Arcade & Retro Repairs & Mods, all new recipe, with no added MSG...

Burzum wrote: »

Apologies if not right place but would anyone know where I could get some Saturn games resurfaced?

eddhorse wrote: »

Yeah ive sent a few to Grant aka Gunblade on UKVAC forums.

Not sure on Brexit costs now for shipping etc but it was around €100 to fix

Colonel Panic wrote: »

I think it was here that this crowd were mentioned too https://www.psra.ie/monitors/crt-monitors/

I've got it bookmarked for those "just in case" events.

Burzum wrote: »

Got in touch with https://www.psra.ie/monitors/crt-monitors/ sadly it does not seem they can service an apple IIe monitor

o1s1n wrote: »

Oh yeah I remember contacting those PSRA lads a few years ago and they said they'd happily do a BVM.

Might be a cost thing, they could be (wrongly!) assuming I've a fortune to spend on it because it's a studio monitor, Apple II monitor might not be worth their while.

I don't think you'll have much luck with gunblade/grantspain, he only really does arcade monitors. Doesn't hurt to ask though!

If you've soldering skills yourself then the guy who runs this website is really nice and will put a cap kit together for you.

I see he already has some apple kits up at the moment:

https://console5.com/store/catalogsearch/result/?q=apple

If you need a lend of a discharging wand and you're around Dublin, let me know.

I bought an Neo Geo AES which was converted to JAMMA in the past - looks like it was a pro conversion, the JAMMA board it a little rough with some traces not made correctly so patched. Maybe at a time which AES wasn't worth much but MVS was still going strong in the Arcades. The case at least has a sub 4k serial number which suggests it was an earlier unit and the mainboard backs this up a little.

It looked rather sorry for itself;

Even more so internally

It's an early NEO-AES board. It had a special BIOS chip which I take it worked with the JAMMA board and its tapoff points on the board to time limit play depending on credits. The unit wasn't operating as is so I removed all the extra cabling, random patch wires and caps on the bottom of the board and worked to fix the cut traces.

I still used the JAMMA board for video/power for now (until the PSU/Video cables arrive) and popped in a standard BIOS. The self-test showed RAM issues and from inspecting the board both the Fast VRAM and Palette RAM had been replaced/bodged in the past so I removed those, socketed them and threw in Sony replacements and BOOM! Working!

UniBIOS4 burned to an EPROM and a AES 161-in-1 with the 'PICKnMIX' feature from the UniBIOS and it is working a treat - tbh, I didn't think I would get it working.

I've a cap kit on route as it seems the factory caps on the RGB circuit aren't correct.

Only issues now

• Power switch was missing as when it was converted to JAMMA, the used that opening for the hacked in power. 3D printed one for now, looks fine
• Audio 3.5mm socket - thats missing. I've tried to find the type used by using photos but no luck as of yet. Any pointers appreciated!
• No screws - yup, our JAMMA people decided the unit needed none replaced as they had it held together with large rubber bands!

Did a hilarious repair this evening.

So a few months back I picked up a Mitsubishi hs-337 VCR from 1985, the same model as I had when I was a kid.

Unfortunately it didn't come with a remote.

My mam was cleaning out the coal bunker this evening and found the remote from our original one. Absolutely knackared but I decided to take it from her and see what condition it was in.

Thing must have been sitting out there for 20 years. There were still batteries inside when I opened it up, so I thought it was a goner.

So I decided to see if I could salvage it for the craic this evening. Spent the last hour with it in pieces cleaning every minute piece of corrosion.

Dried it off, put it back together and... it works!! haha, can't believe it.

The remote itself is 36 years old and I reckon those batteries must be in it about 20 of those years. Apart from a little bit of discolouration on the tip of the positive side, there's zero corrosion and they actually look like they're new! Hard to believe.

Unfortunately the tape deck itself won't play tapes. It powers on, the coal bunker remote will cycle through all the channels, you can insert and eject tapes, but the drum doesn't spin or do anything.

