[Tzatziki Sauce:]

I figured it would be nice to share my recipe for making Gyros at home.  I made a batch of this last night, but stupid me forgot to buy Pita bread so I need to pick up some Pita's in order to eat this.

Tzatziki Sauce:

16 oz. Plain Greek Yogurt
3 Cloves Garlic
1 Medium/Large Cucumber
2 Tbsp Lemon Juice
2 Tbsp Fresh Dill
1/2 Tsp Kosher Salt
1/2 Tsp Freshly Ground Black Pepper

Peel and de-seed the cucumber (I use a spoon to de-seed it after cutting it in half lengthwise).
Puree the cucumber in a food processor until no chunks are left.  Drain off some of the water to keep the final product thicker, or keep the water if you like it runny).
Crush three cloves of garlic and mix it in with the cucumber puree.
Add the chopped dill, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.
Mix in the Greek Yogurt until everything is well mixed. 
Store in the fridge, preferably overnight, to allow all the flavors to meld together.

Gyro Meat:

1 lb Ground Beef (90% Lean)
1 lb Ground Lamb
1 Medium Onion
1 Tbsp Crushed Garlic
1 Tbsp Finely Chopped Fresh Rosemary
1 Tbsp Chopped Marjoram (fresh, if available, or dried if no fresh is available)
1 Tsp Kosher Salt
1/2 Tsp Freshly Ground Black Pepper

Very finely chop/puree the onion and garlic.  You don't want large chunks.
Mix all the ingredients together until the "loaf" is of a uniform consistency and mix.
Allow to sit in the fridge overnight to meld the flavors.

To cook, pre-heat the oven to 325 degrees and cook for one hour until cooked all the way through.  Then, shave the loaf into thin strips for consumption.  Best way is to rotisserie cook the "meat-log" just like the real things are done.  For me, I got and break out a small portion, flatten it paper thin and then cook that paper thin portion and use that in my Gyro.

Assembly:

Brush some olive oil on a pita bread and warm it up in the oven until it's pliable.  Coat the warm pita with some Tzatziki sauce, then add a large leaf of Romaine Lettuce, a slice of cucumber, a slice of tomato, and a slice of Red Onion.  Stack the gryo meat on top of this and roll into a cone.  (Or, dump into the pocket of the pita if you are using pocket pitas).  Cover again with some Tzatziki sauce to taste and enjoy!

No real need to be scared.  As you heard from my story, I only got a bit of a bite when mucking around with the thing on.  Not from discharging the monitor.  In the one monitor chassis I've worked two tubes on, there was never any issue with the discharge.  My chassis board must have a bleed off circuit as I have never even heard the tiniest crackle, let alone see a spark, when discharging it.  I've now discharged this thing dozens of times. 

It really is as simple as it seems.  It's just that the built in fear of getting "bit" makes it seem much more complex.

If you watch a bunch of videos on YouTube with people discharging a monitor, and you soon start to know what they're going to do next and aren't surprised, then you know all you need to know.

Also, just for peace of mind keep your other hand in your pocket.  This way it doesn't get in the way or get into things it shouldn't touch. 

If anybody's got a spare 63 MB SIMM for the CPS3 mainboard, and they are willing to part with it, let me know.  I've got a working New Generation CPS3 system, and a bunch of 128 MB SIMMs on the way, but i need another 64 MB SIMM (Slots 1 and 2 on the main board) to play other games.

Thanks John.  It's a learning experience.  I figure if someone works with CRT monitors enough, they'll get bit once and they'll also have a neck crack.  I just got mine out of the way early.   

Wanted to post an update here in this thread.  As stated previously, the flyback on my chassis went up in a blaze of glory.  Bright blue/white sparks, a horrific noise, and a really scared Jdurg.

I ordered the flyback and it supposedly had arrived this past Tuesday, but unfortunately the shipper erroneously left the flyback out of the box and had to quickly ship it to me.  (Must say, the response from Twisted Quarter was fantastic, and very courteous.  Andrew profusely apologized and got me my flyback only a few days later).

