strips as I thought that I might get a larger capacity pen drive in the future and if I glue gun the pen drive in place it will be stuck there forever. A rare bit of forward thinking from me haha. I also quickly ordered up a usb extension wire from the interwebs to give me a wire that can connect the cart / usb to my computer. I don’t really like the look of just the USB connector sticking out of the sides so wanted to go the dangly wire way.

Here you can see how the insides of the cartridge will look with the USB pen drive in place and the extension cable hanging out the side. Looking pretty neat.

And here you see how it looks with the little security screws put back into place and the cartridge all closed up.

When I was brainstorming how to have the USB extension cable and have the game playable I thought that if I have the cable coming out of the top of the back alignment groove the cartridge should still fit into the Megadrive 1 and 2 and not crimp or squash the cable. And it was a bit of a relief when I tried it after screwing it back together and it still fit into the cart slot and switched it on! :D

WOOP! Now I have a retro styled backup USB drive which has given a dusty unused cartridge some new life AND the game is still in there and working. So if there is an emergency situation where I see a Megadrive and heaven forbid there isn’t a game available to play then POW! USB Retro pen drive saves the day!

Hopefully this little post will inspire some other people to give their spare cartridges a new lease of life without sacrificing the actual game itself as that seems a big shame to me too.

I’m going to be making some time to make the hook-up wires for the Neptune next so hopefully there will be a post on those soon.

Catch you later

Porl’’

SEGA NAOMI CHASSIS SAGA CONTINUES

Hi everyone,

Been a little bit of a break between posts again I know but not as long as it has been in the past haha. We've had a chock-a-block-a couple of weeks and I'd been struggling to get some time in on the Naomi project with helping to setup for summer concerts (indoor and outdoor) practicing for playing in the concerts as well as helping to organise our wedding and our stag + hen do activities. So getting to posting some updates has been a little tight like a tiger. But! Hopefully we have a nice couple of weeks of summer holidays now and a more leisurely pace.

Well, As you probably read in my last post I had a real lemon of a monitor in the Naomi, and from some reading around on the forums I frequent I think it had been a problem for the owner at least a year before I won it on eBay. Bit crap really but I guess that's why I ended up getting it so cheaply. Anyway, nothing to it but try to get the sucker up and running.

So at the end of the last post I had my Naomi up and running via my Dreamcast and had a great time playing some Street Fighter 3 : double impact and Giga Wing. But the pin cushion controls weren't working so you couldn't get it to full screen without it pinching inwards from the sides quite a lot! Pretty annoying and obviously another fault on the chassis.

Well, the chassis lasted until I played on the machine again after having a good nose round it. It started looking like it wanted to scroll and then POP the line came back. I guess some parts of it gave up the ghost, again. So back onto the repair dude for thoughts and ideas because he'd been slowly eliminating problems as he went with my chassis.

Because I'd replaced the transistor already and it had gone again it had to be something else and Grant started thinking it could be a faulty Yoke or fly-back. Well I know what the parts of the monitor are now from doing research on them for the Naomi project but haven't got the first clue with how to diagnose and fix them. So off my chassis went again down south for Grant to do some more inspections and to soak test the chassis again on his spare tube to see if it would hold out. And if it did that would mean that I had an internally sparking Yoke or something.

I had a nose around the Yoke area after I sent the chassis off and found a piece of plastic that encloses some copper wiring was loose and flapping about so I mentioned this to Grant and super glued it back on. He said that this wouldn't be the problem though, so I glued it up so that it should help stop moisture getting into the Yoke area through that avenue.

The coiled up copper wiring on the white cone is the Yoke area. It was absolutely filthy around this area so I gave it a good ol' clean down to see if anything else looked a little suspicious.

The chassis was posted off and received and I waited to see how it would hold up to Grant's tests and started trying to do some internet research on getting hold of Sanwa 29" tubes or even worst case senario, 29" tv's to sub into place. Both lots of research basically came up bust though and it would seem I would need to drop a couple of hundred on a complete monitor and chassis if it show's up as my tube is faulty as spares for them seem to be non-existant anymore. :-(

The weekend comes and I get a PM and its good news, well for me. The chassis popped again on Grant's spare tube within about 20 minutes. This ruled out my Yoke being the issue which made me have a huge sigh of relief!!!

