just posted a bunch of photos from the gory disassembling that just took place. link is also over on the right, under ‘Photos’. enjoy!

so i promised an update to my peeps, and here it is. it’s wound up being a lot longer than i had intended, but i do tend to ramble on. please read on, though — i’m about to cover a lot of different topics. :)

CAB CLEANUP

so mitch and harrison and i met up at about 11:45 and went down to the cabinet to unmount the monitor. we brought tools and cleaning supplies with us, and within about 20 minutes we had the necessary bolts undone and the monitor out of the cabinet. we dumped the bezel and the cardboard thing that goes around it, and the monitor is ready for pickup now by whoever wants it. we cleaned the monitor glass a little, and there’s some bad ‘credits’ and ‘game over’ burn-in, so probably good that we’re tossing it. we had time left over so we cleaned up the rest of the cab as much as we could, vacuumed it up and wiped it down a little. it definitely looks nicer. i’ll be posting pics later this afternoon. the coinbox and marquee held up to the cleaning and will likely be kept. the rest of the cab is still crap since the sides are useless.

THE NEXT STEP

so mitch and harrison and i decided that we’re going to start the process of building a cab from scratch, unless an undamaged one comes up in the next few days for the Right Price.

AND ANOTHER THE NEXT STEP

SO — in the interim, because building the cabinet could take a little while getting everything together and having time and everything, we also decided to start putting the actual CPU together while we’re at it, so that if one half of the project slows down or is on hold for one reason or another, we have another half one we can work on until we get back to the first. tweaking the interface etc should provide hours of clueless entertainment. :)

what this means to you is that it’s time to bring in the spare PC parts that you’ve all so kindly donated! the running tally of what we have and what we need is here.

right now the things we still need are a HDD (possibly donated by steve, thanks!) and a DVD-ROM drive. i have a Geforce2 that we can use for now, but we’ll probably want a more powerful card once things get really rolling. does anyone have a spare HDD that they’d be willing to donate or sell for cheap? same thing for a DVD-rom drive.

jeff is going to bring in his mobo/cpu and RAM, and seth still has his power supply, and will be bringing it in. viv is bringing in her monitor! minus the DVD drive and cables, i think we have a whole working computer!

thanks to everyone who’s helped out so far,

-tony.

not being fans of burn-in and interlaced 15kHz video modes, we’ve decided to toss the monitor for these 20″ sgi monitors. craigslist, that ephemeral phenom of internet flea markets, coughed up a taker for our monitor within thirty minutes of my having posted the ad. granted, we’re giving it away, but still. it saves us a trip to the hazardous waste recycling plant and lets us move on to the next phase of the project — what to do with the actual cabinet? keep for now, or go MDF shopping?

*sigh*. i think that until we rebuild the cabinet, we’re kinda stuck for it. i kind of want a nice fresh cab to drop into our laps, which i doubt is going to happen. i just need to decide to do it and get it over with, i think. :P

so i went out back after lunch and wrote down everything i could about the monitor we have in the cabinet. hopefully kurt will know more about whether this monitor is one that we want to keep or toss, and we can go from there.

here’s the specs:

• Wells Gardner monitor
• model# 19K4903
• chassis serial #: WG484120
• manufactured: September 1982
• CRT type: 19VLTP22 19VMCP22 19VMKP22
• RCA manufactured tube
• Taito serial #: 145264
• PIX tube serial #: WG484120 (same as chassis ser#)

sounds dry and boring, but hopefully that will scare up some pertinent info. :)

viviana’s spare monitor is also available, and she says she has a spare keyboard, which we need.

i had written our local electricity guy about helping us to test the arcade monitor, and he wrote back today, saying that he’d be available. we’re going to try and get some specs on the monitor, do a little net research and see what we can find out about how to go about testing the signal. i’ll head out there after lunch and see if i can get any useful info off the guts.

well, no sign of monitors from viv yet, but no worries — mitch and i just picked up two SGI monitors from work. TWO! we’re not sure which one is in better condition yet, but we’ll find out and keep the best one.

So i’m thinking sad thoughts about having to potentially rebuild the cabinet because the gorramn sides are puffy all around the edges where the MDF has absorbed too much moisture. maybe its previous home was a bathhouse? or a bar where people had water guns? who knows. anyway, there’s just not much we can do about it (from a salvage standpoint), save trying to sand it and then laquer over it. and i bet you can guess how successful that’s going to be.

which leads us to trying to trace the sides of the cabinet to get approximate dimensions, and/or getting plans online and adapting them to use (and/or just building the damn thing over from scratch).

in the brief amount of searching i’ve done so far, i’ve found this plan at MAMEWorld (the ‘Galagads’ plan). it’s fairly informative, and even if we can ultimately use it, will help us design our own. i’ll post more as i find them. if anyone’s reading this and knows of a useful cabinet plan resource, post a comment and let me know. i’d be uber-grateful.

Just real fast, i’ve added an inventory link to help keep track of the items we have and what we still need. it’s over there on the right, under the ‘Inventory’ category of links.

looks like if our arcade monitor is a bust, we’ll have a loaner PC monitor to use until we decide on a final video solution. Viviana has graciously donated an old 19″ monitor for us to use. yayyy parts!

now all we have to do is clean the damn thing.

which will happen some day this week.

we hope.

so our golden axe monitor is very probably busted and no good. i’ll hold onto hope until we can test it, but i’m certainly not going to hold my breath or anything. it is a standard resolution monitor though, which is what we’d want.

so i wrote a friend of mine and asked what he used for his MAME cabinet, and he reports that the Wells-Gardner D9200 is the ‘cadillac of arcade monitors’, but i think i’d be happy with just about any of their product line. Not that we could probably afford one, given our nonexistent budget. maybe a TV, maybe an old computer monitor, maybe a used arcade monitor. we’ll have to take what we can get.

it’s also time to get rags and sponges and buckets out of the closet — next week is (hopefully) the beginning of cleaning!