Tuesday 4 February 2014

Pole Position. Chequered Flag in sight


It's been a long time since the last update and tbh I've spent more time playing PP that finishing it off :) To recap from the last update back in August '13, I had just purchased a working boardset and had fired up the cab and played a few games. 

Fast forward 24 hours and the game didn't run correctly I was greeted with a blue screen on the monitor with a 'RAM 22' error. Mark from Retroclinic kindly sent me a hand full of them and after replacing the faulty RAM the game still didn't work! eek, ok so what had happened, well my ARII had shat its load. The 2N3055 Transistor had failed and caused the ARII to output around 7 volts (from memory. It may have been 8 volts) well this had the effect of blowing a protection diode on the CPU board, so a week later Mark had sorted it at my expense, and I had replaced the offending 2n3055's on both ARII's. The game was working once again.

Not content with using the ARII's for fear of similar failures I decided to go down the route of installing a switcher PSU into the cab to run the gameboards' leaving the ARII's to run the audio amplification.

Running a switch mode power supply for the 5V supply
I jumpered the 5V line and the ground lines across test points throughout both boards, and removed the 5V edge connector feeds which came from the ARII. Fingers crossed the board have been playing fine for months now.

Next I needed to make a back door for the cab, I had already remade the bottom section of the cab when I was initially putting it together, but with having a new mdf door, it made sense to remake to bottom section so it all matched.

Rear Door made and hole cut ready for a lock
Another new bottom section of the cab
Fitted to the cab ready for paint

I still need to spray the door, that will get done in the first instance of some fine dry weather. After that it will be painting the coin doors (the frame is already done), remounting the mechs and then making a cardboard monitor surround. I'll get there soon!