And with this happening it got Grant's head scratching again and he would have to really start delving into the chassis. This could take a while, so awesomely! This is a true example of the Arcade scene's helpfulness and friendliness. He offered to send me his spare working, repaired chassis to use while he spends some time diagnosing and repairing mine so that I have a Naomi to use and play on while he gets into the nitty gritty with my faulty chassis. What a dude!! :D

So while I waited for the spare chassis to arrive I started working away on my Mame PC setup. I've played Mame before on my desktop PC but I've never set up a machine just to play Mame on an arcade machine before so I had to do a lot of reading up on what to use and how to set it so that the resolutions are fixed so they don't damage my fragile monitor and so that there isn't screen tearing etc. The last thing you would want is to give the game away that it wasn't running real arcade hardware inside with crappy looking screen tearing!

I follow a guy on YouTube called Exmosquito who does 1CC runs of some of the hardest arcade games and he runs Mame on his arcade machine and thankfully he did a video a while ago explaining his Mame setup. It looks like it runs absolutely smoothly so I wanted to copy his setup so I could have a spot on machine.

He uses GroovyMame which is a modified version of Mame and he also uses the CRTEmu drivers which are designed to work on ATI graphics cards. So I set about sourcing all the parts for making up a small PC that would run GroovyMame out of my spares.

Typically I didn't have very many parts left over at all. Since I was a teenager I've been into PC's with my Dad and whenever we'd upgrade parts I would generally keep them as spares incase anything went wrong. And over the years I've kept doing this and whenever anyone's PC's needed replacements I've popped these spares into their machines to help fix them. So when it comes round for me to want to make another PC I couldn't as I've given all the spares I need away! haha blumin' typical!

So I went on the scrounge a bit. I remembered my Brother might still have his old motherboard and processor still from when we upgraded his machine a few months ago so I gave him a call and thankfully he did! So I nipped over to pick it up. A good start! I have a mobo and processor. Next I need an ATI graphics card, which no-one I know has so I sourced a nice looking ASUS Radeon HD4350 512mb Silent PCI-express card that's compatible with the CRTEmu drivers and some memory from the local CEX. Im trying to get this little machine running on the cheap cheap if you couldn't tell. Next thing is a Power supply which is easy as I have my spare modular Corsair HX520w psu which will work a treat. And the final thing, a hard drive. I recently had a PS3 Phat 60GB that I reflowed which lasted for a very short time before it was properly bricked so before I binned it I took the HDD out of that and hooked the sucker up. Perfecto! A nice little Mame PC on the pretty cheap.

I mounted it all to the Naomi wooden board so that I knew it would fit within the bottom box of the arcade machine and it ended up looking like this :D

Not too shabby I don't think haha. I set up a switch so that it could be turned on from the front and all the ports are easily accessable from the door of the Naomi and the power cable routes out of the back of the machine.

Next step is to get GroovyMame installed and a load of games loaded and wait on the chassis to return.

More in the next post! :D

Porl''

A NEW TOY / PROJECT : SEGA NAOMI UNIVERSAL MAME CABINET

Hi peeps,

It's been a little while since my last post. I've been itching to make posts about my new toy but I've been having nothing but trouble with it from pretty much the off so much so that I haven't gotten it to a stable position enough to make a post about it haha.

And the weird thing is I bought this under the impression that I could just plug this sucker in and play. Unfortunately that hasn't been the case.

Here is the beast, my very own candy cab! I must admit, I didn't think I would ever own a candy cab because they are so expensive!

Unfortunetly this isn't the view I had when I first got it home.

Right, how did I end up getting hold of a Naomi Universal cabinet in the first place?

Well I was sitting at our breakfast bar one evening after work with my Fiancé Rozzy and some how doing a random google search I came across an link to an ebay auction for a Mame ready naomi universal arcade cabinet. So being a nosey bugger I clicked the link and went through to the listing. It had 2 days to go I think and it had some bids but it was ridiculously low so I said to Roz that I might bid on it but I would never ever get it because it's going to go for at least £200. She said that if I did end up getting it for the measly sum I put in she would treat me as an early wedding present. But I was convinced that I wouldn't get it and to be honest, if I did win it where would I put it?! We live in a cosy small cottage and I don't have a garage haha.

