Some of you may remember that I sold my old Video Wizard MAME cab some months ago on ebay at a stunning loss. I'd really developed a strong attachment to the little cab over the three years that I had it, but unfortunately it just didn't fit with all of the white plastic and metal in my games room that is known as Candy
[The games room and landing and in fact the whole house has had a bit of a lick since that pic
]
I managed to get a very, very good deal on a Naomi chopdown with a complete brand new NNC kit. So a drive up north to somewhere approaching GeordieLand, and we stripped the cab down and fed it into the back of my car in pieces. Over the course of the following days, weeks and months I came to regret not paying more attention to the strip down process as the cab has proved to be a bit of a "TWA coffee" to reassemble!!!
First job was to rip out the JVS I/O and tray, and flog the tray off to AndyGeezer. This was then replaced with an Ultimarc I-Pac4.
I then cut all of the cabling to the JVS I/O, stripped the wires back, and connected them to the I-Pac4. In a remarkable piece of retrospective justification, the JVS I/O ended up functionally challenged i.e. borked!
Having got rid of the JVS I/O and tray, it appeared that I had to accommodate a little more than just the buttons and joysticks on the CP. I managed to mount the monitor remote board and the panel for the Test/Service/Demag buttons and the Volume pot. These are all still fully functional.
Next I had to thread all of the cabling through the legs of the cab to the base, and remove the tray containing the Sun JVS PSU and sound amp. I mounted the sound amp onto the pcb "breadboard" . I hope most of the connectors in the pic below are fairly obvious.
Time now to connect up the P.C. I built for this project. A very nice Shuttle SD30G2 Black Plus
It has an Intel Core2Duo E8500 [not overclocked], 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD, and a Sapphire Radeon X1550 512GB graphics card.
Running WinXP64 and the 64bit build of MAMEUIFX called from AdvMENU as my frontend.
I drilled out the "breadboard" to allow the network and power connections for the P.C. through from underneath the cab.
Next job I had to attend to was the marquee light. The one supplied looked a little worse for wear, and despite assurances that it was probably still fully functional, I decided to cut my losses, rip it out, and buy a striplight from Argos
I connected the light to the 240VAC inlet to the cab just on the right side of the noise filter.
I was really pleased about getting AdvMENU working with this cab, but it did take the installation of a graphics card to get everything running as it should. Also, it was nice to see the marquee light working.
All in all, I'm really pleased with the outcome, and I'm missing the Video Wizard less and less by the day now.
Any/all comments/feedba*k gladly received as always.
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