Star Wars/ revenge form Mars Replacemnt LCD retro Kit

[Jeff AMN]

How would this be considered spam?!

[Rickn]

Gee, if it is spam, I apologize. I was just trying to get other peoples opinionin order to answer these vary questions asked early in the thread/ post.

[ChadTower]

Has someone here actually bought the kit?  If they have I'd like to talk to them directly.

[Jeff AMN]

I don't see the reason behind giving a guy a hard time that's trying to improve the options for people who are looking to repair, maintain, or restore pinball machines. Rick is a well-known and well-respected guy around here, especially with the arcade fellas, and I don't see why he should be catching any flak for asking the community's help in improving his products.

[ChadTower]

I don't see the reason behind giving a guy a hard time that's trying to improve the options for people who are looking to repair, maintain, or restore pinball machines. Rick is a well-known and well-respected guy around here, especially with the arcade fellas, and I don't see why he should be catching any flak for asking the community's help in improving his products.

I'm not giving him a hard time - I would really like to talk to someone who has the kit.  The only real issue I have is the fact that I asked him a direct question multiple times and got nothing even resembling an answer.  It isn't smart to buy pricey specialized products without the ability to ask questions beforehand.

[ChadTower]

If you are interested the LCD with the mounting plate is $360 USD plus freight.

Rickn
Rick@niemandisplays.com

That's what I have been going by.

[truevidiot]

Hello guys,

I have Rick’s the LCD kit in my RFM pinball from http://niemandisplays.com/
Rick has a large warehouse in the Cambridge, ON area and has been in the arcade display field for 30+ years. I have been bringing him games from my route to fix or retro fit CRT and LCD into for around 3 years and he has always been a great help and always goes the extra mile for my self and others.

My RFM kit as explained from Rick is a commercial frame LCD monitor with a custom metal formed monitor bezel that fits into the existing RFM tube cut out to replace the old CRT.

The biggest draw for me is that Rick was able to correct the sync problems that I had when testing other monitors like the ones from Happ. Most monitors have an auto configuration button that would not sync up with the game. The picture was always to the right or left and took 10 to 15 times for the monitor to center up the screen. I would try to set it manually but the LCD controls would not let me adjust the picture over enough and some monitors just jumped around.  I believe what is happen is when I turned off the game and back on the LCD would auto center the VGA signal sent to it first from the mother board. When the Prism board took over and changed it to CGA the LCD would auto adjust again and I would be left with an out of sync or out of range display and found my self hitting the auto configuration button again and again to get a playable picture. Rick was able to program his LCD to perform flawless in all modes and didn’t have any problems when cycling the machine on and off.

Brightness issues: I like the black to be black as black can be. But others like the LCD brighter and didn’t care much about the black being a little lighter. The LCD has good range so if you like the black, Black or brighter the controls are there.

When I brought the pinball to Rick I had a hand made wood bracket with a CGA LCD that I picked up from Betson. I was having noise issues and the sync problems listed above. The wood painted black was holding the LCD in and blocking the light that was leaking through from the fluorescent light. I used wood to fill the space were the CRT was and it changed the height or distance from the LCD to playfield glass. I kinda noticed that the graphics didn’t correspond well with the action on the playfield. It could have been the spacing or the sync problems not sure. I was happy with my handy work but in retrospect it was junk compared to what is in my machine now.

Off topic:  “CGA VGA adapter” they are crap I have tried to use them on other project with poor success. I don’t want to get into any long winded debate but I was happy selling my units off on ebay for $25 to get rid of them. 


The thing I can’t show you is how great this thing looks. Colors jump out with vibrates and the game looks crisp and clear like the day I got her. For some of you who have had the chance to see it know and see the difference especially when I place it next to a CRT version.  His frame work is custom fitted. It tightly fits the LCD and acts like a picture frame masking out unviewable areas.
The use of metal to hold the LCD greatly reduced the spacing needed to mount the LCD so the distance between the LCD and playfield glass matched the old CRT so graphics seem to interact better with the playfield below.

This weekend I brought the playfield down to wood and gave her a good cleaning and replace the playfield lights with LEDs from http://www.cointaker.com  (also great people) and she looks hot.

Seeing is believing…

Troy

[Rickn]

Chad, I apologize, if I did not answer your question, I guess I missed it. As you probably know I try hard to help anywhere I can. For example your questions about the flyback.
If the question was the difference between an industrial (more specifically ours) and a retail LCD goes, here are a few:
- our LCD takes CGA/Standard and mid res signals direct, no converter (mentioned earlier)
- Support, we stock replacement boards should some time in the future your LCD does have a problem.
- Board design and components are selected for an industrial enviroment, this allows them to be used as some of our customers do in applications such as CNC machines and other process control markets. That is why the US Army had us develop a custom 26" for them.
- Many retail LCD and even our competitions do not have the ability to adjsut some of the parameters such as size and position as well as others.

Hope this helps and that it is the question you refer to, sorry I missed it. Perhaps the post by Troy above helps with the rest.