A back shed in a country town

I  made a visit to a mate's house in the country today. We first crossed paths through a wanted ad on Gumtree (I sold him a Loewe Calida) and have been fighting the good fight together ever since. The thing that really blows my mind is that a fellow SCART hunter lives in the country town that I grew up and went to school in! The world is a crazy place more often than not...

Anyway, Rob kindly let me take photos of his shed and his amazing console collection. He's got some real treats tucked away in his bunker! Check it out:

Rob's shed

My kind of workbench!

My kind of mess!

Rob showed me his latest acquisitions and I was mighty impressed! There were two things in particular that caught my eye: a Leader signal generator and an Extron 16 input RGBHV router! Very cool toys!

Leader test signal generator - very cool unit!

Leader Multiformat Pattern Generator LT 448

Testing out a baby Sony PVM

Checker board, cross hatch, colour bars, it's all possible!

Also, this cool looking test card.

Street Fighter Zero 2 running RGB from the Sega Saturn

Extron video router... serious!

BNC city! Note the blue audio inputs that also switch. Handy!

3 Nanao monitors sitting idle. Some decent Sega Rally burn in on one!

A quirky duo of Commodore and Thomson monitors. Both with SCART!

Next, we went inside to see Rob's amazing console collection:

How many do you recognise?! Beefy Marantz and JBL sound system too...

Street Fighter Zero looking magic on the Loewe Calida 5072

Street Fighter 4 on a CRT. Glorious!

So much purple! Great depth of field effects...

5 of the best!

Final Fight re-packaged... quite interesting, the options available.

Never seen one of these before! 3DO

Afterburner remade... even this recent game looks amazing on CRT!

Finally, we went into the lounge room to check out Rob's 16:9 Philips. I was soon distracted by what I saw in the corner...

Street Fighter II hooked up to a PC via an ArcadeVGA card

I only had an hour and a half for my visit but I could stayed a lot longer if I'd been able. So much cool stuff! Amazing!

Sharp Image in a better light

Before I sent the Sharp Image back to Jomac, I couldn't resist testing the chassis with a couple other tubes. I tried out another "black standard" Phillips and experienced the same geometry problems as before:

Phillips A66EAK071X11

Great focus, colours and contrast... but, err... one problem!

This was a shame because the newer "black standard" Phillips tubes have such dark blacks and more vivid colours. The older EAK tubes look greyer when they're turned off and have less contrast between highlights and black backgrounds when operating. The whole point of buying a universal chassis was have an analogue chassis driving one of these excellent newer tubes.

As a final test, I hooked the screen up to an older Phillips A66EAK71X11 tube. Bingo! The geometry came good! Still, compared to my analogue Blaupunkt, the geometry still wasn't quite as good and since there was none of the advantage I was hoping to get from using a "black standard" type Phillips, I still figured the best thing to was to send the chassis back. The Blaupunkt still looked better so there just wasn't any point keeping the Sharp Image.

Image is correct but what's the advantage over my Blaupunkt?

Well, that explains things...

So, it turns out that the warped image that my universal chassis was showing is due to an incompatibility between the Sharp Image chassis and the Phillips tube that I paired it with. Boo hoo! That means that comparing the Blaupunkt and Sharp Image isn't really a fair contest since the Sharp Image is working with a monitor it doesn't like. Here's what Joey from Jomac had to say:


"Mate honestly that picture looks awful , I know exactly what's causing it but it's not something I can do remotely or without the same tube here , I wouldn't be happy with that either the way it is. , fortunately it's not a issue with most tubes , for some reason it only appears on some of the Euro types with moulded yokes but still not all , I think you would have heard by now if this was a general issue."

I guess that means that the images I posted aren't really indicative of how these chassis usually operate. It also means that I'm out of luck in when it comes to a universal chassis.

Pots progress

I received a few packages last week: 1 from Digikey, 1 from Jomac and 1 from Ozstick. After getting straight into the latter two (and subsequently feeling pretty disappointed with the combined result), I spent today working with the 6 Vishay potentiometers I bought from Digikey for my Blaupunkt IS70-33 VTN television.

It was a pretty fiddly operation and soldering was sweaty work on a 34 degree Celsius day. However, it was a complete success! I now have external analogue controls for V-size, V-position, H-size and H-position (pincushion and trapezium are still to come). I even wired things so that the direction of the pots is intuitive (e.g. clockwise expands the height, anticlockwise moves the image left). With these controls outside the TV case and at the front of the screen, I can now quickly perfect the borders for every game I load up in GroovyMAME!

The cool thing with this setup is that you don't have to compromise. GroovyMAME does a great job of centring the image for each modeline and gets pretty damn close in most cases. With these extra knobs for size and position controls I can quickly account for the last few millimetres and get things PERFECT. The other cool thing is that you can adjust for games like Metal Slug that normally has a built in border. Once the pots are mounted in the TV casing (meaning I don't have to pick each one up to adjust), the whole process will be under 10 seconds for each game.

Now I just need to drill some holes! I practised today on a spare Loewe input plate that I have. However, the plastic started to tear and rip once the drill bit got halfway. Probably gonna need a better drill than the crappy Ozito I borrowed from work. Can't wait to finish this little project!

External controls held in place by a Siemens RC

Metal Slug minus the borders

Bubble Bobble spot on!

Universal chassis arrives!

My universal chassis from Jomac arrived yesterday! I feverishly hooked it all up last night. As a start, you can read a little about my experience here. I'll have a full report posted sometime on the weekend. Gonna be fun putting this thing through its paces!

Game Over

Something bad and sad happened today. After a flurry of tube swapping, my antique Grundig CUC 4635 chassis went up in smoke. I left one of the connectors off (not the HV anode though!) after swapping the chassis back from testing a different tube. When I powered on there was a hiss, some smoke and then a sinking feeling in my stomach. I found the burnt resistor and replaced it but it was no use. There must have been some further damage down the line. Since I don't have the skills needed to repair something so complicated I took a deep breath and started tearing it down. I put all the circuit boards in a cardboard box and off it went to the tip with a pile of my other junk. Pretty sad. This was the best chassis I've tried so far and I reckon the chances of another one coming along in this day and age are pretty slim. Luckily, I had just ordered a universal chassis from Jomac so I didn't cry. I guess it was good to get my experimenting out of the way using a chassis I paid $0 for. I still kicked myself though! Oh well. Live and (hopefully) learn.

RIP Grundig