I received today...

[SuperPang]

I love the designs on the old Sigma stuff.

[ChrisBEANS]

Yeah, I can’t possibly ‘destroy’ it, but the rust and discolouration is a bit rough.

Bare minimum I need to do is address the rust, and I’ve no idea how without sanding out large parts of the original design anyway.

I’m leaning towards scanning it and putting an overlay on top (after sorting the rust) but open to all ideas!

[o1s1n]

Edit - I see you've another thread about this, won't derail this further.

[NASguy]

Looks fine to me, spot clean the rust with qtip lemon juice/baking soda or something, shouldn't spread anymore. I wouldn't sand it at all, maybe extremely fine grit paper just to get flakes off, anymore might make it worse. Keep it stock, looks powder coated anyway nice quality

[pubjoe]

Loverly.

I've been adding the older styled Sigma sticks to my watchlist for years but never yet ended up with one.

[Kretinou]

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[Kamiboy]

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My chinese repro Capcom Mini Cute arrived in a crate just in time for some weekend tinkering.

To my endless confusion it had a US style power plug, which took me an embarrassing long time to confirm, is meant to be plugged into a 220V outlet. Why on earth would they put a US style plug on a 220V the cab, I cannot intuit.

Upon closer inspection it turned out that the monitor inside is actually 110 V, while the rest of the cabinet is 220V.

There is a built in somewhat rusty stepdown convertor inside that takes care of the power requirements for the monitor. It is secured in place with some really shoddy crooked screws.

Speaking of rust, many screw posts inside were rusty, no doubt the fault of the long sea voyage. Also there were some metal shavings inside which could have shorted out electronics if they got in the wrong place.

As for the cabinet itself, it seems to be of ok quality, having never seen the real thing to compare to I would say it is a fine build, but not perfect. The coin mech return button thing gets stuck, the front door opens with a wobbly motion and believe the controller housing is stuck in place because the plexiglass is blocking it in the corners, which is regrettable.

The unit looks pretty nice when off, quite the piece of decor, it really outshines my original Blast City in the looks department. I especially like the look of the plexiglass and the yellow of the sides.

However the impression stops impressing once you flick that top switch and turn the unit on.

My major gripes fall into two distinct categories, audio and video.

The CRT image quality really leaves a lot to be desired unfortunately. I am not sure if the problem is the tube, the chassis, both or perhaps the settings.

First thing that sprang to mind was how blacks didn’t quite look right. They are too bright, looking like dark green at times.

Then there is the fact that the picture grows and shrinks dramatically depending on content being shown, specifically how bright sections of the image are.

I forget the technical term for this, but if I remember correctly it is a sure sign of cheap drive circuitry. The Nanao MS2930 inside my Blast city is rock solid in that department.

Lastly there are convergence issues in the upper right quadrant of the monitor.

I am not sure if some of these issues could potentially be fixed or mitigated by adjustments. Pretty sure the convergence issues would require magnet strips or playing around with convergence rings to be solved. Not really anything I am keen to do.

I did try to adjust the brightness pot to solve the black issue but the image gets too dark and dull. I will have to return to that later once I have read up on it. The adjustment pots are accessed from the back of the unit, which is inconvenient. My Blast City allows adjustments to be made from front so size, position and brightness can be quickly dialed in from game to game. Here it is a long awkward process.

The screen shrinking I am fairly certain can only be solved with better parts, specifically exchanging the chassis for a better one. Not sure if the tube is part of the equation there, I will need to read up on it. Also bot sure if the tube inside this thing is compatible with any quality arcade chassis.

As for the audio department, well, it just sounds subpar, not sure how else to describe it. Not sure if it is because of bad amplification or subpar speaker cones.

In any regards, there seems to be quite a battle ahead for anyone who would want to bring the internals up to par with the beautiful externals of this unit.

I may just partake in such a venture in the future.

[pubjoe]

Thanks for that write up.

You'll be able to improve the colour and brightness, assuming you can access RGB pots, but as you say it's a pain to do so with rear controls. In those cases sometimes it's easier to remove the tube and chassis.

https://wiki.arcadeotaku.com/w/How_to_C ... Brightness

Shame about the other video issues. Adjusting the brightness might reduce the bloom a bit, but at the end of the day you're on the lookout for a better replacement ideally.

They've just thrown a cheap monitor and speakers in. Vast majority of your money has gone on the build so it's good to hear that's pretty decent. It might be preferable to request the shell only but if they gave that option I bet it'd only reduce the price very slightly.

[Kamiboy]

Great link. I was looking for a video to explain the step by step process to adjust the settings, but couldn't find something by someone who looked like they knew what they were doing.

I need to order a set of insulated screwdrivers to do these adjustment and see about finding all the necessary pots on my chassis.

Speaking of which, I have tried to find information about the tube that is used in the cab. I have not had any luck, but it seems that is a Chinese tube, mine being manufactured in 2019 apparently. It doesn’t look like it has seen any or much use.

