PLAY IT LOUD!! BACKLIGHT + BI-VERT MOD

Hey, how’s it going? Hopefully well. :-)

A few posts ago I showed the Play it Loud! Gameboy I got locally for a real deal. Well I got round to backlighting and bi-verting my Gameboy so that I can play it in any light :-D

As an example, this is the original screen. You can see the title screen for Zelda : Links Awakening okay in this photo but you really struggle when your holding the Gameboy and its moving around in the light.

I was a little worried I must admit because I watched a few tutorials on doing the backlight mod and one of the main things everyone says is how easy it is to ruin the screen by prying the screen out too far and snapping / breaking the connections between it and the main board. I really wanted to do this mod though so I had to be brave, take my time and go for it.

I went to a really cool UK Gameboy mods site to order my backlight kit. Check them out here : http://www.gameboymods.co.uk/ Shaun who runs the site was really helpful with my questions and the backlight arrived super quick. I highly recommend getting your backlight from him!

When the backlight arrived I got started that night on the mod. I couldn’t wait haha. Here you can see front main board out and the really tricky back reflective sticker removed. I didn’t want to take any in progress photos as I did this, I just wanted to concentrate on getting it all out in one piece and not wrecking the screen. Its this process that can damage the screen. There are solder points under the glass that can easily be pried away from the solder pads if your not careful.

I didn’t end up photographing the light in place, I’m not sure know why but I connected the power and grounds up to the capacitor you see in the above photo. Its directly below the screen. Its a nice short location and keeps everything clean.

Here you can see the Gameboy back together and the light working!! Whoop whoop!! What you might notice is that the image is now inverted compared to the first non-backlit image. Once of the cool things you get with the back-light is a contrast sheet and if you turn it one way the image is normal and you rotate it and the image is inverted. Its important if your going to do the Bi-vert mod to have the sheet set to invert. When I add in the invert chip to the gameboy its going to re-invert the screen which will result in a really nicely contrasting screen image.

That was all I managed to do in the one night, and I must admit I was really happy I’d gotten that far with it as I really did take my time removing the reflective sticker.

I played the machine for about a week inverted until I got another chance to open it up and install the small 7404 Hex Inverter chip to switch the image back over.

This really was a simple mod to do and I followed the excellent guide on mmmonkey’s site : http://www.mmmonkey.co.uk/gameboy-dmg-01-screen-invert/ He always does great write ups and has really informative photos so you shouldn’t have any problems following them.

Here you can see my inverted back-lit Gameboy sitting on the tutorial I printed out. This is a reference of how it looks before for a late photo ;-)

There isn’t much to write about the process really, the guide is so good I just followed it and kept my wiring as neat as possible. The chip just wedges in the top of the case and it all closes up absolutely fine! Here you can see my wiring and the chip in place. Looks pretty neat I think!

And here it is all Bi-verted for comparison! Look at that backlit bi-verted contrasty goodness!! :D

And heres another one of the first level of MegaMan as it shows more depth in the screen image.

These two mods really have made my Gameboy way more useable in everyday life. I can see the screen in any situation now and I have it in my rucksack at all times for whenever Im having to wait for anything and I want a hit of retro gaming.

I really recommend trying this mod out if you feel brave enough or get someone to do it for you. It really does add loads of extra usable life to you Gameboy and looks top banana! I went for the green backlight just to keep the feel of the machine original. But I saw several Gameboys backlit with other colours and they all looked great! I was really Impressed with the light blue and the pink ones.

So yeah, go for it and have fun with your Gameboys!

Porl’’

SEGA NEPTUNE REPLICA FINISHED

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for coming back and checking on my blog. Some of you guys might have been following / found my blog because of my EPIC Neptune project I set myself a few years ago after seeing the awesome Longhorn Engineer's tutorial on creating a Neptune using a 32x and a Genesis / MD2.

