 |
| Hatch backs rule for CRT freaks |
 |
| Grundig as passenger! Sanyo on the floor |
 |
| Boxed chassis piled in the back |
Showing posts with label Siemens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Siemens. Show all posts
Monday, 13 August 2012
Road trippin'
This must have looked pretty funny to other travellers on the road yesterday! My mate Rob carted away some SCART relate goodies for our combined CRT future fund...
Sunday, 12 August 2012
Siemens up close
Handed the mega Siemens FS 247 V6 over to a worthy recipient today.
With two grown men on the job the stair climb wasn't too bad. We opened up the casing and cleaned out years of dust with my trusty air compressor. Discovered some interesting repair work that involves some funky trace patching. Guess this thing got too hot for its own good somewhere along the line!
Fiddled with the focus pot a bit and wiped down the screen. This TV really is pretty exceptional: huge visible area and lovely image quality.
Anyway, it's on its way to a new home now! Lucky for this TV it'll have a second life instead of heading to land fill.
With two grown men on the job the stair climb wasn't too bad. We opened up the casing and cleaned out years of dust with my trusty air compressor. Discovered some interesting repair work that involves some funky trace patching. Guess this thing got too hot for its own good somewhere along the line!
Fiddled with the focus pot a bit and wiped down the screen. This TV really is pretty exceptional: huge visible area and lovely image quality.
Anyway, it's on its way to a new home now! Lucky for this TV it'll have a second life instead of heading to land fill.
 |
| Siemens FS 247 V6 |
 |
| Rear view |
 |
| Multi colour SCART ports! |
 |
| Patched traces |
 |
| Hole |
 |
| Toshiba A76KJJ96X08 |
 |
| P-47 |
 |
| Rainbow Islands |
 |
| Shinobi |
 |
| Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles |
 |
| R-Type Leo |
Thursday, 9 August 2012
Super Siemens!
Spotted a Siemens for free on Gumtree last week. The ad said it was 26" so I was expecting a Philips A66 tube type model, just like the others Siemens I've seen. There was no photo in the Gumtree ad so you can imagine my surprise when I went to the owner's house and saw the size of this thing! It was fortunate that the bubbly women giving the TV away was up for a bit of heavy lifting. Despite my enthusiasm there's just no way I could have got this thing out of the building, through the garden and into the car by myself!
Once home, I managed to move it into the foyer by lonesome but getting it up the stairs and into the apartment was completely out of the question! I got it to the first step and then gave up. Even a 84cm Metz isn't as heavy as this beast. I got one of them up the stairs by myself but this Siemens is just a whole other level of spinal destruction.
My neighours probably think I'm crazy because I setup my PC in the stairwell and fired up the TV. I even left it running for a few hours to see if was stable or not...
The picture quality is surprisingly good for such a huge screen. What's especially nice is that the non-100 Hz Grundig chassis inside doesn't have any of the annoying image artifacts that later jumbo TVs (such as the 84cm models by Loewe, Grundig and Metz that I've tried) have. Very nice!
This one is too big for me to keep but I'd definitely reccomend this chassis and tube combination for anyone after a monster CRT.
I'll try to upload some internal shots if I'm ever able to get it inside the house...
Once home, I managed to move it into the foyer by lonesome but getting it up the stairs and into the apartment was completely out of the question! I got it to the first step and then gave up. Even a 84cm Metz isn't as heavy as this beast. I got one of them up the stairs by myself but this Siemens is just a whole other level of spinal destruction.
My neighours probably think I'm crazy because I setup my PC in the stairwell and fired up the TV. I even left it running for a few hours to see if was stable or not...
 |
| PC and TV in the communal stair well! |
 |
| Siemens FS 247 V6 (chassis CS 9202) |
 |
| Ghouls'n Ghosts |
 |
| Golden Axe |
This one is too big for me to keep but I'd definitely reccomend this chassis and tube combination for anyone after a monster CRT.
I'll try to upload some internal shots if I'm ever able to get it inside the house...
Sunday, 26 February 2012
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!
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! |
Saturday, 25 February 2012
My second ever Siemens
Siemens TVs are pretty rare in Australia. I've only seen four in my time: 1 under a ton of hard rubbish, 1 on eBay (which is now in my lounge room), 1 in an alley way (with spray paint over the screen) and another recently advertised on eBay (keeping my other Siemens company in the lounge, as of today).
Siemens televisions house chassis made by Grundig. The first Siemens I bought was a digital chassis whereas the one I picked up today has a stack of lovely analog trimpots (Siemens chassis CS 9106 = Grundig chassis CUC 5630).
Having spent some time today messing with my new Sharp Image universal chassis and, frankly, feeling pretty disappointed by the geometry, I fired up the new Siemens to see how it compared. As I suspected it would, it kicks ass! Using the trimpots at the back you can get the borders nicely in MAME before starting a game. With the universal chassis it's much more of a compromise whereas the CUC 5630 let's you get very close to perfect geometry. Pretty crazy considering the Siemens cost me AUD $10 and the Sharp Image was AUD $240!
Hopefully I'll have a detailed comparison written up soon...
Siemens televisions house chassis made by Grundig. The first Siemens I bought was a digital chassis whereas the one I picked up today has a stack of lovely analog trimpots (Siemens chassis CS 9106 = Grundig chassis CUC 5630).
Having spent some time today messing with my new Sharp Image universal chassis and, frankly, feeling pretty disappointed by the geometry, I fired up the new Siemens to see how it compared. As I suspected it would, it kicks ass! Using the trimpots at the back you can get the borders nicely in MAME before starting a game. With the universal chassis it's much more of a compromise whereas the CUC 5630 let's you get very close to perfect geometry. Pretty crazy considering the Siemens cost me AUD $10 and the Sharp Image was AUD $240!
Hopefully I'll have a detailed comparison written up soon...
 |
| Siemens FS 237 M6 (chassis type CS 9106) |
 |
| Say your prayers dust, tomorrow you meet my air compressor! |
Monday, 30 January 2012
Diamonds in the rough
So, on the way to the Op Shop to drop off a Loewe and Blaupunkt I happened to turn down a dead end alley and found a cluster of TVs! The best kind too! It was like finding diamonds in Minecraft... except that the diamonds fall into lava... these TVs had been there for a while, out in the rain and mud. Amongst them was a Grundig and a Siemens. Two of the best types for SCART gaming! Shame.
 |
| Alley stash |
 |
| Grundig! |
 |
| Siemens FS-271 |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)