Thanks both! Just wanted to be sure, since the angle of the bracket doesn't make it completely obvious.
In bigger news, WE HAVE POWER!
Ignore the colours, it's just bad room lighting (and photography).
It's a big moment. All the major electronics are working, so I press the magic power button, PC starts up, and a couple of seconds later the monitor and marquee light fire up. So the smart switch thing seems to be doing its job, although I had ONE time where the machine had been running for about a minute and it powered off the light and monitor again, so it must have thought the PC wasn't busy or something. Really hoping that was a one-off, because the whole approach to cabinet power fails (no point having a power switch for the PC if the monitor and marquee are always on!).
I'd done some work early last year on setting up CRT emudriver and so some bits came together quite quickly. I've got groovymame and attractmode in place but only vaguely tested, but at least it meant I could fire up a game and get a picture and judge results. I came a bit more unstuck with Wreck It Ralph (formerly Fixit Felix
) because it sent the monitor out of range and I hadn't immediately realised the cause.
Even after closing the game my monitor remained out of play until I reduced the H size on the monitor (resulting in "double desktop" but at least I could see). It turned out that my desktop resolution had been happily running at 640 X 480 interlaced from my work last year, but the Fixit game seems to switch resolution (assuming to 640 X 480 progressive, although I could have this wrong) and then leaves me in that state. ArcadeOSD to the rescue got my desktop back as it was, once I figured out the problem, leaving me with the problem that my Wreck It Ralph cabinet might not be able to run Wreck It Ralph. Luckily I found that by changing the settings of the game to NOT run full screen that it still can run "full screen" but doesn't mess with the resolution. So things are looking good.
In slightly worse news, it appears that monitor (not Sanyo, it's a Wells Gardner 19K7689) isn't in perfect health. There's a vertical band on the left side of the screen (in vertical orientation) where the colour is off and where the image is compressed. You can see it on the left three digits of WiR here:
The colour band is more noticeable in other games - here's AttractMode:
And Bomb Jack's calibration grid clearly shows the distortion:
I suspect that someone knowledgeable is going to tell me that I need a cap kit (or worse). Can't say I'm particularly looking forward to that as an option. I'm looking at the circuit board and trying to figure how practical that is to remove without removing the monitor from the cabinet, and I'm wondering at my skill at replacing what looks like quite a LOT of capacitors! I've done a couple on a boiler PCB in the past, but if you change TWO and something doesn't work afterwards then you have limited places to look. But the biggest challenges is probably even GETTING such a kit in the UK. It's pretty expensive to ship stuff in, and thanks to some new customs laws a load of companies outside of the UK have now stopped shipping here completely. How practical is it to identify and source the capacitors manually?
Of course, if someone points out that the issue has some much easier solution then that's even better
I'm also tempted to come back to this particular problem later since it'd be nice to finish this project and then tinker later rathen that add a load of delay and risk at this point. Obviously I don't want to create worse issues by leaving it though, if that's possible.
Still, it's still a big moment for this project. The end is in sight. Now, need some controls....