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First cabinet! Sega Blast City

wilycoldcuts

wilycoldcuts

Student
Joined
Oct 30, 2017
Messages
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49
Location
San Jose, CA
Hi everyone!

I'm new to the forum - my intro thread was only a month ago where I mentioned I was waiting for the right cab, which didn't take long! I'm now the proud owner of a Blast City, courtesy of Cereth's import thread in the trade/sale forum. It arrived on Sunday, so I'm slowly poking at it and making plans.

J4Ei1Opm.jpg


Link to Imgur album

Initial thoughts:
  • This cab is in pretty excellent shape! No major cleaning is required, although there are some light scratches on the screen bezel that I'll hit with some Novus polish. The coin mech reads 23590, which means this machine has seen about $20,000 worth of plays, right?
  • My first major operation will be to swap the PSU fan because it sounds like death. Internet says it's just a regular 12V 80mm fan with a JST connector - are there any other limitations to watch out for, here? If not, I'm partial to Noctua fans so I'll probably go for that.
  • Testing it with a borrowed SFII board, the screen looks pretty good to me (no ghosting or burn-in) but has some convergence issues and blurriness in the corners. I'm no connoisseur, but I think the next step will be taking a look at the chassis to look for goop and figure out if I can improve the picture with adjustments or if I try my hand at recapping it.
  • The button harness isn't complete or in that great a shape, so I may end up making replacement harnesses for the control panel. The controls are a bit mushy too, so I'll probably replace them with the original pink and green color scheme as seen on the marketing flyers.
Now the hunt is on for a NAOMI to put in it! Thanks for reading! :D
 
Really nice cab man. Very clean. I can vouch for Cereth. Haven't bought a cab from him yet, but have bought other things from him. Very reputable guy.

I don't think you'll have a problem finding a Naomi. Whereabouts in San Jose are you located?
 
Awesome grab, the blast was also my first cab. All of them have some convergence due to the tri sync monitors. I was able to get mine pretty dialed in with the help of another friend and convergence strips.
 
Congratulations ! Nice cab !
Have a lot of fun playing !
I remember getting my Egret 2 around 2006/2007 and its just great fun playing on a real cab.
It also completes your room very nicely I must say :)
 
A very good choice as first Cabinet. Plays almost everything and has a nice Monitor too.
Have fun with it!
 
I don't think there's a Blast City out there with good corner convergence. Mine are all terrible.

Don't worry about the black goop of death. I have it in all of mine and they're all running fine.

They're nice cabs. First order of business should be to remove the PSU (at the back, four screws in the corners, then pull) and open it up. It's most likely dusty as hell. Mine were absolutely covered in muck, so much so that the fans had seized. Hit it with an air compressor and then swap the fan.
 
Progress update:

It's been slow-going with the holidays and such, but I've swapped the PSU fan. I photographed most of the steps I took for any other newbies who want to follow along, so here's a link to the album (to avoid clogging the forum):

https://imgur.com/a/GxOOF

And here's the finished product:

Qhc2qU4m.jpg


The inside of the PSU looks good too! No dust or bulging caps from what I can see. Next step will be to swap out the buttons and sticks. :D
 
wilycoldcuts said:
Progress update:

It's been slow-going with the holidays and such, but I've swapped the PSU fan. I photographed most of the steps I took for any other newbies who want to follow along, so here's a link to the album (to avoid clogging the forum):

https://imgur.com/a/GxOOF

And here's the finished product:

Qhc2qU4m.jpg


The inside of the PSU looks good too! No dust or bulging caps from what I can see. Next step will be to swap out the buttons and sticks. :D
Click to expand...
Hi, can you give me the model of the noctua fan? thank you!
 
benb155 said:
Hi, can you give me the model of the noctua fan? thank you!
Click to expand...
Sure thing. I used a Noctua NF-A8 FLX that I bought on Amazon: amazon.com/gp/product/B00NEMG9K6/

It's kind of expensive as fans go, but I figured if I was going to replace it, I only want to do it once so I spent the extra money on a really nice one. It's got silicone dampers on each corner so it doesn't vibrate, so it's almost totally silent. I can't hear it at all when I'm seated in front of my cab.

Also don't forget that you'll need to change the connector on the end - I kinda show the process I used in my linked photos above. Hope this helps!
 
wilycoldcuts said:
benb155 said:
Hi, can you give me the model of the noctua fan? thank you!
Click to expand...
Sure thing. I used a Noctua NF-A8 FLX that I bought on Amazon: amazon.com/gp/product/B00NEMG9K6/
It's kind of expensive as fans go, but I figured if I was going to replace it, I only want to do it once so I spent the extra money on a really nice one. It's got silicone dampers on each corner so it doesn't vibrate, so it's almost totally silent. I can't hear it at all when I'm seated in front of my cab.

Also don't forget that you'll need to change the connector on the end - I kinda show the process I used in my linked photos above. Hope this helps!
Click to expand...
Thank you very much for the informations! Just bought..!
 
wilycoldcuts said:
Hi everyone!

I'm new to the forum - my intro thread was only a month ago where I mentioned I was waiting for the right cab, which didn't take long! I'm now the proud owner of a Blast City, courtesy of Cereth's import thread in the trade/sale forum. It arrived on Sunday, so I'm slowly poking at it and making plans.

J4Ei1Opm.jpg


Link to Imgur album

Initial thoughts:
  • This cab is in pretty excellent shape! No major cleaning is required, although there are some light scratches on the screen bezel that I'll hit with some Novus polish. The coin mech reads 23590, which means this machine has seen about $20,000 worth of plays, right?
  • My first major operation will be to swap the PSU fan because it sounds like death. Internet says it's just a regular 12V 80mm fan with a JST connector - are there any other limitations to watch out for, here? If not, I'm partial to Noctua fans so I'll probably go for that.
  • Testing it with a borrowed SFII board, the screen looks pretty good to me (no ghosting or burn-in) but has some convergence issues and blurriness in the corners. I'm no connoisseur, but I think the next step will be taking a look at the chassis to look for goop and figure out if I can improve the picture with adjustments or if I try my hand at recapping it.
  • The button harness isn't complete or in that great a shape, so I may end up making replacement harnesses for the control panel. The controls are a bit mushy too, so I'll probably replace them with the original pink and green color scheme as seen on the marketing flyers.
Now the hunt is on for a NAOMI to put in it! Thanks for reading! :D
Click to expand...
so awesome man. Looking for my first cab. Going for a blast city. Will look up Cereth's import
 
Next project: Net-booting!

User thejew on the Project Ideas forum (link to thread) posted an idea to use Attract Mode with Piforcetools, which sounded much nicer than using a character LCD. It's still a work in progress, but so far I like it!

Album link:
https://imgur.com/a/JtmjFtp

tvbGJxcl.jpg


v5lKda3l.jpg


Right now I've just got the Raspberry Pi hidden underneath the control panel, since I figure I have to open that anyway to power on the system, adjust volume, and mess with service modes. For the future, I might play around with a large LCD screen that I could install in the marquee instead. The challenge will be making this look professional without cutting any holes, since one of my guiding principles is "no mods that aren't reversible."

To control it, I'm using a USB Genesis controller, although in the future I could swap this for touch control (since the screen has a touch panel) or I could come up with a way to split the Player 2 controls with a "shift key" to serve as input to the Pi (this one is more likely).

NofuYVXl.jpg


Here's a YouTube video of it in action (apologies for the shaky cellphone footage):

I'll start a separate thread in the NAOMI forum with more detailed instructions and code snippets and will update here with a link once it's up. [Update: Here's the thread.]
 
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