A bit of (Vewlix Dia) blue for the lads...

[emphatic]

Amazing.

[geotrig]

that mental Franco as always

[Pete]

Great job but maybe I'm just getting old or foreshadowing...but I prefer my power sockets half way up the wall

Do you forsee an issue?

I was originally in two minds about whether to put the sockets further up the wall. In the end I decided against it. My office is about 3.6m long on that wall and I would have to have bought another 3m length to extend the trunking along the rest of the wall. As it is the 3m length just falls nicely behind part of my desk and lets me run the cables in/out of the trunking:

I'm standing for now but have had lots of problems with nerve damage in my legs over the years, in my workshop my sockets are half way up which is more of standard in those set-ups.

DSC_0719_1.JPG

Busy night!

[anx10us]

Great thread, just realised you are just down the road from me (I'm outside Banbury), there was some talk about getting some Vewlix Sub Panels made up via arcade shop (I think), did you ever get anywhere. There are some panels on aliexpress that I'm tempted by, the downside is length of time for delivery and also there wording on each button doesn't make sense for my setup ...

From the pictures you showed on arcade-projects, your version seems better, would be good to know if you have made progress of have abandoned for now ?

[FrancoB]

Ah, Banbury's not far at all. One of my workmates lives in Adderbury which is just outside Banbury

I have actually made a fair bit of progress on the Vewlix's but not had the time to post any updates, I've also not done anything on them for a few months as well Life is a still manic here at the moment and I've not had a lot of free time to work on things. I'm also pretty bad for having too many projects on the go at once and so with the time that I have had I decided to pull back from working on the Vewlix's whilst I got some things finished for myself and others. I've actually just finished a project I started last March I just need to get a couple more things finished and then I can get back on with these.

I was working on quite a few things on the Vewlix's at once but the sub panel is probably a good place to start. In answer to your question, I have made some progress with them but I don't know if I'm going to be doing a production run of them. There was little interest/feedback in the thread I started so I presumed people were not interested. There may have been more if I got a proto made... Also, the panels that I'm making are going to be quite bespoke to my needs and most likely won't appeal to enough people to make it viable to do a production run. However, I've got certain things going on in the background which may mean I can offer smaller/bespoke runs myself. None of this is going to happen any time soon (6 months +) so if you want a panel soon then you'll want to look elsewhere I'm afraid.

I've just been collating some photos to upload and update the thread.... looking at the amount I can't quite bring myself to do the writeup tonight too, I'll leave that for another night

[anx10us]

Small world, I'm about 3 miles from Adderbury I know it well, I appreciate your quick response, if there was ever an opportunity to do something bespoke, I guess around the £50 I'd be happy to order, however in the mean time I may just risk aliexpress for now ..

[wonderbanana]

Small world, I'm about 3 miles from Adderbury I know it well, I appreciate your quick response, if there was ever an opportunity to do something bespoke, I guess around the £50 I'd be happy to order, however in the mean time I may just risk aliexpress for now ..

You could also try Rbtamanini. He did mine though I forget the exact price now.

[slugflyer]

WHAT A THREAD!

Absolutely incredible read. Thank you SO much for sharing this. Amazing. Always had a thing for the Diamond blue ones but could never find them so ended up getting a pair of the amazing VLX arcade sticks in blue Well done buddy. In awe.

[wonderbanana]

WHAT A THREAD!

Absolutely incredible read. Thank you SO much for sharing this. Amazing. Always had a thing for the Diamond blue ones but could never find them so ended up getting a pair of the amazing VLX arcade sticks in blue Well done buddy. In awe.

Mo's had one for ages now...

[slugflyer]

i wonder if that would be the one of 3 left from this thread. One day, ill get another one, but thanks for the heads up. Do you guys generally just remove the vewlix monitors and put LGs in like those in the states seem to do all the time? I swear, in america they are like pimp-my-ride with vewlix's. Seen enough to warrant a vewlix massacres thread tbh

[FrancoB]

WHAT A THREAD!

Absolutely incredible read. Thank you SO much for sharing this. Amazing. Always had a thing for the Diamond blue ones but could never find them so ended up getting a pair of the amazing VLX arcade sticks in blue Well done buddy. In awe.