My idea was to learn soldering by making one of my spare Megadrive 2's into a working Neptune. But rather than leave it there I was going to use the skills I'd picked up making designer toys to make a replica outer shell for the mod and create an actual Neptune.

Well my project started with the hunting out on ebay of a 32x and then getting as many Neptune Prototype shell photos as I could and comparing them with my MD2. I'm pretty much 100% convinced that the Neptune prototype shell is a modified Genesis 2 shell. The bottom certainly makes me thing this as the lower square pan is exactly the same as a Gen 2 shell.

I documented the process of making my Neptune replica shell at most stages of sculpting. I thought I would make a slideshow so you guys can see what the steps are to make a Megadrive/Genesis 2 shell into a Neptune shell.

To finish it off I back painted the perspex LED 'window', glossed the buttons and applied the waterslip decals for the logos so that it looks like the prototype photo's I've seen on the web.

I've placed a few photos on the page as well as making a gallery for you guys to look through.

As you can see from the above photo I've finished the internal modular setup of the Neptune for when I eventually get a 32x. I really wanted to make sure that I would not need to destroy the 32x to make the Neptune. I will simply just have to take the 32x apart, fold it under itself and plug it in. Well I'll actually have to desolder the choke and resolder it on its side to lower the profile of the edge of the 32x so it will fit in the Replica case.

Again I made a slideshow of the progress I made with the mod and if you've followed my blog you will have seen all or most of them.



And to finish this post off which is a little shorter than I thought it would be. Its more photo heavy as I've basically posted most of my progress as I've gone along. I also made a Youtube video showing the shell and the internal mod.



Hopefully you guys like my replica Neptune shell. I'm so happy that its all finished off, and when I get a 32x I'll make it even more finished off. :-)

Catch you guys later on.

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''

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''

HOMEMADE SCAN LINE GENERATOR - MID-WEEK PROJECT

Hey y'all,

Last week inbetween working on things for my arcade machine (fixing the blackout paper and making extension wires etc) I started work on something I've been wanting to make for ages! A Scan Line Generator for my dreamcast! :D

As always I headed over to mmmonkey's awesome modding website www.mmmonkey.co.uk and started reading up on how you make them and what sort of bits and bobs I would need to get. Well, as it turned out I'd had some fore-thought and bought some of the required IC's and some matrix board last year when I was thinking of giving it ago. So All I would need to get would be the male and female vga ports and a little project box to house it all in.

With this in mind I started out on monday night with my soldering iron and started following mmmonkey's photos and write up. I found it a little confusing at points to follow along and know what was going on but after some cups of tea (and one hot chocolate with all the trimmings) I had a finished off matrix board. Awesome!!

I couldn't try it out though because the next step was to make a VGA extension cable (female - male) so that I could hook the R,G,B, V sync, H sync and Ground up to one end of the cable.

Fast forward a couple of days and I headed over to Maplin in Tamworth and picked up the sockets and project box so I could carry on with my little project. Fast forward to thursday and I get soldering again and the cable is made up and the SLG is soldered up to one end of the cable.

Cue excited running upstairs to plug it into my Dreamcast and check out the kick-ass scanlines!!!.......no scan lines! :-( There was a picture but five wiggly bands of what looked like interference. Darn it!

I looked over the matrix board again and noticed that one of my ground links wasn't hooked up so I bridged that and replaced a resister leg bridge with a small bit of wire. Cue new test and the same result!

hmmm

I got the images of the SGL progress from mmmonkey's website on the Tablet and got a fresh cuppa to ponder where I'd gone wrong.

I couldn't spot any differences until I went to the start of the article and looked at his original sketch. Could I have the chips in the wrong way round?! Could it be that simple?! I popped out the 74 and the 125 IC's giving myself a mental High Five that I'd had the forward thinking to solder in sockets rather than soldering straight to the chips themselves. If I hadn't it would have been pretty much starting from scratch if I'd have to desolder both the chips to flip them.

