Neo Geo 4 cleaning continues...

After taking care of some things this afternoon, I finally got around to removing the power supply from the Neo Geo cab. The main thing I wanted to get done was to remove the power supply, open it up, swap out the fan, and blow out all the old dust and cobwebs inside the case.

...that was the plan anyway.

After removing the power supply from the arcade, I noticed a little bit of patina on the bottom of the power supply case. I didn't think anything of it.

After wiping it up, I proceeded to open the case. I was greeted with this:

Yikes!

And no, hitting it with an air duster didn't move this gunk, not one bit.

I had to sideline the project for now. I'm getting consensus on what to do next. Instinct is telling me to:

1. Spray it down with a cleaner (more than likely Simple Green), use a toothbrush to scrub it down, then spray it down with water and final rinse with distilled water. OR
2. Go to town with a pressure washer. OR
3. Swap out the power supply in the other arcade, then later get another power supply for that one when I start to work on it.

I'll probably just do 1, let it dry for a few days, then reinstall it. If that fails, then step 3.

Now that I can just link up my pictures from my Google Photos, posting might be more frequent now. Stay tuned, I suppose.

I fixed the thing!

And man, I am happy!

First off, here's what I did...you know, since the recapping of the board.

These 3 things...are the bane of my existence. These are capacitors are responsible for the horizontal phase (is that what it's called? I'm not sure.) of the monitor. The width, if you will. These things were old and possibly worked. So, $22, 5 days shipping time, and 30 mins for desoldering and replacing these old caps with these:

(it's the brown, square-ish things), we are ready to reinstall the chassis to the cab.

I also have to note that I also took my Allen key and turned the horizontal coil (that white, PVC looking thing with the copper coil around it) all the way down.

I put the chassis back in the cab, connected everything, and turned the cab on. And I was greeted with...loud hissing and popping from the CRT and some screen snapping weirdness.

...

At this point, I thought I screwed everything up by replacing those three components with the wrong thing. So, I turned the cab off and went to the back to discharge the CRT from the anode...and the anode just popped out.

...

I didn't put the anode in properly. Silly me. Luckily, that was an easy fix. So here I go again, round 2, with turning the cab on and seeing if the fruits of my labor paid off.

Well...

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Before, the game select screen on my 161-in-1, you couldn't see either all of Terry Bogard's left arm or you wouldn't be able to see the game select arrow at the left of the screen. Now, it looks way better.

...I love the King of Fighters series. It's not evident, but you wouldn't be able to see either a chunk of the left side of the screen (you would only see half of Terry) or the right side of the screen (half of Ryo).

Now, mind you, I'm not sure if me setting the horizontal coil all the way down was part of it and I'm just a dummy for not testing that out first, but I figure this old thing could use some fresh components after sitting in the warehouse for so long.

So, I'm marking this as a successful result!

Next part of this thing: fixing the fan on the power supply...and more cleaning up inside.

I got a thing...

That I've been wanting for SOOO long...Since I was in high school, working at an arcade.

It's not the "Big Red" Neo Geo 4 cab, but a 4 game cab nonetheless. It's really worked, as it probably came from a laundromat or something, but still running...so to speak.

The only major thing is that the monitor's width is stretched...really wide. Worse part is, the coil that allows adjustment wasn't working properly...from what I could do, anyway.

I hit up some people/friends through forums and social media and consensus was to do a recap on the monitor chassis board.

So, after vacation, I ordered a cap kit and went for it. Got out the trusty soldering and desoldering station (2 different devices, don't judge).

The recap job took about an hour since I was being really meticulous and there was one or two caps that were hard to install. After the recap, I installed the chassis back into the cab. Did it help at all? 

...no, it didn't...

So, I just ordered 3 more, high voltage capacitors that are part of the width circuit. I hope this will fix the problem, otherwise, I have to get another component (horizontal width coil) to fix the problem. I hope that does it, otherwise, I'll have to replace either the chassis or the whole monitor, which I don't want to do. 

There are other things to fix up in there, like rewiring the controllers, rewire the test button, break and replace the coin door locks, vacuuming the inside of the cab from ages of dirt and grime, and changing the fan in the power supply...possibly adding more fans for the heck of it.

Oh, and if you haven't noticed, there is another arcade cabinet next to the Neo Geo cab. That's another project for another time.

Re-re-REvisit of the 3d printer...

I've been hella lazy blogging...anyway...

