How to fire up an arcade without a cab

mitchschaft

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I have almost 100% of the components I need to test out my Galaga boards. I notice quite a few ground wires coming off of the wiring harness. Can I just put everything on cardboard and fire it up or do I need to put these ground wires to something?
 

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if its the yellow ground straps, they should hook to the green earth ground on the power cord.
I have a galaga here if you want to test the pcb.

edit - or to a post on the suitcase (which is also connected to earth ground aka green wire on the power cord)
 
Very cool. I'll take you up on that if it doesn't go well this weekend. I have a connector for the power supply PCB to install for a burnt end and a chip that's completely missing that just came in from Bob Roberts. If nothing else, just to meet a fellow arcadehead (or whatever we're called).

The yellow straps is what I'm most concerned about. They look like they want to be hooked up to something. In this pic, is this the green wire you're talkin' about?

I'm afraid I don't know what a suitcase is :eek:.
 

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Do I have these connectors backwards? It's the video cable to a 4600 chassis. They're not keyed so I'm not 100% sure.
 

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I finally found a pic on google and it's hooked up the same way so I'm confident it's right.

I put those green wires together with the yellow. Took a chance and powered it on! The CRT comes on and you can feel static on the front when you touch it.

The speaker makes a "papa, papa, papa, papa, papa, papa..." quick repetative noise and that's it. The screen isn't even black or anything just completely blank. I was hoping for a ram error code or something. Oh well, it was exciting. Even had the wife watch, lol.

Any suggestions off the top of your head? I still have some PCB work to do so I wasn't expecting much.
 
The video cables look right. If you look at the traces on the back of the card the top connector is RGBE (E=ground) you can tell because the 4th pin goes to the ground trace on the board. The bottom pins the same way EHV (E=ground, Horizontal sync, Vertical sync).

The yellow ground straps are to go to things like the control panel, the marquee light, the coin door and several other metal parts just as a safety precaution to avoid electrocution lawsuits.

ken
 
Shouldn't all ground wires lead to the earth ground on power supplies?

Juan
Not necessarily. There's a difference if you're talking about earth ground like the yellow straps for Galaga and logic ground things like the buttons, joysticks and pcb.
 
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