A quick check on the main TV downstairs and whats this?...could it be? SCANLINES!! WOOO! It took a little bit of head scratching but it's worked in the end!

Check those suckers out! That's some retro viewing right there on a modern LCD TV :-D

With the scan lines all working nicely I headed back to the project bench and started finishing off the casing.

And here is the finished result in the project box. I got the VGA cable sitting nicely in between the 2 socketed IC's which will help keep it all snug in its box, even though the hot glue will probably do anyway :-P

With the box all finished off I popped upstairs and hooked the Dreamcast back up to my PC monitor and put the SGL inbetween the two and flicked the power switch. The image comes on for a second then dissappears!! NOOO!! I hit my odd / even lines switch and nothing, turned the monitor on and off and it again appears for a second then dissappears. Darnit!

So I tried it on my smaller flat panel tv in my games room and nice scan lines show up.

It seems that my PC monitor isn't compatible with my SGL. Doh! Im not sure why. Could be that I've left a few of the pin's floating rather than grounding them out but I've hot glued it all in place now. Oh well, it was only a mid-week project and it works properly on my TV's :-D So when I fancy some Dreamcast on the big TV I can have nice old-school scan lines running on there.

I have enough IC's etc to make another SGL if I fancy it at some point and I'll ground out the floating pins and add in another switch to alter the width of the scan lines. I went with the basic version to start with to see if it would work or not.

Im really pleased with the result in the end, even though it doesn't work on my PC monitor. Its a shame but not the end of the world. :-)

Looks pretty neat all finished. If you want some retro scan lines on your VGA modded dreamcast then I recommend checking out mmmonkey's guide. Its a nice cheap and pretty quick project to get some retro goodness on your TV.

Just a quick last minute photo. It turned out not too dissimilar to my drawing I made during the week :-) I was trying to figure out how the video signal would run and which way it would face inbetween the monitor / TV and Dreamcast.

Catch you all later for the next project update.

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 5. MARQUEE AND JAMMADRIVE 2

Hi All,

Well, the weekend has passed and I managed to get a little bit of work done on the arcade machine while my fiance was planting trees with her mom in one of the fields. Shirking a little bit of manual labour I slinked off to my arcade machine to continue work.

My main aim for the weekends work was to try and figure out the marquee light and try to get that hooked up and working. I must admit though I hadn't got a clue how the thing hooked up to the power supply as it was just 2 wires and they weren't standard colourings to the wires. Hmm, surely one has to be ground and one live? There's a sticker on what looks like the ignitor? power block for the light that says 240v so I thought 'brilliant! I'll hook it up to a mains plug and see what happens'. Well, what happened was the bulb got really bright then a burning spot appeared at a part of the bulb and it switched off. Doh!! Burnt it out and my confidence with getting that thing working dropped through the floor.

I could try to get another bulb to fit but I might struggle and then it could just burn out like this one did because its not wired correctly, so I decided to head down to my local B&Q diy store and pick up some tree ties for Roz and her mom and picked up a small strip light while I was at it. While I was there I checked over all the lights and checked that the one I got was mains powered so I could just hook it up and I'd be away.

I had a good long piece of mains cabling and scrounged a plug and hooked up the light to check that it fired up and worked okay. And, bingo! It worked! Next step is to get it mounted to the marquee board and check again. Here you can see it mounted to the board before I routed the wiring down the back trunking of the machine and down to the power strip thats sitting in the base.

After I got it all cable tied to place and hidden in the trunking I go it switched on in its new home. :D

Check that glow! haha. Another tick on my list of things to do there. Marquee light, done!

Here's how the machine looks at the minute with the glass and marquee sign all back in place.

Looking pretty snazzy I think. I don't know what it is but when the light turned on it just clicked to me. This is finally an arcade machine, it just feels more right.

During the week I'd received some new Neo Geo MVS games so I thought I'd bring one of the cartridges with me to 'test' out in the cabinet. Metal Slug 2! :D

Its crazy how different the game looks compared to my little LCD TV I've got at home. Standing up close to the CRT monitor with the scan lines etc makes it feel a lot more proper.