I just discovered yesterday that Liam Hearns is still running Town Hall Electric at the top of Bray mainstreet. Absolutely amazed by that, it must now be one of the longest running shops in Bray. To put it in perspective, we used to buy C64 tapes from him in there.

Might drop this player into him and see what he can do :D

My precious launch JPN Saturn is starting to show problems. I've only owned it a few months :(

I think it's power cap related. If it's been off overnight and I press the power button it lights up but there's no image. If I toggle the switch, it boots.

Via a scaler, you can see loads of noise in the image on the home and Action Replay screens which goes away after it's warmed up! I plugged another Saturn into the scaler and it's grand. The noise doesn't really show on a CRT.

I've tried with two step-downs. My Maplins special I use for all my retro, and the industrial one I got for my arcade cabinet.

So, should I replace the PSU with a modern equivalent, since it's a 100V or replace the caps on it?

That's weird about my old AES! It was a Jap model that I bought from a seller in Japan.

Delighted you got it working. I'd say I must have broken a trace using that MVS to AES converter thingy.

Wife took the baby out visiting, so I got to solder the PSU bits together and stick them in my Jpn Dreamcast. I also put in a battery holder and a replacement fan.

Putting the fan in was SUCH a pain on this DC. It's a VA0, so I needed to literally take the main board out and flip it to unscrew the original fan! Next up I need to decide on what ODE to get.

I swapped in the Amiga 600 hard membrane I posted in the Gets thread yesterday. It's definitely a quality bit of kit, with the weakest part being the ribbon cable(just like on the old membrane). But at least with this design if the cable ever gets damaged or wears out its a quick and cheap common replacement(not like the old membrane).

All done.

Yes, it upgrades the cpu from the 68000(7MHz) to a 68EC020 running at 33MHz. It's also got an 68882 FPU in there along with 9.5MB of Fast RAM. Nice little upgrade for gaming with WHDLoad and general workbench stuff. I've got a 1MB trapdoor upgrade in there as well with clock and running everything from SD card.

It's a great little setup for running the stuff i mostly do on all my Amiga's. For heavier stuff I'd use my A1200 or A4000, but i don't really have much of a need to power them up these days.

Yeah looks very neat, finishes it off nicely.

get a backlight and bi vert screen you wont regret it

I'm currently trying to repair an Amstrad CPC 464 which Ciderman bequeath to me - was missing the Z80 and the AY-3-8912 sound chip. Those replaced and diag rom in...no joy...so RAM replaced...no joy :( Could well be the ULA chip.

Might anyone have an Amstrad CPC 464 or similar in some sort of dis-repair or unwanted'ness they want to part with? :D

Hey Bob, if Kerb doesn't want that I'd be interested myself....ive a 464 here that's really badly beat up, in need of a good few spare parts

Cheers Kerb 👍 1st thing on the list is a replacement shell....the one here has burn marks, is bowed in the middle, and is pretty beat up. After that I'll possibly need a keyboard as it's bowed too, but can't test it yet as I've no psu currently.

Dangit!

I noticed what appeared to be a surface mount capacitor on my floor last night. Curious as to where it may have come from I finally realised that it must have broken off of my Tekken Tag board when it fell on the floor the other day.

Crap. Well that's going to be fun to try to fix. I hope the capacitor itself is still good. I'm not going to chance plugging the board back in until I've had a proper change to try to reattach the cap.

It's erh... all good experience I suppose?

Thankfully it doesn't look like there's any damage to the actual pads so... bit of flux and desolder wick should clean them up nicely.

Kinda hoping that this cap is ok though because it seems to have a little dent in it.

Ohh well... that's teach me to not leave unfinished board projects lying about the place when I'm not working on them! (literally all I was waiting to do was attach it to some PCB feet and mount it to some MDF. Whoops!

That would be amazing. I can't really tell from the cap itself as it's a bit scruffed... I fear that I may have walked on it at some point without realising.

Having a hard time tracking down the board schematics too.

If anybody here could tell me what kind of SMC capacitor is needed between C4 and C5 on the board I'd greatly appreciate it. 🙂