Well, obviously I kept watching how the auction was progressing and no more bids came for a while and I was winning and thinking "crap! Im actually going to win this and I have no where to put it!!! what was I thinking!?" but it still had time and any arcade machines I normally watch for curiosities sake have a blitz near the closing time and shoot right up. Well finally another bid came but I was still winning. Then Wednesday lunchtime comes and Im watching for the Blitz like a hawk on my phone and .....I won it! I only went and blumin' won it and for the princely sum of £64!!!! £64 for a candy cab! And the description said that all I would have to do after collecting it was to plug in a Mame set up PC and it's ready to go! Wowzers!!

I had a bit of a panic about the whole situation to Roz and being awesome she got on the phone and sorted out with her family that I could keep it at their farm until we eventually end up getting a bigger house and I can take it home then. I had the idea that it could go up into our hobby room (this was before I saw how big it actually was and how heavy it is. jeez is it heavy!) but the floor wouldn't be able to hold this kind of machine as its an old place. So I have to store it and work on it at the minute.

Well, we borrowed the Discovery and headed off to Birmingham to pick it up and hope that it would fit in the back. We met up with the seller and had a good ol' chat and nose around his lock up which was packed to the gills with other arcade machines and spare parts. Pretty awesome! And the 3 of us, lifting with our legs, managed to get it to fit quite nicely in the back of the Discovery without any disassembly other than taking the top marquee out. Phew, that was a worry! I really wish I'd taken a photo of the machine in the back of the Disco but with all the excitement I didn't get my phone out. Oh well!

Off we trotted carefully back home in the Disco in rush hour traffic and got the machine out and across the yard to where I'll be working on the machine.

Super excitedly I looked over the machine, got my Dreamcast out of its carry case as the Dreamcast (VGA modded) should be able to plug straight into the Naomi and play straight off and plugged it in. Turned all the power on and I get an image on the screen but it is rolling like a maniac!! Vertical sync isn't working! The image filled the screen from what I could tell but it was scrolling really really fast. I switched off the Dreamcast and tried it a few more times checking the cable was sitting correctly but no go.

I tried my laptop set to 640 x 480 but got the same result :-(

Here you can see the Dreamcast image rolling and rolling and rolling.

So I gave up for the day and headed home and onto the Forums and google to get a hold of a manual and do some research.

The next day I went back to the Naomi with an idea that I'll take the back hood off the machine and hunt down the vertical hold / sync and get it adjusted to settle it down.

Unable to find a V Hold pot I started adjusting the H hold and got the image tuning in and out like you get with an Old TV tuning a station in. I got all the way to the left and got a vertical thin line. This must be the left hand side of the adjustment so lets turn right and see what happens when we get going. Turn......nothing......turn.......still nothing. I got a very cold feeling go down my spine with a realisation that it had just broken big time!!!! Oh man!! This was meant to be an easy plug and play system.

See the image to the left. This is all that happens when tried with either the Dreamcast or the laptop. Oh, and the thin vertical line is still rolling without Vertical sync.

So I got back on to the forum and I got chatting with a guy who is the go to man for repairing the chassis in Naomi's and he's confident that he can repair it.

Of I headed to take the chassis out of the machine and send it off for repair and he found a multitude of things that had gone wrong on the chassis. Cold solder, capacitors gone as well as the vertical transistor and safety resistor. I think I'd been sold a bit of a dog of a monitor set up within this machine. The machine as it is is sound even if it needs a little bit of work to tidy up but the main bit being the monitor seems a bit boned!

Anyway, after a week Grant sent me back my repaired chassis and I installed it into the cabinet and I get a full screen view but its got a twitch to it. It seems like its trying its hardest to roll but something is holding it back. You could really tell it was itching to roll. I adjusted the image with the control panel break-out board and had a quick go on Street Fighter 3 double impact on the Dreamcast. This go was without sound though as the speakers are mounted within the rear hood of the machine. So I got up and headed over to get the hood so I could plug the sound in and I heard a really loud SNAP!!. I quickly turned round and the thin, glowing vertical line was back! Flippin eck!! :-(

After some further PM's Grant really nicely sent over a replacement Transistor and resistor as he thought that the transistor was faulty. The next weekend I replaced the components and BINGO!! I got a steady image! Its on a slight tilt but not so much that the lay person could see without being told. I've got weird pincushion squeeze that I can't adjust out but I'm able to finally play some games on it using my Dreamcast and my Dreamcast arcade stick as I haven't got any pad hacks done yet.