So I got the flyback in and hooked it all up.  Turned it on, and the only thing I saw was blue/white beams arcing in the neck.  My worst fears turned out true.  The vacuum was gone.  I quickly turned it off and disconnected everything.  Upon closer inspection, I saw this:



A small crack up near the top by the neckboard connector.  The tube is officially a very heavy pile of semi-toxic waste.  heh.  I'm guessing that the neck cracked a small bit during one of two instances.  One was early on when I was taking the tube out of the TV case and it leaned down fairly heavy on the neck connector.  The only damage I noticed at the time was some bent pins, and minor deformation of the connecting socket.  Still, I put the neckboard on after that and the tube fired up and worked great.  So I did not suspect anything.  The second possibility was when i decided (For some stupid reason related to my OCD on perfection) to "un-deform" the connector.  i was able to do this and got the neckboard on after a sudden jolt.  Again, however, I powered it on and had a beautiful picture for about an hour.  That's when the flyback blew.

I figure that when the flyback blew, the sudden increase in temperature caused by the high voltage discharge in the area created a little thermal shock to the glass in the neck.  The tiny crack that had existed before, but wasn't full distance through the glass, then fully opened.  When it blew, i heard a very loud and violent sounding screeching/scratching.  I guess that was a combination of the electrical discharges, the speakers picking up that discharge in the air and making a horrible sound, and air rushing into the tube.

I did order a new tube to put in there (And hope to get confirmaiton that it will be delivered this coming Monday as the company did confirm my order), so I will just hope that the tube comes with the yoke and purity/convergence ring assembly so that I won't have to go through that experience.  Heh.  But a sad end to my first ever experience with arcade monitors, but you know what?  The tube was free and no matter how careful and experienced you are, a cracked neck may eventually happen to you.  I just got mine out of the way the first time through.   

Okay, thanks.    Regardless, I have learned a LOT about monitors and their repair, etc.  In the meantime, my blank eproms came in the mail today so I am programming the version upgrade for my SF2:CE board, as well as the hyperfighting ROM upgrade.  So at least I have something to do.  Hopefully my flyback gets here early next week and i can test everything out again.

Thanks again for all your help.  The cap kit is great, and although the previous owner of the chassis said that he had done a cap kit, I did notice some subtle improvement in the image quality once i had done mine.   

Well I had a feeling that the flyback that was on there was starting to fail on me anyway.  It was crackling/buzzing quite a bit, and when I replaced it that buzzing went away.  So it was only going to be a matter of time before it went out on me.  i know that there is an instrument that can fully test a flyback, but there is a test that can be done with a multimeter to check the capacitance between the anode cap and ground.  i get nothing from that when i measure which means that the capacitor in the new flyback is shot.  That would explain the failure.  Oh well.  Lesson learned.

If only I had a video of this to show you guys.  WOW!  I had finally gotten my monitor adjusted properly, and had recently replaced the full set of capacitors, including the B+ Filter Cap, the HOT, and the flyback.  (Thanks Ian for the cap-kit.  Was super easy to install).  Everything went on incredibly easily and the image looked amazing.  No cold solder joints, no shorts, no nothing.

Today, i was finishing up adjustments when my hand accidentally hit the yoke of the tube sending quite a bit of electricity into my right arm.  Felt like I was stabbed and punched VERY hard at the same time in the same spot.  Heh.  They aren't kidding when they say that a CRT can REALLY hurt.  Glad I followed the advice of everyone and always kept one hand in my pocket while adjusting the width coil to prevent a charge across my heart.

Anyway, while finishing up the width coil adjustment, i noticed that the neckboard wasn't seated fully against the neck of the CRT.  You could see about a mm of pins all around the tube.  This was likely from when I was first moving the tube and it slipped, causing it to lean onto the neck connector.  I straightened out all the pins, but i guess I didn't straighten out the key plug enough.  So i went and got that sorted out and had the neckboard fully onto the CRT tube.  No pins showing.

As i've generally been doing, i turned the setup on and let my game play through it.  This keeps everything warmed up, and is nice background noise for me. 

While I'm sitting in the next room, i suddenly hear this loud screeching noise that was kind of like a record being scratched.  I quickly jump up from my seat and run over to the room to see no picture on the screen and a TON of bright white arcs in the back area of the monitor.  I nearly trip over my feet running for the power plug to unplug this thing.  The smell of ozone filled the house.

After my nerves calmed down and I flooded the shout box here with my tales of woe, I went over to the tube, discharged it, removed the chassis, and closely inspected the CRT.  Thankfully, it appears as though the vacuum is still present as the getter inside the neck is still a nice shiny silver color.  I then looked over the board and saw no signs of physical damage.  No funky looking capacitors, no charred parts, no overheated solder joints.  It all looked good.

