Some extra times spent on the Compactline cabinet this afternoon.  Making good progress.

The first of the extra buttons that need to be installed is in place.  I need a better drill as this takes way too long to do at the moment but the size is correct.  Inside needs to be filed down as well to get rid of the sharp edges.  But new buttons fit, that’s the most important.

The wooden board that will support the VGA screen is also in place.

Start of the innards.  Powersupply and distribution box are in place.  The switch on the extender can figure as a global on/off if prefered or plug/unplug the main lead.  The powerswitch installed inside the cabinet can not be reused, sadly.

We have this stock of old CompactLine cabinets and every now and then one gets converted to something else – sometimes Mame, sometimes a multigame cabinet – but I never documented this before.  Another came on the block so lets document this one from the beginning.

This is how it sits at the start.  Non working, probably a dead power supply, with an untested CRT monitor.  So we will try to salvage this screen and see if we can get it fixed / upgraded / whatever for potential future use.

Disconnect the screen.  Goes easy with 3 plugs.

These cabinets have a cool feature when it comes to the monitor.  It can rotate horizontal or vertical and it flips open like this for very easy access.

Old control panel.  The joysticks are decent so these can stay – we’ll put in new microswitches – but the leaf-switch buttons will go.  These things are jucky feedback-wise and are crap quality.

Old control panel components, destination trash.

Cleaned up inside and out, all cables removed – we can now start rebuilding from the ground up – that will be for part 2.

With the new games coming in next week the stockroom had to be reorganized a tiny bit.  Put some not-really-soon to be used cabinets in the back, move some others to the front, rotate a third group to provide more space for the newbies – that kind of thing.

So one hour and a lot of floor cleaning later, the result.  Most of these are with non-working screens by the way – so all go into the project or to-be mame cabinet category.

After some attempts to repair the 4th player display on the Space Station on a budget – and failing at it – and repair costs going potentially over the allocated budget we “just” got a Pinled display.

Install couldn’t be easier, take out the old display and screw in the new one.  I didn’t remove the 100V fuse from the powerboard, partly because I have no idea which one it is from memory and am too lazy to figure it out at the moment, but that should do no harm there.

I like the end result.  Ok the white blocks scream LED DISPLAY when the light is on but in the dark environment the game is usually in its close to unnoticeable unless you actually tell people about the LEDs.

Over 2500 of them.  Come and get one when you see us on a show.

The picture says it all…

With some shelf-space cleared it was time to build a permanent JAMMA test-setup.  The hardest part was finding an old TV that would let me select the SCART A/V input without the remote but once we had that it was pretty straightforward.  Okay going paracommando style over the floor to plug in the powercable does not count, I admit there is too much crap in front of the powerplug over there so that should be cleaned up.. Later..

But hey.  Decent testing rig, good workbench and we can actually sit down and play some games as well.  Testing here are the last carts from that operator haul.  11 in all and now we have the entire kit and kaboodle.  Yes again 3 times Tecmo World Soccer 96 and 2 Goal Goal Goal’s.  What the world has with soccer games, I don’t get it.

This year Rastermania is supporting Revision again with some pinball machines, and we’ve brought our 60-in-1 demobox along !  Lineup should be Terminator 2, Laser Cue and Guns n Roses.  And this cabinet aside them as well, obviously…

When you think that you have fished the pond empty, another former operator – actually kinda just around the corner – popped up online with some carts for sale.  Some ended up to close to 80 of them so we bought the entire kit and kaboodle.

We have to transfer the carts in 2 runs.  This is about 70% of the content.  2 crates of carts, 1 crate of kits and 5 boards in both 2-slot and 4-slot configuration.

About half the carts worked right away.  The other half had to be cleaned and damn were they dirty.  Each cotton swab was used once on a single cartridge just to give you an idea how dirty these thing can get.

So we had some testing and counting of carts to do.  Most of the carts worked as did 2 of the 4-slots.  The rest we will clean once more and retest later.  But for now we have a huge stash of carts again that should last us till the end of the year.

We set up a 60-in-1 equiped arcade cabinet up at Nintendoom and it got quite some play.  Co-op pacman anyone ?