Check it out! That's me playing some Street Fighter 3 Double Impact on the Naomi :D It's stripped down because of fitting the repaired chassis but its working and MAN IS THAT SCREEN BIG!!! It's like sitting in the cinema on the front row, you actually have to turn and really look around the screen or you'll miss something. Its awesome!!!

The pin cushion pinch is a bit anoying though as you can't get the image full screen without it pushing in at the sides so this needs to be adjusted (see right) but the next main job is building a Mame PC from as many spare parts as I can find so its nice and cheap as it's going to sit in the lower part of the Naomi perminantly and only play games. So it doesn't need to be any kind of real power house! And once the PC is working I can get the control panel hooked up via the iPac thats installed in there. :-D

Here's a few shots of the Dreamcast running on screen :

I've also made a video explanation of the progress so far so you can see it actually playing Street Fighter 3 Double Impact.

Looks pretty sweet I think!! :D

Geeky exciting stuff!!!

Catch you in the next update y'all.

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 6. FINISHED!

Hi all,

It's been a couple of weeks since my last update so I thought I would post up a quick update on the Jamma arcade machine resurrection.

ITS FINISHED!!! :-D

Yep indeedy. I've been over to the machine over the last weekend and finished up the last little touches I wanted to do to it so I can call it done. And its a pretty great feeling to know that I've taken a machine that was basically sitting and rotting broken and unusable and its now a tidied up and rejuvenated arcade machine that can be used to run both Jamma and MVS games.

The main finishing touch I wanted to do was re-fit the blackout card around the monitor so that you couldn't see into the machine while playing it and it just makes you focus on the game your playing. When I was removing the card to do the cleaning a part of it got torn so I had to tape it back together.

You can see the join if your looking but Im pretty sure if you didn't know it was torn and repaired you wouldn't spot it. It needed a little trimming and adjusting to get it to fit the new monitor shape nicely but in the end (with some stapling and then re-stapling) I got it to fit how I wanted and closed up the front of the machine and clamped the latches down so its all secure at the front.

On the left you can now only see me and the wall behind me reflecting in the glass rather than seeing straight into the cabinet.


Below you can see a kind of POV of how it looks when your playing. You really just see the game now.

The next step was to tidy up the dangling wires inside the coin door area so I got some of my cable tie bases stuck to the inside of the wood and cable tie'd the wires out of sight. Nice and easy.

I also wanted to mount the Test Switch within the coin mech area on the back of the coin door but the wires weren't long enough so I got a pair of off cuts from the jamma harness and extended them so that I could neatly route the wires along the inside of the cabinet and out to the coin mech nicely. So now when you open the coin door to get to the remote to set the TV to AV so that the picture is perfect the Test switch cabling is no longer pulling on the harness wiring and the door swings freely. :-)

And that's it! :-D I wanted to make a new marquess sign for the machine which I might still do at some point but It all still works and fits and is how the machine was last set up so I think its good for now.

The machine now needs some games played on it so it can be used again. At the minute I've gotten my Jammadrive 2 in permanent residence so that I can get blasting some of the amazing Megadrive arcade conversions I have. Golden Axe really plays nicely in the stand up cab set up even though its still the megadrive version.

Here is the arcade machine in its new location for a while. As you can see I had my trusty assistant with me helping me out. Unfortunately he's too short to reach the Player 2 controls. haha :-P

As I said numerous times Im really stoked out with this project and how I've managed to bring an actual arcade machine back to life from the dead! Its been a project where I've learnt a lot and gained a lot of confidence in this area of retro games electronics / wiring etc.

I have another arcade machine project on the go at the minute, yes I know! Another! But this project is very different to this machine so again its a neat learning experience.

So expect another post up here soon. Hopefully I get a major component for it back tomorrow (fingers crossed) so I can really get to work on it.


Porl''