I then pulled out my multimeter and checked the HOT in circuit.  Got readings of 0.490 on each leg so it appears as though the HOT was not damaged in any way by this failure.  I'll test it out of circuit tomorrow as I'll need to remove it from the board per the problem I did see.

It looks like the flyback i had replaced was a dud.  The ferrite cores that meet in the middle of the flyback itself and have a wire C-Clamp holding them together on the outside is INCREDIBLY loose. With the flyback on the board, it readily swirls around in all directions.  i'm guessing the arcing I saw was coming from this.  The flyback was manufactured earlier this year, but I guess something finally came loose and resulted in the catastrophic failure I witnessed.

Going to try to head to bed right now and sleep this off.  Will do some extensive multi-meter testing tomorrow and will remove the flyback and toss it in the trash.  I'm hoping that a new flyback on here will be a good one and won't result in an insane light show and soiled pants.

Insomnia is a great thing to have when you're working on a project.  I got my speakers hooked up, and the diagram i put together earlier in the thread works great!  I got everything hooked up and got the volume pot attached to the service switch/test switch area behind the coin door.  It sounds great.  Right now, it's all hooked up in a test manner, and I'll permanently attach the LOC and amplifier to the drawer once the cabinet is ready to go together.  Not much tweaking left to do.  Will be picking up a new flyback as the buzzing in mine has me concerned, and I wonder if a new flyback will make the slight pincushion effect I'm seeing go away.  (As in, on all four sides, the image kind of curves in towards the center while the corners are where they should be on the screen.

It's nice having the game on in attract mode while I sit in the living room and watch TV and/or surf the web.  When I get MAME going on my computer, it sounds like i'm in an arcade. 

Another update.  After talking with Ian on the shout box, I figured I should post an audio file of what I'm hearing.  I had to take this from my iPhone as I have no microphone, and the noise from the fan and my refridgerator kind of overwhelm it, but after the loud clicking of me pressing the power button, you can hear the buzzing that I was chatting about before the fan kicks in and drowns it out.

I've uploaded the .m4a file here:  http://www.filedropper.com/201512122228321

Alright, the bug hit me and I went back and worked on the project.  I switched the wires from the yoke (after cutting the connector in two) and flipped the closer-together-side.  Picture was now oriented perfectly.  Fired the game up and made some adjustments on the remote board and the brightness setting on the flyback.  Took the picture you see below.  I'm not sure if the orientation issue I see on the player health bars are from my camera/viewing angle, or to due with the yoke position.  I'm hoping that I don't have to adjust the yoke orientation as the yoke is attached to the TV tube I pulled this from.  I don't think the yoke assembly will easily come off. 

Regardless, I'm INCREDIBLY happy right now.  This is the first time I've ever seen an arcade game PCB in person, nor a CRT tube, nor a monitor chassis.  Yet as of right now, I have a fully working, and beautiful looking, 25" arcade monitor running.   

Some further updates here.  I went and finally got the molex plug needed in order to hook-up the power supply to the Jamma harness.  Sadly, i totally messed up and accidentally switched the -5V and +12V lines on the Jamma Molex.  When i fired it up, i would hear crackling of sorts coming from the power supply.  I didn't realize that I had the two lines switched until I took a further look and realized i had the wrong pin in the wrong hole.   

I corrected it, and then when I turned the power on there was no longer that crackling sound.  Still, I was scared to death that I had fried my board before i even got to play it. 

to check, i went and temporarily connected a video signal to the monitor chassis.  Upon doing so, hitting power turned on the game and it was running great!  Well, almost.    The image is vertically reversed, so I'll need to switch around the yoke plugs to try and fix it.  Overall, the image quality is pretty nice.  I need to work on the sizes and positioning, but the colors all look sharp and solid.  i'm going to boot it up in test mode tomorrow to adjust the monitor to it's final level.  I'm too happy right now to continue, and plan on having some beer and beer + High Voltage electronics = nuh-uh.  Heh.

I also tested out my CP and every button works EXCEPT for the Player 1 Fierce punch.  i'm figuring it's just a connection issue, so I'll recrimp the molex pins and test for continuity at the board.  I'm hoping that the screw up with the -5V and +12V didn't totally fry the controls, but i figure if they did, none of the player controls would work.

I'll have the speakers hooked up tomorrow.


Game version.  I have flipped the image in Photoshop before uploading it.  i see that this is the earliest version of SF2CE for the USA.  I'll see about getting some EPROMS so that I can program the most up-to-date version once I figure out where the hell to buy EPROMs.