I got a nice little stash of games and I'm really itching to complete them all but the one thing I'm making sure I don't do is credit my way through them. I.e. just pressing the credit button continuously to force my way through the games. One thing I've been doing with Metal Slug 2 is giving myself 3 credits and 3 credits only. Trying to recreate only having so much change in my pocket like when I was a kid. Man, is Metal Slug 2 a hard game though!! I can only get to the end of level 3 so far with my 3 credits. Its crazy tough even on level 4 difficulty settings. I'll get there though.

The Games I got (as I got side-tracked there) are : Metal Slug 2 (loose cart), Metal Slug 4 (full kit), King of Fighters 2001 (loose cart), Puzzle Bobble (loose cart) and Tecmo Soccer '96 (loose cart). I'll probably be selling on Tecmo Soccer as Im not that into football games but the others are definate keepers.

So that was Saturday's work and I thought I would be all done for the weekend but we headed back on the Sunday so Roz could help her mom out with some more tree's so I had an idea of what I could leave in the machine semi-perminantly as I don't want to be leaving my 'real' arcade boards in the machine when it's not at my house yet.

So I used the time in the morning at home to source out an old Megadrive / Mega CD base plate from my wardrobe to see if I could modify it into a PCB stand for my Sega Jammadrive 2 :-)

I found the base plate out but quickly found out that its not going to fit the Jammadrive 2 unless I take the rubber feet off the bottom of the casing (not gonna happen as I want it to look stock :P ) or modify the plate. So I got my metal saw out and started hacking away at the base. I got a little way but needed some proper equipment so I took it to the farm and used the saws there.

Here you can see the Jammadrive 2 next to where I was working so I could keep offering up the plate to it to see how it was fitting.

Right, a little disclaimer...I'm not going to show the finished off plate because its VERY embarrassing and looks like a torture device from Vlad the Impaler (and it actually did impale me at one point and cut my hand doh!) but it does fit nicely and work very well. I drilled out some holes and mounted PCB feet that I had spare so that I could then screw that into the internal wooden wall of the arcade machine.

And here is the Jammadrive 2 sitting in place on the wooden wall. The way I positioned it is so the weight of the console pushes downwards onto the mounts of the base plate so it will keep in place and it also has the Jamma edge at a nice easy to access position. I've also mounted it quite high on the board so that I can still fit other arcade games in there past it so I don't have to take it out all the time to put other game boards in.

Im really pleased with how it sits in the cabinet I must admit and really happy that the baseplate worked after all my hacking of it (and my hand).

And here you can see the machine running Streets of Rage from the Sega Mega Games 6 cartridge. A neat little fact about this cart is that it has the full version of Streets of Rage on it so much that if you flick it over to Japanese language you get the game Bare Knuckle instead of Streets of Rage :D A good cart to test your language switch mods on ;-)

I thought I could leave this cart in the machine and there are a few games to have a blast on when there aren't any arcade boards plugged in.

Also its inspired me to dig some of my megadrive arcade converstions out of my shelves such as golden axe and I know its not technically an arcade game but its pretty close to the original, Splatterhouse 2.

Oh, I also painted up the old coin door that I mentioned in one or two of the video progress reports. Well it turns out after I painted it up that it didn't fit and wasn't the correct door!! Double dang it!

But I scratted around and found the proper one which is chrome and only needed a quick brush down to look half decent again. I mounted it into place and quickly tie-wrapped my Test Button to it but I'm going to extend the wiring on that so that its neater when you open the door.

And that's the progress so far. I'll leave you until the next post.

Catch you later

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 4.5 - videos

Hi peeps,

Here is a small update for the last progress report. I finally managed to upload the video progress reports to Youtube over the weekend so I thought I'd post them up here while I carry on working on the cabinet.

