What did you do this weekend?

Tighe

Well-known member
Joined
May 25, 2009
Messages
20,797
Reaction score
825
Location
Richmondville, New York
I put up some drywall in the basement.

I don't have a photo of it with the joint compound up. I still need to put up a second coat and then paint. My wife's embroidery machine (make some cool arcade themed apparel) is going in this area, the games are on the opposite sides of the stairs, which I will finish off probably next month.

12%252520-%2525201.jpg
 
Last edited:
Pulled the monitor on the Jungle King cocktail and ran that Dave (dgottfried) on Saturday, and gave him two 25" monitors that I had sitting around. Checked out the progress on his game room, which is looking awesome. Sunday I ran a bunch of parts and a Dr. Mario down to Jeff (chips4sle). Checked out his place and chatted for a bit. Not a ton of progress, but cleared up more room in the basement.

Also smashed my head into the corner of a metal speaker cover on Keyboardmania. I think I gave myself a slight concussion, because I was somewhat dizzy and had a headache afterwards. My wife also ran to urgent care to get her shoulder checked out, because of dropping the top piece of a showcase cabinet on it when I asked her to help me move it. Slipped out of her hands when setting it down. More to come on that story in a new post (with x-ray pictures!).
 
I worked on 2 things amidst 5,000 or so interruptions this weekend. Got the black stencil finished on my Pacman:

DSC00938.jpg

DSC00931.jpg


-and got about 30% of my garage work area cleaned, torn down and painted. I had to take down shelves, shelf brackets, monitors, tools, parts, parts bins, random shit, etc, etc. I had to wipe the dust off of everything, get rid of dusty cobwebs, etc. I then pulled all my unfinished, shit-brown peg board off the cheap furring strips it was haphazardly attached to when I moved there and redid each stud joint, then reinforced it, then primed and painted it safety yellow. I also primed my bench top and will be rolling a nice even satin black over the whole top. After the first section of Pegboard dried, I put up all new matching black shelf brackets every 16 inches and reinstalled my monitor shelf, then all my extra monitors. Next will be the second section of the work area, then my project table. I am tired of my shop looking like a condemned building in Detroit.
 
Picked up a grail (Paperboy) for dirt cheap off Craigslist - huzzah!

Also went picnicking in the park, went to Pinballz arcade, put away Xmas decorations, had a small gameroom party (my buddies set new high scores on Galaga and Spy Hunter), played tabletop Battletech, and watched a few movies and shows.

LeChuck
 
Last edited:
I put a new monitor frame in a Star Wars that had been converted to MAME. During the MAME conversion, someone took a hacksaw to the original wooden monitor frame so they could stick an uncased VGA monitor in there. Removing what was left of the chopped monitor frame was a major pain. Fortunately I was able to get some measurements from a friend with an intact frame.

Photo%20Jan%2020%2C%208%2040%2055%20PM.jpg


I also wired up a few cables to connect a Dragon's Lair Scoreboard to a parallel port on a computer running DAPHNE. The parts had been sitting in a box for about 2 years.
 
-and got about 30% of my garage work area cleaned, torn down and painted. I had to take down shelves, shelf brackets, monitors, tools, parts, parts bins, random shit, etc, etc. I had to wipe the dust off of everything, get rid of dusty cobwebs, etc. I then pulled all my unfinished, shit-brown peg board off the cheap furring strips it was haphazardly attached to when I moved there and redid each stud joint, then reinforced it, then primed and painted it safety yellow. I also primed my bench top and will be rolling a nice even satin black over the whole top. After the first section of Pegboard dried, I put up all new matching black shelf brackets every 16 inches and reinstalled my monitor shelf, then all my extra monitors. Next will be the second section of the work area, then my project table. I am tired of my shop looking like a condemned building in Detroit.

Pics or it didn't happen. :D
 
Tore into my Pump pads to figure out some niggling issues. Turns out the "missing" sensor was actually a pad board problem (most likely the first Schmitt Trigger on U3 was bad). While troubleshooting the board I tried to pull U3... it didn't go well. Ripped half the legs off the chip. :mad: A new 74HC14N, and a socket to put it in, are on their way. In the meantime, no doubles for me :(

Also had one panel not lighting up. Opened it up to find the CCFL missing. Ballast is there, but no tube. Go figure. The ballast is receiving power, so I'm just gonna rip it out and put LEDs in like I'm doing in all the other panels.

Protip: Clean out allen screws with one edge of an appropriately-sized needlenose pliers before trying to break a stuck one. The dirt gets compacted down in there and you won't get your wrench in there even halfway until you rip all the crap out. For some reason, half-a-needlenose works really well for this.
 