I've had some problems with my 3D printer for a while now. I've just been getting crappy first layers and overall bad quality prints. It's been a few months, but I've finally was able to tune my printer, getting some maintenance done on it (around the beginning of the year). Here's some things I've learned from that.

- I used my wire cutters to clip off old plastic hanging out at the nozzle. Apparently, I shouldn't have done that. Doing that made the tip of the nozzle become messed up (nozzle is made out of brass, so it's very soft). So I changed the nozzle with a brand new one...but then the next problem cam up.

- I manhandled the old extruder nozzle off the old heater block with some pliers. Again, shouldn't have done this as part of the nozzle broke off in the heater block. This caused filament to leak out from the sides of the nozzle. Proper way of removing the nozzle is to heat up the extruder THEN remove the nozzle.

So needless to say, I had to change out the filament throat, heater block, and install a new nozzle. There was some issues getting the thermister as well as the heating element to fit properly in the new heater blocks, but after a little modification, I got it to work.

I've also greased up the bearings on all axis and changed the firmware from the stock Anet A8 to Marlin. I'd have to say that I would HIGHLY recommend updating the firmware, if anything, for safety reasons as the firmware has a thermal break on it, halting printing or even pre-heating if it doesn't detect the proper temps or there is a thermal runaway.

So after tuning the printer, I'm happy to say that the printer is back printing like a champ.

Death of a semi-decent PC...

Remember when I mentioned that I was slowly kinda making my computer a semi-decent gaming rig? Well, the other night I was welcomed to a blue screen.

...damn...

I figured something happened to the OS (deleted something wrong, bad driver install, etc), so I ended up killing the drive and trying to reinstall Windows.

I first installed Windows 7. It installed ok, but then immediately blue screened on me.

I then tried Windows 10, and it blue screened on me during the installation!

Tried a few Linux distros, both worked, but neither one detected my USB Wi-Fi thing.

This was all in one evening. I kinda gave up and tried the following night. A co-worker of mine mentioned that the hard drive might be going out, and I have had several do that to me before. I've also had capacitors burst in some computers causing failures.

That night, I started up my computer again with the intention to try the Linux distro. I noticed that when I tried to load the distro, there was some kind of failure warning that I couldn't figure out. Again, the distro didn't find my wifi thing, so I gave up and tried to reinstall Windows...again.

I noticed, this time, that there is a system diagnostics option that I can do at boot time. Running this gave me an error...not on the hard drive, but on the memory test.

!?!

I opened up the case to remove one of the sticks and see if it was one, the other, or both that were failing, also checking for bad caps while I was in there (there was none). I took one memory stick out and ran the test. First test gave me the error. I ran it again, and it gave me another error.

I swapped out the sticks and ran the test. This time it didn't give me errors. Ran it again to make sure, no error.

So, just because I didn't want to go back to running 4GB RAM again, I put one of the old 2GB sticks in and ran the test, which worked perfectly. It's not the 8GB I had, but I'll take 6GB.

With that done, I just need to get everything reinstalled on my computer...ugh...

Stuff, stuff, and more stuff...

Well. I really don't have much to blog about most days.

I've repaired my friend's JVC X'Eye. It's been a year and a half, but all it really needed was a new laser for the disc drive. Luckily, he had some spare ones that worked perfectly.

Did a swap meet a few weeks ago. I was able to sell off a box of doubles/crap games that I just needed to get rid of. Managed to get a game to add to my "Pulse Label" Famicom games, closing the collection to 2 more to find.

I also *kinda* managed to get a PS4 fight stick, still need to break it in.

Goodwill finds? I managed to find a Blu-ray/VHS player. Pretty much holy grail. Also found a Dell touchscreen computer for cheap! All I needed was a hard drive to test it out. Several operating system tests later, got it working, running Win 10.

 I guess I failed to mention my Christmas gift as well. I got a really nice desoldering gun. Tested it on a few boards I had laying around. Works perfect. Bring on some recapping projects!

That's it for now. I know I lack pics, but I'll hopefully start bringing more in.

I should really stop watching repair videos...

It seems that there are a lot of console repair videos that have been popping up in my YouTube feed, from pros to amateurs doing mods and repairs. The amateurs go online and pick up broken consoles on the cheap and repair them.

...the temptation is real.

I think after I fixed the Jaguar and a few NES consoles, I've been back in repair/mod mode. There are quite a few consoles that popped up on eBay that I wouldn't mind getting, but with Christmas coming up, I'll have to put those on hold.

My Turbo Everdrive is officially dead. I might have to send it out to get repaired, but only time will tell.