I know you can see the progress in the photos but I always like to see arcade machines in action with the game up and running and yelling out of the way too loud speakers! haha :-P

Capcom CPS2 button demo:


Neo Geo MVS button demo:


catch you on the next update!!

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 4. CONTROL PANEL MODS

Hi everyone,

I've made some more progress on "the Machine" this friday afternoon and it's starting to get there now :-D

The aim for the control panel was to get 6 buttons for each player so that I can play my Street Fighter games on there no problem. So I set about drawing out the positions for the new buttons on the control panel so that I could figure out if they would all fit. What I've found is Player One's part of the panel had more than enough room around the existing 3 buttons to get the others to fit. But Player Two's area is really cramped. It's like they ran out of room as they worked along from left to right. So between the 3rd button and the cigarette area is rather cramped. So this part of the panel is going to have to be a bit of a compromise.

Last weekend I'd tried to make a start on the control panel and thought that I would be able to drill out the hole like a little pepper pot with the largest metal drill that I had and then cut out the linking bits of metal with my Dremel. Well let me tell you, that isn't the way to go about drilling the holes out of a metal control panel. To get the one hole done it took me an hour and a half and I went through 2 grinding wheels on my Dremel. This way would take me forever and I would be buying new grinding tools every other button hole.

So I left it there last weekend and during the week I picked up a Holesaw along with the corresponding drill bit from Wickes and set about the control panel again. What a change using the proper tools makes! The holesaw made short work of the control panel and I breezed through this time.

Here is the second player's control area. You can see that button 6 has had to be squashed up to get it to fit. And I've had to fit the extra buttons a little closer to the original holes because of available space. It doesn't feel too tight to use.

 Here you can see the holesaw I used. Its a 29mm holesaw and the buttons fit perfectly into the space you drilled. I thought it might make holes that are a little too big but they are spot on.

One thing to remember though is take out the existing buttons when you start to do your drilling. I didn't do this and buggered up one of my buttons. :-( The holesaw generates lots and lots of really little metal flakes and they can go down the litte gaps around the buttons and jam them up a treat! Because the plastic is quite soft the metal seems to dig in really well and it doesn't feel like it will come un-stuck.

So I'm going to have to order another one to replace the stuck one.

Below you can see the backside of the control panel all wired up. It looks a little bit of a mess but it's as neat as I can get. I can't pull the harness wiring through any further because its pulling the jamma edge up too high for my smaller game PCB's to sit on the bottom of the machine.

You can see that Player One's buttons are laid out more traditionally than Player Two. The spacing is still not exactly how you would normally have it if you were to make the control panel from scratch. But its nice enough I think.

Once I'd gotten all the buttons wired in and tested I started working on a little idea I'd had during the week. One thing I found out from making my first arcade stick for my Super Gun was that if you make an arcade stick that is just 6 buttons you won't be able to play Neo Geo MVS games that require 4 buttons. This sounds a little daft but when you make a 6 button stick for CPS2 Street Fighter games your top row consist of A, B and C from the Jamma harness. And the bottom row are Light Kick, Medium Kick and Heavy Kick which come straight from the CPS2 kick harness. Neo Geo MVS uses button D from the Jamma Harness. So when I made my second arcade stick I made it have 7 buttons so that it had D on there as well.

The problem with the arcade machine is that the control panel has very limited space but I still wanted to be able to play Neo Geo MVS games on it. So I decided to see if I could wire up a switch so that I could convert button 6 to either by Heavy Kick or Neo Geo Button D.

Here you can see the Conversion Switch held in place via Cable ties mounted on my new bases.

The center of the Double Pole Double Throw switch leads to button 6. The left hand tab comes straight from the kick harness and the right hand tab comes from button D on the jamma harness. So if you flick the switch over to the left your hooked up for CPS2 games, and if you flick it to the right you have button D for Neo Geo games. :-D Im really pleased that such a simple switch works a treat! Probably very simple to most people that mess about with electronics or wiring stuff up but being new to this I was quite proud that it worked. woop!