Nice Title Screen.


Blanka on Blanka action.

Figured I'd update this post with some more info.  I got my jamma harness completely wired and tested for continuity.  Also got my coin door wired up, the control panel wired up with a kick harness, the game pcb, marquee, bezel, etc.  Basically, i have a bunch of parts in place and am getting down to the point of only needing to build the cabinet itself.

Today, I got the monitor all wired up and turned it on for the first time.  It was made from a WG 25k7xxx chassis and frame I bought from folks on KLOV, and a tube i took from a 25" Sanyo TV i got for free on Craigslist.  Still riding that high from it successfully turning on and looking pretty good.

I'm now focusing heavily on the speakers.  I know that Jamma is a mono only setup with very rarely a game that gives stereo output on Jamma.  CPS2/CPS3 games all output unamplified, line-level signals through separate RCA connectors.  So I've been wondering how i can get this cabinet setup so that it will play mono jamma games through both the left and right speakers, and also be able to easily play stereo CPS2/CPS3 games.  I have two shielded, 8 ohm, 4 W speakers and yanked a 5 watt, 2-channel amplifier from a Logitech Z130 set of computer speakers.  I needed to figure out how to get this all together so I could make an easy swap on the pull-out drawer, and also not damage any components.

I found out that a Line Output Conditioner (LOC) will take the amplified jamma mono signal and convert it down to a line level signal that I can then feed into the amp.  The LOC arrived yesterday and is pretty simple.  Four wires coming in (which I will connect to the L/R +/- jamma connector by using a two pin molex connector for each speaker line), and two RCA jacks coming out along with gain control for each channel.

The left speaker output from the Jamma Harness (which is the mono audio for games like SF2CE) will be connected to the amplifier via a Y-splitter RCA cable.  This way the signal will be provided to both the left and right channels on my amplifier.  If I'm playing a CPS2/CPS3 game, I will just unplug the splitter and plug the PCB's RCA connection directly to my amplifier, bypassing the LOC. 

The audio amp will then have a 9-pin molex connector between the 9 wires I'll solder onto the amp board where the volume pot used to be, and the lengths of cord used so i can mount the volume knob in an easy accessible area in the coin door opening.

For power, this will come from a 12V DC connection and ground connection from the power supply.  While the speakers came with an AC Adapter to convert AC to 10V DC, I don't see any issue in feeding it 12V DC since the amplifier chip itself (BT2025BH) is spec'd to run at 12 Volts. 

Currently, the only thing I need to do is get some RCA cables and figure out how to wire them into the audio amp, then I also need to get some more molex connectors to make all the connections I will need to make.  I'm hoping to get this done this weekend and test it all out by mounting the speakers to a scrap piece of board.

Below is a somewhat large sketch I drew up that details my plans.

Preliminary results are in.  Got the frame, chassis, and proper connectors in the mail, and today during lunch at work I went and hooked it up temporarily to the isolation transformer and the power supply.  Turned it on to see if there were any sudden issues (smoke, explosions, etc.) and nothing.  Just the satisfying sizzle of a tube warming up.  The image is very blue as I think I moved some of the pots on the neckboard when installing it, but I'll adjust that once i hook up the game PCB and go into test mode.

The only current issue I see is some SLIGHT convergence misalignment, whitish lines appearing across the screen, and the top kind of bows downward like a bowl.  i'm not super worried right now since I'll be doing my fine-tune adjustments once the PCB is hooked up.  This was simply a test to make sure everything works.  I'm pretty damned happy as until I built this thing, I've never even seen the "guts" of an arcade CRT monitor in person!

Hey guys.  After John read my viewer mail on the last video, a question came up regarding the fact that the power supply that I have has a normal AC plug in the back of it, and a physical push switch on the side.  As a result, I couldn't take the AC cord, put it through the fuses and isolation transformer as well as an on/off switch.  Well, I seem to have found the answer to my question.

In the KLOV thread HERE, towards the bottom of the thread somebody pointed out that the power supply in this cab is located in the back right of the cab about midway up.  There's a hole in the side of the HS5 cabs that the switch pokes through that you push to turn on/off.  The AC three pin molex connector then needs to be connected to a molex that has the white/black/green wires with disconnects on one side.  These are then fed to the fuses and whatnot, and in to the isolation transformer for the monitor and other AC connections.

So it looks like I've figured out how to get this wired up once I get the physical cab built.  Just figured I'd share that here for everyone else too.