Recently I picked up a New Astro City. It was in pretty rough shape…

 

 

Anyways, per usual I broke out the hose and Simple Green (I wonder if I get enough traffic for them to become a sponsor? Probably not). The display was particularly gross. Not as bad as my blast city, but still pretty bad.

So we go from this:

 

To this:

 

Now onto the rest of the cab. I didn’t take any photos of the post cleanup, it just took a lot of simple green and water really. This definitely needs to be repainted at some point, but not today. Here was the corpse after the clean.

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Not looking too hot next to the blast…

 

Next up was ripping out the jamma harness and rewiring it. That took probably 4 hours. Wiring is such a pain. On the plus side I did improve a bunch of wiring in the cab from being spliced to using AMP connectors and whatnot.

 

WiredUp

 

 

Shockingly everything worked, including audio.

 

I then worked on the control panel. Removed the 50 yen sticker that had been placed on it, only to have a 100 yen sticker be underneath that. These 100 yen stickers are so much nicer! In the process of washing the CP the center bolt hole broke off so I had to use some abs cement to weld it back into place, see the hi-tech electrical tape stabilizing it?

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With that in place I had to get a new cp, thankfully Jasen (of Jasenscustoms.com) makes some awesome repros so I picked one up from him and applied a new overlay to it 😀

Then it was just a matter of buttoning the baby up! Right now I’m running Darksoft’s CPS2 multiboard in it, I might throw something else in there sometime, we’ll see!

Yay!

Yay!

Jasen went ahead and made me a slightly different version of his ps360+ DB15 daughter board that can pass buttons k4 and p4 through specifically for padhacks. This came up when I told him it’d be really cool to use that thing for padhacks instead of superguns, since I don’t have a supergun, and likely won’t really use one. It was a relatively simple change, but since the db15 connector only has 15 pins, he ended up using shield for ground. Anyways, heres what I have:

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I finally have the NeoGeo and Xmen Vs Street Fighter cabinets ready to go. After getting the control panels sandblasted, painted, cutting new Lexan, and getting new overlays they’re finally back together. It all took far longer than I wanted it to, but that was just due to time constraints. Overall they look fantastic. There is a small issue with the NeoGeo, mainly since I left the overlay vinyl attached to the original backing the pressure the Lexan puts on it causes some noticeable marking. I think that may just be trapped moisture that will go away. If not, I’ll put the vinyl onto cardstock backing and see how that goes.

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Finally cleaned the Blast City today. I figure since I’m going to be out of town this weekend it’ll have plenty of time to dry, and when I get back I can put everything together.

Simple Green is some seriously wonderful stuff.

I’m still trying to figure out a good way to do pictures on here. Picasa web albums suck, and imgur doesn’t embed very well. So here’s a bunch of picturesContinue reading

Well, it’s time to start cleaning the Blast City. I decided to start with some of the simple things. The rear marquee, monitor, power supply, bezel, and IO board. Ironically the Monitor and PSU are typically the dirtiest parts of any cabinet.

The monitor was a pain in the ass to get it. 29 inch crt = very heavy. I managed to get it out, discharge it, and only contract 5 or 6 diseases. This thing was filthy. See below…

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Right before going to GXL (and I mean immediately before) I finished building a new stick! While at Jasen’s I had picked up a new Panzer body. This stick I had decided to padhack an xbone PCB and go with Seimitsu buttons and a Seimitsu joystick.

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Bare Pad

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I did it, I got a blast city! I drove to Jasen’s in Herndon and picked it up today. Filthy as hell, I’ll post pictures as I work on it. I’ve already started cleaning the control panel. But don’t expect much. Here’s a few:

 

Yeah, the versus city CP is in bad shape, but don’tworry. I bought a repro from Jasen, as well as hardware for a new Panzer! Pics and info to come.

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I do have some good plans for it as well. I’ve picked up a Naomi, NetDimm, SunPSU, and some 360 Pads. I plan on running a Naomi and 360 in the cabinet. I’m modded up some padhacks and I’m thinking I’ll enclose them in a hobby box with a jamma fingerboard for easy swapping. More as that progresses..

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Pad Hacks!