The raw image quality is not bad actually, the colours look ok and the pixelart looks nice enough. Seeing as how it is basically a new tube it would be ideal to keep and make the most of it by marrying it with a higher quality chassis.

To my surprise the chassis it is paired with does not appear to be the same as that universal chassis being sold on Aliexpress.

I need to know the specifications of the tube itself to verify whether it could work with a vintage Japanese arcade chassis.

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[geotrig]

sounds like form your description that the flyback might be turned up too high also , might be worth turning the screen knob down a notch and working back up to an acceptable setting ,infact pretty much with all settings , also worth getting a few pics and videos up in the monitor section pics and videos help us all see any issues !

[o1s1n]

Delighted to hear it arrived in one piece, does look lovely in that photo.

As the guys said, you should be able to dial the monitor in. When I got both my current cabinets the monitors were way off, but they look new now after tinkering. I followed that guide Pubjoe posted and they now look brilliant. Do try to get the brightness down as much as you can and compensate with the other pots. You are fighting against having a tinted bezel over the monitor versus your Blast's monitor so do remember that re the brightness.

WTF by the way, a 2019 manufacture date on the CRT?? that's very interesting, I thought the last tubes were made around 2015.

[PrincessPrinPrin]

The label also says it's a 21" tube. Is it really so?

[Kamiboy]

For sure the set is not setup right, I will try and dial it in over the coming days. Not sure I want to wait for a ceramic screwdriver set to arrive, that would take weeks. Some pots are on high risk areas, such as the neckbeard, so perhaps being patient is warranted. I first need to dial in the screen knob on the flyback, which I believe it is set too high, as others have also suggested. From what I have read there is a ABL adjustment which influences blooming, which ideally should be set from the factory and not touched. If the adjustment is on my chassis at all, that might be a last resort, but from the sound of it dealing in screen, brightness and contrast might mitigate the blooming somewhat.

The convergence issues I will have to live with I am afraid, but even my MS 2930 suffers from that. Apropos, I broke the chassis on that one during a recap, so I need to fix that as well while I am at it...

As for size, I will have to take a tape measure to the tube to verify, but it doesn't look very large to me, I would expect it is closer to 19". I believe there are various ways to measure diagonal size, so it might just be that in play here. Who knows how much that label can be trusted, especially the 2019 date code. It is partially torn, not sure if it was an accident or they were intentionally trying to remove the sticker to obscure its details, and if so, why.

[aerobert]

A51 means 51cm which translates to 20 inches. Then there's the matter of japan/west measure differently. Visible area vs corner to corner glass.

[o1s1n]

Is it just me or is there a lot of corrosion on all the metal contacts on the chassis? Hope that wasn't a side effect of the overseas shipping.

[geotrig]

lable is probably been read backwards ! its meant to be 19th Mar 04 !

[o1s1n]

lable is probably been read backwards ! its meant to be 19th Mar 04 !

...

I think I should probably step away from the internet for the day before I do damage.

[Kamiboy]

Is it just me or is there a lot of corrosion on all the metal contacts on the chassis? Hope that wasn't a side effect of the overseas shipping.

I believe it is due to the shipping. Rust is all over several metal parts, mostly screws. Any metal that is not painted or made of rust free material, which luckily is mostly small stuff.

As for production date, I did consider it might be the other way around, which could be the case. The only mention of the CRT ID code on the label is a shipping manifest of a few thousand of these things being sent to India from China in 2016.

I guess there must be a large warehouse of them somewhere.

[tart31]

Is it just me or is there a lot of corrosion on all the metal contacts on the chassis? Hope that wasn't a side effect of the overseas shipping.

I believe it is due to the shipping. Rust is all over several metal parts, mostly screws. Any metal that is not painted or made of rust free material, which luckily is mostly small stuff.

As for production date, I did consider it might be the other way around, which could be the case. The only mention of the CRT ID code on the label is a shipping manifest of a few thousand of these things being sent to India from China in 2016.

I guess there must be a large warehouse of them somewhere.

I didn’t have any rust on mine so I must have got lucky. You mention That the cp doesn’t open? If I remember correctly mine had some screws at the back before you can unlatch the CP so maybe check for that.
Also I think your monitor may be different to mine so I’ll take some pics and we can compare. It took various tinkering with mine to where I was happy with it and the front Smokey glass really does dim the picture as with my original cute.The speakers on mine are just ok but then any small candy I’ve had in the past wasn’t great either.

[Kamiboy]

The cabinet is nothing if not full of empty unused space. There should be plenty of opportunities to improve the audio quality.

Not sure if it is because the speaker cones are not up to snuff, or because they are just attached to the front without any housing with a resonance chamber designed to improve the audio quality.

I need to try ans connect the cones to an external amplified audio signal to test whether they can sound better with appropriate amplification or they should just be switched out for some better cones. I am not really too well versed in audio, so not sure what to replace them with.

I suppose i could also see about adding some sort of woofer.

Interesting that yours is not rusty and may have a different tube inside it. Do take some photos of yours so we can compare.