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''

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''