Here you can see the finished control panel all working with the glass window in place. I've got Samurai Shodown running in the machine using my Neo Geo MVS 1F board.

For some reason when the Neo Geo is running in the machine the TV is keeping the channel panel up in the top right corner of the screen. Im a little unsure why its doing this as it doesn't do it on normal Jamma games. I'm pretty confident that when I get hold of the remote for the TV I can get that to turn off though so it's not obscuring so much of the screen.

And as a last little picture, here is how the CPS2 cartridges sit in the bottom of the machine. You can see how the Edge connector is in the back and how smaller boards will just end up hanging from it. Which isn't a good way to have them connected. So I'm going to be making a little box that sits in the bottom of the machine so it raises the boards up a bit.


So what's next for the machine? Im going to be cleaning up the glass window and trying to get the marquee light working. Tidy up the coin door a little bit and remount it to the front of the coin door area. Sort out the back panel of the machine. Repaint it or something as birds have been pooping on it a bit. Ugh!

Catch you on the next update :-)

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 2. MONITOR

Hi Again ;-) time for another update! 2 in the space of a week!? What's this craziness?!

Well, we were at the farm on sunday so I took my tools with me and thought I'd make a start on getting the TV out of its casing so I could see what's what. I'm really hoping that it will fit the frame otherwise its going to take some figuring out to make new fixings.

I took the back of the TV and had a nose around the cabling of the chassis as well as what looks like a grounding loop that sits behind the tube. All looked similar to the existing broken monitor which is a good start :-)

Then I attempted to discharge the tube in case it was still holding any deadly volts in the there. I hooked my wired up screwdriver to the grounding on the cabinets frame and poked about under the rubber cap. All seemed good so off came the Anode cap and I started stripping out the chassis from the casing.

With the chassis and the screws undone I could take the TV out of its front casing. And here comes the moment of truth, offering up the TV into the housing to see how it fits........and it fits perfectly!!!! Absolutely spot on alignment with the mounting holes. Hot Dog!! :-D

I was really hoping it would at least be close so this is a great result!!

The next step is to mount the chassis into the cabinet in a place where all the wiring is within reach of the anode area and the tube neck etc. I've realised that the TVs chassis is bigger than the old monitor so I will have to put it somewhere differently. It won't fit underneath the tube assembly like the old monitors. Doh. Shouldn't be too much of a problem though.

Last night I did a quick modification to the chassis and extended the I.R. sensor from the front of it so that I can mount it underneath the tube at the front of the cabinet. So when the whole cab' is powered on I will be able to switch the TV on with its remote. Hopefully it will work when I get to testing it in the cab :-P Normally in an arcade the monitor will turn on and off with the main switch on the top of the cabinet but I can't really do that. So a little modding was in order.

I think the next step is to get it all wired together again and take my Supergun and a game so I can test that the TV is powering up and displaying the imagery okay while I wait for the harness and controller stuff to turn up.

Catch you on the next update. Hopefully I will have made more progress :-)

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION

Hi peepzillas!! :-D

It's been another long time posting and I miss it actually. Posting meant that I had projects on the go and I would always like posting up progress with learning new things. Well the only projects I've been working on recently have been reflowing PS3's. My sister's housemate months ago asked me if I could fix his YLOD on his PS3 so I looked up how to reflow and got ready to try it when his mate said he would have a go. Month's later I still wanted to see if I could 'fix' a PS3 so I bought a 40gb PS3 phat for £12 from ebay and had a go and it worked first try. Man I was stocked! A PS3 for £12! Hot dog! I posted on facebook about it and peeps started asking me to fix some for them so I've basically been doing that. And when I haven't been fixing PS3's I've been playing through Halo : Reach on my xbox or playing Resident Evil 5 / Uncharted 2 on my PS3 or Metal Gear Solid : Peace Walker on my PSP. :-D Playing through my games list has been awesome!

