Minor Arcade Cabinet Tweaking

I’ve got an italian-made Neo Geo cabinet in the gameroom with a purrrrrrrrr-fect CRT in there. No dust, no wavy stuff, razor-sharp image, no burn-in. Very very jummy display.. That’s also why its in the personal gameroom – you need a showpiece to impress the potential buyers.

But this screen needed some adjusting.. The left border was misaligned and the screen was too “red”. So its twisty turny time on the pot-meters to set horizontal and vertical adjust, gains and on the screen yoke the “red gain”. Minor issue is that the adjust were only reachable from the back and my arms are in no way long enough to safely poke around in a high-voltage screen while watching the CRT at the front. A mirror might have helped here but thats something that I dont realy have around the house as a spare. Moving the cabinet into the bathroom wasnt really an option either.

After 15 minutes of fiddling around I got the screen pretty much to an OK state. I cant produce a good blacklevel in contrast with the other colors so the brightness is calibrated too high, turning black into a kind of dark grey but it will have to do.

I also noticed that the power supply needs replacing. The fan on it has died and the PSU gets quite hot in a short timeframe. When checking out the PSU I also noticed that the cable colors are completely crazy-connected. Red is ground, green is 12V, black was 5volt and I forgot what -5volt was. This will have to be a cable-per-cable convertion towards a new arcade power supply. Doing it blindly with black-to-ground, red-to-5v, yellow-to-12v will yield very unwanted requirements.

And new power supplies are on the “to restock” list, so these should be available before the end of summer.