It's... ALIVE!

Monday night is "movie night". A group of us get together, have dinner, chat and then, if we don't get carried away with talking, watch a film or TV series (Twin Peaks at the moment). We rotate between 3 different locations so everyone takes it in turn to be chef, video hirer and beer supplier.

It's pretty rare that we miss a Monday 'cause everyone is committed to this little gathering. However, tonight was one of those rare nights... So, one guess what I did with the extra hours I suddenly had on my hands...

Well, it's finally finally complete! My Blaupunkt IS 70-33 VTN (chassis number 310.32) now has 6 external controls neatly mounted on the front panel under the screen. Everything is screwed back together and the guts are no longer hanging out the back. Everything is back to the original state except for the H-size, H-position, V-size, V-position knobs on the left and pincushion and trapezium controls on the right.

I have to say, this was a pretty momentous moment on my CRT/SCART/MAME journey! Up there with the golden moments like the first time I got a VGA to SCART cable working or first ran a progressive resolution using Soft 15-kHz.

With these external controls it's incredibly simple to get every resolution in MAME looking perfect. GroovyMAME does its best to get things right and then a few tweaks later I have perfect sizing and geometry. The cool thing is that you can adjust for things that GroovyMAME doesn't account for such as the inbuilt borders in the Metal Slug games or games that have scores and credit text pushed hard against a border.

Check out how the finished product looks! I'm pretty pleased considering I would never have dreamed of doing something like this when I first got into this hobby!

Front panel complete!

Pots mounted behind the front panel

Control cables soldered to the chassis

Phillips A66EAK220X01 tube taken from a Loewe Contur 770

And now for the games... Look at all those tidy borders!

Street Fighter 2

Mortal Kombat

Golden Axe

Last Blade 2

Robocop

Legend of Hero Tonma

R-Type Leo

Metal Slug 3 (no borders!)

Aliens

Super Street Fighter 2

There are stills things to do: tidy up the internal wiring usual cable ties, finish cleaning the inside of casing, fine tune the GroovyMAME monitor specs, etc. but basically this project has reached its goal!

Might be time to actually play a game... ;)