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Universal chassis arrives (and so do the problems & questions)

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Paradroid:
So, two packages arrived today! Pretty good timing since the I needed both components (chassis and video amp) before I could start experimenting with this.

The universal chassis that Jomac sent me for my Phillips tube turned out to be a Sharp Image. Don't know if that's a reputable brand or not but it looks nice and shiny. Also, the board itself is actually quite small which means I'll easily be able to stuff it in my gutted Loewe CT1170 television case.

After messing around soldering and patching all the cables (power, H and V monitor inputs, degauss coil, etc.) I was able to pull an image. At first it was all scrambled until I messed with the H and V holds on the wired remote control board. Once I got sync the image was upside down but a quick wire swap fixed that.

After next adjusting the focus, brightness and contrast I soon had a very sharp and stable image. Unfortunately, there's a major problem. If you look at the attached images you'll immediately see what I'm talking about.

I guess at this point I'm wondering if anyone has some ideas on what needs fixing before I start pestering Jomac? Is this something that needs changing with my modeline setup or is it purely a hardware issue? Of course, I had a fiddle with Arcade_OSD but didn't manage to rectify the situation.

One quick observation: coming from the world of SCART televisions, while actual image quality is looking very promising, it's certainly not leaps and bounds ahead of some of the SCART TVs I've used. In fact, the ancient Grundig I managed to fry last weekend would easily match the image quality here. However, the great thing is that this arcade chassis has literally 1/5 of the components. It's so minimal compared with the internals of a TV!

Back on topic, any suggestions regarding this issue are most welcome!

Calamity:
Hi Paradroid,

I think it could be a wrong polarity issue for hsync. Does your chassis have any switch for sync polarities?
Unfortunatly Arcade_OSD/CRT_Emudriver don't have the polarity stuff implemented. That is a must, I know, and it's top priority in my to-do list. By now you can use Winmodelines to tweak existing modeline polarities by software, that would tell us if that's the issue actually.

lettuce:
Surely going to these extents is a little OTT now for the ideal mame setup, after all i though it was to get the best possible TV to use for mame, this is moving further and further away from this? Wouldnt it been easier to just get a 15khz Arcade monitor and place that in the Lowes case?

Paradroid:

--- Quote from: Calamity on February 23, 2012, 07:11:01 am ---I think it could be a wrong polarity issue for hsync.
--- End quote ---

Spot on! Flipping both the H and V sync fixed the issue. I didn't think of that last night since every SCART TV I've had operates on negative sync.


--- Quote from: Calamity on February 23, 2012, 07:11:01 am ---Does your chassis have any switch for sync polarities?
--- End quote ---

Not that I know of. It didn't come with any documentation. Mostly, it's self explanatory though. Unfortunately, I have to change a jumper to go into 25kHz mode. So, no fast switching there... :( I'll have to spend some more time to work out the other functions.


--- Quote from: Calamity on February 23, 2012, 07:11:01 am ---Unfortunatly Arcade_OSD/CRT_Emudriver don't have the polarity stuff implemented. That is a must, I know, and it's top priority in my to-do list.
--- End quote ---

I guess your post kind of pre-empted my next question but I'm still going to ask it anyway: how soon can we have this? :) Gonna be a pain to set every mode manually otherwise.

Of course, I'll have plenty more to report in the coming days. I'm very interested to see how this rig compares to my SCART boards. So far, I suspect it's not going to be quite the world of difference I imagined (or was led to believe by the purists).

Thanks for your help!

Calamity:
Oh those are good news indeed.


--- Quote ---I guess your post kind of pre-empted my next question but I'm still going to ask it anyway: how soon can we have this? Smiley Gonna be a pain to set every mode manually otherwise.

--- End quote ---

I'll see if I can have it ready for this week. I'm preparing a new release of Vmmaker right now and this should get included, I've been lazy for not adding this feature before just because I didn't need it. Good news are that now I have someone with a suitable system for testing the sync polarity feature :)

Yeah you may have realized that arcade chassis are not a panacea either. I wish at least it behaves in a good analog way regarding picture centering and stuff.

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