The pleasure is all mine

That's a lovely stick I was looking at that exact VLX a few years ago and it's that that got me thinking about Vewlix's in general.

i wonder if that would be the one of 3 left from this thread. One day, ill get another one, but thanks for the heads up. Do you guys generally just remove the vewlix monitors and put LGs in like those in the states seem to do all the time? I swear, in america they are like pimp-my-ride with vewlix's. Seen enough to warrant a vewlix massacres thread tbh

I'm probably more guilty of cab pimping than most I'm trying to keep out of the shame thread but I might be walking a fine line with some more recent stuff

One of the OG P32L050 monitors in mine had given up the ghost... I've been trying to fix it with the help of the mighty @Monstermug but no joy as yet. He's going to try a BGA reflow on it for me as a last ditch attempt.

I have picked up two LG UltraGear 32GN550s to install at some point and I've been working on mounts for them. I'm keeping the OG monitors though so I'm hoping I can get the other one working. More details on all of that in a bit.

I will get up to date on this thread soon, it's a good job I've not done anything on them for months

[Codiene]

You haven’t made this mod yet…… or have you

[FrancoB]

I sent you that photo in confidence!

[slugflyer]

hahahahahaha

Well, if youre replacing with LGs i would interested to see your installs and mounts, fingers crossed you decide to make mounts to sell like your coin button mods You're awesome!! The mods i was talking about, ill have to find some and share... some really sad vewlix mods out there, i mean REALLY... yours are class and keep it looking original. I mean some people have drilled in like beatmania type buttons etc

[Codiene]

Not a bad idea but execution could have been much better imho.

That’s got to be really annoying to play over the joysticks. It needs some phreak link mods on the joystick shafts.

If the beat mania had just been made into a CP to sit in the usual position (granted it might have need to be raised to give space for the beatmania style buttons and rotary controller underneath) it would then have been fairly simple to swap in and out and keep everything looking much neater.

Could display the panels on a wall bracket or one of the mounts that @FrancoB makes if that’s your kind of thing

[wonderbanana]

Well, if youre replacing with LGs i would interested to see your installs and mounts, fingers crossed you decide to make mounts to sell like your coin button mods Y

I'm hoping Franco does a mount run at some point as well

[ChrisBEANS]

Well, if youre replacing with LGs i would interested to see your installs and mounts, fingers crossed you decide to make mounts to sell like your coin button mods Y

I'm hoping Franco does a mount run at some point as well

Franco needs to be a full time ‘Cool ****’ designer and maker.

I’ve posted elsewhere about the LS56 throw reducer, and I cannot say enough good things about it.
No hyperbole, it has improved my gameplay.

[wonderbanana]

Well, if youre replacing with LGs i would interested to see your installs and mounts, fingers crossed you decide to make mounts to sell like your coin button mods Y

I'm hoping Franco does a mount run at some point as well

Franco needs to be a full time ‘Cool ****’ designer and maker.

I’ve posted elsewhere about the LS56 throw reducer, and I cannot say enough good things about it.
No hyperbole, it has improved my gameplay.

Yeah I love them though I broke my first one

[FrancoB]

That was maybe more my bad than yours mate, hopefully your PETG replacements will hold up a little better.



Right, I'll try and get caught up as it might spur me on to put some time aside do a bit more....

Not entirely sure where to start and I've probably forgotten loads of stuff but here goes....

Fan upgrade

The stock fans in my cabs, like most Vewlix's I'm sure, were loud as ****.

This was the state of the fans when I first got the cab:



Luvverly

Even after cleaning them they still sounded like a harrier jump jet winding up.

There are two 120mm fans in the Dia blues, one at the bottom of the cab and one behind the monitor. I looked at a few options for replacements and balked at some of the prices for fans, especially when I needed to buy four. I thought I would start with something cheaper and see how they go. In the end I picked up a [five pack of Arctic F12 fans] from Amazon for ~£21.



The original fans had been hardwired in with some closed end crimps so I had to cut the fans off.



The OG fans are bolted all the way through and so have those white nylon tubes to stop the flanges from bending I wanted to bolt the replacement fans in the same way and so I printed some supports for the flange centers:



The fans came with a three pin non-polarised connector. I've got some pin headers that I could attach to the stock wiring but I wanted to use something polarised so that I don't run the risk of plugging things in back to front, especially when rummaging around in the back of the cab. Using a connector means I can always easily swap them out if required. I had ran out of 2 pin JST YL connectors so I used some spare JST XH connectors I had. They don't do a wire-wire connector so I soldered a header onto the fan and crimped a connector onto the cab side. I only needed 12v and GND so I tucked the sense wire into the outer heat shrink.





