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Small update this time, but felt important enough to warrant getting an update out.

V3.0.127.
- corrected a bug related to certain touch inputs being able to trigger a back pill double press while in chains of menus.

I believe I've reached "cheap retro gaming TV nirvana." I did some more dialing in and the results via component video are just incredible with this chassis! I have a Sony PVM, a couple of larger TVs I've RGB moddded, and another one I've done an s-video mod on. None of the tubes (even the small PVM) look as good as this one. It's a Philips CRT, so I wasn't sure how good the color purity would actually be. But I do have quite the unfair advantage due to the tube being practically mint, pegging the needles on an emissions test. This TV was just dumped in someone's front yard!

I appreciate you giving people another good option for converting from RGB to component, but in my case I won't be needing it since I have my Wii for some emulators and fat PS2 for my PSX/PS2 games. S-video is an option too but I haven't been a fan of the color smearing and offset the NTSC decoders these Toshiba 88XX series chips have.

The pictures I got didn't do it justice at first, so I boosted the color saturation in the these photos to best reflect how the games look to the eye. I also used to help out with a family arcade operator for many years growing up and after the mods, this thing looks every bit as good as a brand new arcade monitor running on RGB.

https://www.imgur.com/a/NUgpvlB

Hey there,

I have an older solo XArcade. I want to play Mortal kombat x and need to get a Trimode board installed so steam and the game see my stick as an XBOX 360 controller.
Last night I installed the board and the following happened.

The x arcade showed up in joy.cpl in mode 1 and 2 as x arcade joystick.
In mode 1 pressing the program button would not make the light turn on and off.
Mortal kombat x locked on the faction update screen when xarcade was in mode 4
Mortal kombat x would enter game in mode 1 but the stick was inoperative.


I have pulled the connectors, checked for bent pins and reseated them.
I tried to do a firmware update for the solo board but the firmware program did not recognize. I had a controller attached.
I did a firmware update for the dual stick out of desperation. And that had no effect, even though the firmware update did go through.
I tried unplugging it and tapping the programming button to drain it of memory, but that was ineffective.
I tried the stick on two separate computers and it displayed the same behavior on both.

The stick worked great in mame With the old board that was in it.
The stick worked great in quake with the new board on mode one.

I'm not sure if I have made a basic wiring error, if the new board requires a different wiring pattern, then the old board.
I'm not sure if the new board I got was d o a.
I'm not sure if there's some special hoop. I need to jump through because i'm using a solo x. Arcade and not a dual stick configuration.

I'm not sure if it's just some x factor I don't know about.

If anybody could point me in the right direction, I would be much obliged.

Hi Thooperman - Sorry for the late reply, I haven't checked the forum in a while.

I'm happy to help if I can, but I'm not actually sure what you mean when you mention 'arcade fade screens' - are you talking about the marquee screen, or the background 'splash' screen that is displayed when selecting a game in BigBox, or something else?

Suzo-Happ has just recently exited the amusement parts business: https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/suzo-happ-apparently-gone-it-seems-tnt-amusements.565170/page-5

You might try contacting Twisted Coin to see if they have any in inventory.

They looked like the standard Happ/Suzo concave pushbuttons availible today, but the microswitch was mounted vertically in the button.

Those are "Suzo Happ Ultimate Pushbuttons" -- not sure if IL ever made them or what name they might have called them. (IL joysticks have different names than the Happ version of the same stick.)

There are several sites that carry them, but the two I looked at were pretty expensive. (Amazon and GameRoomGuys)

Not sure if there are any vendors on your side of the pond that carry them.   


Scott

Hi,

When i built my first cabinet back in the 2000:s, I bought controls directly from HAPP in the US (I'm in Sweden). I can't exactly remember what they where called, but I think it was something along the lines of "Happ competition pushbutton".

They looked like the standard Happ/Suzo concave pushbuttons availible today, but the microswitch was mounted vertically in the button. I would like to get my hands on a few more buttons of the same kind but can't seem to find them anywhere. Have they simply gone out of production? I really liked them for two reasons: You could replace them without taking the microswitch off and they had a more responsive "click" (according to me anyway).

Does anyone remember these button? Is there anywhere to get a hold on a few of them?

Kind regards
/Freppz

I was never as big a regular as most of you but I still love this site and glad it is still around. Hope you are all well

Moved a couple of times in the last few years and every time I’ve had to downsize. So no more room for real pinball machines, only my pincab.  No more mame arcade cabinet, only RPi5 to do the job .  Still in VR though, waiting for the steam frame .  Still play VR golf almost daily with two Swedish friends and a California guy

That awesome! You seem to be across it and your pics look good too.

Yeah I've pored over dozens of schematics and actual TVs and they often had these funny variations that didn't seem to make sense, although maybe they do if you consider that most customers were only looking for a cheap TV to watch soap operas and shopping channels. So low cost & quality video was the game, blurry was sometimes better. They were optimised to make a composite/RF input look good, rather than high quality YPbPr or RGB signals.

The input schema/circuit above attempts to provide a baseline input arrangement for 90's/2000's YUV-capable TVs with similar jungles, and the same principles work as a starting point for RGB mods.

Now what you need is a GreenAntz transcoder (see link in my sig below) so you can convert the component TV into an RGB monitor for retrogaming & videos 

I should have guessed lol, so many of the transcoders I've tried have had a miswired RCA. Doesn't bother me at all. I totally understand how you must feel. Don't sweat it.

I flipped the cables around and re-troubleshooted my mode lines and I'm feeling really good about how it looks. I feel like there are just a lot of subtle improvements that have been added to the picture that I'm really appreciating, and I can't wait to tune in the 240p mode line and see how that looks as well.

Really appreciate your dedication to a clean component transcoder, really doing gods work.