Anyway, the Arcade machine!! If you've read my old posts you will have seen the arcade machine I basically inherited. The monitor on the machine is Fubar'd though so I've left it be.  Recently my girlfriends brother has an old CRT TV that he's getting rid of which looks like it might be the same size, so I've started thinking about seeing if I can switch them over today.

I've been thinking of the things I would need and what I have already for the machine and I think I can do it quite cheaply. I need to take the monitor out as well as all the wiring as its a non-jamma loom in there. You need a converter to hook up a jamma game and I'm not 100% where every wire is going, so I'm going to re-wire it so I know what's what.

I already have an Arcade switching PSU and the donor tv so I just need a new Loom and possibly some new controller bits and bobs as the ones in the machine are super old-school.

Here is the kit I took with me :

I thought that I would mainly be cleaning out and stripping down today but I took my soldering kit just incase I hit any snags.

Here is how the machine looked after I cleaned it all down with the brush and the wood polish. I wanted to get a good look at what needed to be done with the machine. Yes that's me in my scruffs looking like a dork in the reflection :-P

It's a proper old-school chip-shop / taxi rank machine and it brings back tonnes of memories of using my pocket money to play games as a kid. So I don't like the thought of it going rotten and unplayed.

As you can see the control set up is just standard Jamma and would need to be set up to play street fighter style 6 button games. Or at least I would like it to be able to play those types of games on it. It gives you more options hey? :-P

And thinking about it I should be able to re-wire this sucker as I've done a few Supergun's now and basically the arcade machine is just the Supergun - TV and controllers all in the one container

Here is the back of the machine. You can see its a bit of a rat's nest of wires but in a logical way if you know what's connected to what. And you can also see the bit of the machine I was the most scared of working on. The Fly-back on the monitor. Its the lead connecting to the back of the monitor with the rubber plunger. The monitor can store charge in it and unless its discharged correctly you can get a big shock from it and it can be really dangerous. So I've been putting it off cus I'm a wimp :-P haha.

Well I grew some stones and had a go at discharging it and from what I could tell there was no charge left in the monitor. Woop!

Onto the disassembly of the machine so I can clean it out. :-)

 Here is the black out paper / card from around the monitor. It had to come out so I could get around the monitor to have a better nose and it got damaged. Not a big deal though, its only card so I will re-fit a nice new piece when I'm rebuilding it.

Here you can see the monitor in situ with the old-school control panel open. Check out those hockey pucks for the control sticks. Ugh!

To remove the monitor you have to unscrew the 4 screws around the monitor and if you un-hook the chassis it just slides out the front of the cabinet. I snipped all the wires from the monitor to the chassis as it was already broken and I don't know how to repair them. It just made it easy for me to remove it.

I also gave the front area a good brush down when I got the monitor out.

Here is everything out of the cabinet leaving it just a bar cabinet now. On the left is the power supply for the cabinet. This runs the game as well as the monitor and the top light. I don't have that kind of power supply and as I'm using a TV as a replacement I'm going to put a 4-gang power strip in the machine which the light and the TV will run from as well as the switching PSU to run the game. Essentially a Supergun set up.

Next to the PSU you can see the loom wiring that I stripped out. The Monitor and the chassis sitting on the black card surround and then the marque light sitting next to the front glass. 

Here is the cabinet empty of monitor, loom, PSU and light. I'm hoping that the replacement TV will sit nicely in the monitor frame. Fingers crossed!! :-P

And here is the replacement TV I've been banging on about in this post. :-) I've half taken the casing off the TV as I wanted to check that it was going to have the tabs on the corners as the monitor does in the background. Thank fully it does, its how its held into the plastic casing. Phew! And from a quick measurement using some wire it looks like its the same width.

The next step will be to get the TV out of the plastic casing and get its chassis mounted in the chassis casing and see if it will all fit in the cabinet.

Catch you all on the next update :-)

Porl''