I zapped my +15v supply on Paperboy trying to troubleshoot the speech section.

Me and my son browsed the pawn shop (he saw the Gun Store sign) and bought a couple of Army MRE's. We got some water and had an urban camping meal.

Played some games, took his Xbox to a repair shop.

Oh- and replaced some bulbs in my wife's car.
 
Last edited:
Took my 8.5 yr old chocolate lab to urgent care after he hadn't eaten for 3 days. After IV fluids, antibiotics, X-rays, and an overnight stay, we still aren't 100% sure what's wrong. :( Sux.

Since I had no control over that, I turned my energy towards something I know I CAN fix - monitors. I grabbed a 20EZ that had a pretty washed out picture and started capping it. Found this:

cap.jpg


Sorry for the cross post, but I was pretty surprised to find that cap during the repair, since the monitor was still working.

Also, I cooked chicken and rice. For my dog. *sigh*
 
I did my first CRT rejuventating Woo-hoo !!

The subjects were two medium res 25" tubes out of two Hard Drivin' cockpits...

Man those 25"es are heavy beasts.

Since my wife and kid were away saturday I had no problems setting up workshop :)

web.jpg


Operating the rejuvenator is not really but a bit complicated, at least you closely have to follow each step. Sometimes the manual is not very clear or instead TOO clear maybe...but we manage.
The thing I hadn't done before was setting up the cut-off correctly before measuring my tube.

So, this time I closely followed the manual (hence iPad) step by step.

Although the primary steps made it show somewhat better results, I still wasn't very happy about them:
web.jpg


So I decided to rejuvenate the guns on setting "Clean" (which means the lowest current used, and let's say the "softest" setting.

We saw some nice little fireworks in the neck of the tube (like expected & intended for the Green & Blue tube. The Red one (which was the best to start with) didn't show much fireworks at all.

Regretfully I didn't take a pic after the rejuvenating but the Green & Blue guns had jumped from 0,5 mA to around 1,0 mA !!!!!
The Red gun shows about the same results, so strangely it's now the "weakest" one of the three but still good enough...

Of course we also checked Bart's tube and decided we shouldn't really mess with it. The values were not ideal but definitely in the "good" area.

Of course it was time to check the result:
So we "installed" Bart's game PCB set, an iso-transformer and a switcher for the PCB set and......
web.jpg


We have a very bright and clean picture !!!!!!
web.jpg

(Small dark band in the top is caused by the camera)

It is a difference between night and day seriously !!! Woo-hoo, my first successful rejuvenation. Buying the Muter definitely paid off now, impossible to find a med-res 25" tube today (well almost).

We do still have some minor issues, there's still some flickering but I'm pretty convinced that the bad neck-board pot meters are the cause for this (still waiting for delivery of the new one's). Also it's almost impossible to set-up the colors correctly with these pots as they developed a "sweet spot" where they work worst, but are supposed to be set to....
Also there is some edge converging to do.

Video:http://youtu.be/9JxFi0LtOMI
 
A friend upgraded his HDMI receiver and gave me his old one for the game room... So the kiddo and I hooked up all the game consoles to it in preparation for his birthday party.

We had 8 kids over and parents coming/going. One of our friends brought her son and stayed to visit with the wife and my parents came down. The game room was a huge hit with the kids and parents alike.

Oh, and the games had no issues. Whew!

Sunday I fixed some game boards, including a Seibu SPI board that had corrupt flash. :D And I did some more work on a pile of Galaga boards for a forum member.
 
Spent part of Saturday helping someone do a cap kit, and then spent all of Sunday finishing a playfield swap on Black Knight.
 
I rebuilt the controls on a Battlezone using an excellent pair of bellows from Wizzies Workshop since a friend was coming by to pick it up, and spent the rest of the weekend working on boards.

Sunday afternoon I took a break to watch my youngest play soccer. Here's a goal by him, jersey #1:

 
Fixed many Arcade machines. Found out a Radio shack close at 8 PM and will still sell you a few fuses at 7:53 PM on a sunday night.

I dont know about other places but our radio shack is a joke,usually a couple of teenagers to busy texting to help a customer and when you do get help its usually the "Ive never seen that part before"response and you have to find it yourself.
 
Finally got my machine to the guy who fixes them and starting watching too much streaming anime online.(sorry no arcade things.)

I could collect more Jammas but I think I got too many lol
 
Attempted to clean up/fix up the garage on Sunday...wrapped up a few projects, fixed a light fixture, and started to slap together a jamma test bed since I never actually had one on the bench. Failed at the monitor which I'm still messing with.
 
Back
Top Bottom