All done:



Now wasn't that exciting

The noise from the fans is a massive improvement though. I've uploaded a video [here] where you can hear the difference between the stock and upgraded fans.

I'll continue with some more updates later....

[FrancoB]

So most things I had been working were not concurrent so the update order doesn't really matter. I'll update progress on the sub panel next.

Sub panel

As well as arcade hardware, I'm running various consoles in the cabs so I need some way of controlling certain console buttons that cannot be mapped to the CP controls. For a start I wasn't really sure exactly what buttons I would need, and to be honest I'm still not 100% set now. I started out by trying to design a panel that other people might also want to use but I think my use case will be different to other peoples and so I eventually decided to work on a panel to suit me. If people are interested I might look to make some generic panels further down the line.

My initial panel design was fairly generic and not too dissimilar from others out there because at this point I didn't really know what I wanted:



There were three 30mm buttons per player (not knowing what they needed to control at this point). A hole on both sides for a power switch so I can power cycle the Brook UFBs when changing consoles, a hole for a volume control and for a headphone jack.

I printed a mocked up panel to play about with. I couldn't quite get the whole thing in one piece on the print bed so I split it in two and added rebates so it would assemble correctly once put together.



I populated the CP with some god awful 30mm snap insI got cheap for use in a wiring jig many years ago. I added a B50K pot and some rocker power switches. Pro tip, don't forget to turn off your soldering iron at night



My office smelt lovely in the morning after that The panel was **** but it could have been far worse

I printed another but without the power switches at this point and then worked on the audio side of things. My cabs are in the corner of my office and they are right next to my daughters bedroom, hence the reason for wanting headphone support. I also want to be able to mute the cab speakers and have amplified headphone audio when the headphone jack is inserted. I was initially going to use some Schiit Fulla DAC/amps as they would work a treat but they were just going to take up far too much route under the CP.

Instead I bought some headphone amplifiers off ebay as well as some DPDT 1/4" stereo jacks. I also had some 3.5mm audio jacks left over from years ago so I made some mounts for them and the amplifiers.



Sexy test wiring



Neatened up a bit:



With no headphones inserted the volume pot controls the line level audio before it goes to the Taito amp and cab speakers. With the headphones inserted, the audio is cut from the cab speakers. The (sub panel volume pot controlled) line level audio then goes to the headphone amp and then to the audio jack/headphones. It works really well, it's just a bit more 'wirey' than I would like. If I get some more time in the future (lol) it would be nice to consolidate more of it onto a PCB or two.

This is my latest (6 months ago) version of the sub panel:



So, top left and top right are two sets of 12mm illuminated buttons, similar to [these].

One of them (for each player) is the latching type and used for switching the Brook UFBs on and off when changing systems as you need to hold different CP buttons whilst power cycling them to set the mode. Secondly, the PCs I'm running are external to the cabs and I have USB power set to always on. I don't want to keep the Brooks powered when not in use so this would allow me to switch them off also. The LED ring also indicates when they are on/off.

The other 12mm button for each player is for a momentary type for the Turbo key and LED from the Brook. It works fairly well, the only thing to improve it would be if you could adjust the auto fire frequency. Still a worthy addition though. Once again the LED ring would indicate if any button has turbo applied.

All the white buttons are 24mm, I don't feel the need to use 30mm. The two in the center would be for P1 'Share' (Select/Back) and the other would be P1 'Home'.

The single 24mm buttons on each side of the panel would then be the 'Touchpad' buttons. I'm not running PS4/5 myself but my original though would use these as credit buttons for MAME etc. Now I'm using the [Coin Reject Button Kits] that frees up a 'designated' credit button and so I may scrap or repurpose that.

In the model above there are two rear mounted Neutrik USB ports in the middle of the panel. Ideally I would like these towards the outer edge but they would foul the mount I have my Brook UFBs on, so for my panel they would need to be somewhere around there. I might change tactic on these now and use more of a low key method similar to what I used to mount the USB extenstions/ports in my [MiSTer Ironclad case]



As i was using a tinted clear panel for the Ironclad I kept installation hardware down a minimum (i.e. none) as I wanted it to look as clean and unobstructed as possible. The Vewlix sub panels are opaque and the cables may be subject to more stress with the CP opening/closing so I've been experimenting with a different mounting method for that.



That's it for the sub panel for now. I need to get some time back on the cabs and play some games ( ) to double check what 'admin' buttons I need for each console.