Another year goes flying past, some projects have progressed a little, some have sat there waiting for me to have the time and / or money to progress them. Still two things have happened, the first is that I have been and checked all of my untested PCB's, so I can update the list to reflect what is actually there.
The second is that I have been doing some improvements to the virtual pinball machine. I quite likes the idea of using a real DMD in there, because the LCD just looks naff, and there is indeed a nice gadget that lets you drive a DMD from a PC. However, it only really works with Virtual Pinball, and my cab mainly uses Future Pinball. So, dug out the C compiler, and spent some time coding up a driver that lets you intercept the DMD data from Future Pinball and display it on a real DMD screen. Here is some video of it working with a Future Pinball table called Tutenkham connected up to the real plasma DMD display on my Twilight Zone. (The DMD for the virtual pinball has been ordered, but they are on a long lead time!)
Time to update the website again - what happens in the gaps - I wish I knew!
Had a problem with the backlight failing on the ABI 4000, so sent off for a cheap generic inverter PCB from ebay, and here's how to fit it.
Original Inverter
Carefully remove the two pins from the plastic connector, these then fit
directly into the socket on the new card. One fitted quite snugly, but the other
was a little loose. We can sort this out later.
remove the black and red wires from the original inverter, red is 12v, black is
ground (on mine anyway, you may want to check this). These can then be soldered
to the pads on the new inverter, red to VIN and black to GND.
This board has an extra enable signal, which needs to be set high to trigger the
board. For this we need 5v - I got this from the 4th pin up on the monitor plug
(see lower picture) and connected this direct to the 'ON' pad. You may wish to
connect this via a resistor to avoid a direct short in case of failure, but I
just wired it directly.
finally, to mount the board and make sure the loose tube connection didn't fall
out, I used hot melt glue at each end.
Replacement Inverter
Just to prove it now works ...
Hopefully more site updates to come and I will finally fill in some of the missing pages. New PCB's for the multigame testing to be completed as I also picked out a couple of galaxian PCB's to test them on and sorted out my old loom (it was getting rather ragged in places and was probably causing most of the faults I was seeing!)
