Fear of Frying

[mairsil]

If that title doesn't get attention, I don't know what will.

Anyway, in the next couple of weeks, I plan to completely replace the power and wiring portions of my converted Pit Fighter. Main reason is that some of the wiring is pretty ratty. It was converted into a Street Fighter Alpha 3 and I had to remove the kick harness because it actually had exposed wire in some places.

The second reason is that I am getting some interference in the monitor (typical ocean ripple). I think that it is being caused by the unshielded isolation transformer that is mounted right below the monitor in the PCB drawer. I am hoping that a shielded one will help the problem.

My main problem is that I don't want the machine to blow up when I am done with it and I don't want to fry while working on it. In particular, if the machine is completely unplugged, do I have to worry about live voltage being passed through the wiring to the monitor? I have no intention of grabbing the big red wire with one hand while licking a battery, standing in salt water and putting a penny in an electrical outlet with my other hand, but I want to be sure that I will be ok switching the RGB and sync wires.

Also, I plan to use a high quality computer power supply wired to a set of terminal blocks. I want to wire a matching molex connector to the terminal blocks so that I can unplug the terminal block and plug in a regular PC motherboard for easy MAMEing. I also need the extra 3.3V rail for my NAOMI board. Assuming that the line in goes to a standard AC distribution block before it gets to the PS, should there be any problems with this setup?

Any comments or help would be greatly appreciated.

[Tiger-Heli]

In particular, if the machine is completely unplugged, do I have to worry about live voltage being passed through the wiring to the monitor?

No, but you have to worry about any of the charged capacitors discharging in an undesirable way.