Sammy Atomiswave SD Restoration

[mourix]

Developments and monitor frustrations..

Still trying to get 15KHz working on the Wei Ya monitor. Thought I had it when I found out the daughterboard relay measured 5 ohms terminal resistance. Put in a new relay but no cigar..

As for the developments. I happened to own a Japanese VA1 Dreamcast, and the Atomiswave has a dual Japanese power outlet on the inside. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?...

One Aliexpress GDEMU, battery holder and PTC fuse later:

To get it going in the cab, I am designing some some custom open source PCB's though.

First off, this great project turns any raspberry Pico into a Dreamcast controller. Annoyingly enough it seems no one made open source PCBs for it as his license is very kind/permissive. Let's change that:

Secondly, the stereo amp for Egret 3 / Atomiswave is unobtainium at this point. Lets make a converter PCB for an Aliexpress TPA3110 module with the same power output as the original:

 

[mourix]

Oh my gosh, the monitor issue was a royal pain in the rear.....

I must have spent 50 hours on this troubleshooting and even ended up in a crisis as I had put my step down transformer in the wrong setting (but only blew up the transformer itself in the end, phew).
Even invested in new test gear like an LCR meter. Eventually Grant was a great help in getting it going, see here. I also may or may not have reproduced IC5 and IC9 modules for the Wei-Ya 3129 / Rodotron 666.

So what was the issue? This frigging thing:

This monitor changes the B+ voltage depending on 15k, 24k, or 31k input. Q12 was shorted, which is part of this switching. Basically, we were stuck at 31k voltage. Hence it going in protection on 15k.

You have no idea how happy I was to see my faulty Neo Geo on this monitor...

On with the restoration.

 

[kuze]

Really nice work with the Wei Ya chassis repair, it was interesting following your thread with Grant on AO.

Thanks for sharing your progress so far!

 

[mourix]

Removing decals and prep for reproduction

Before respraying a candy cab, it's important to make sure there are replacement stickers for everything you rip off.
In the case of the Atomiswave SD, side art and control panel art are well available, but all the small decals are hard to come by. Today is step one of changing that.

Step 1: Heat the decal with a hair dryer for about half a minute or more. You want it to be hot enough to hurt your fingers when touching the panel.

Step 2: Using a razor blade, slice through the molten glue. DO NOT PULL on the sticker as you'll stretch it..

Step 3: Flatten the stickers onto a friendly material. I used CD sleeve plastic.

Now scan it all on at least 600 DPI in full color. After all this effort you want as much usable pixel data as you can. Also look around if there already is any vector data available.

Here is my collection so far, so feel free to use this in any way possible.

 

[mourix]

Time to get back to the audio part. I assembled the custom TPA3110 class D amp.

It actually sounds great!...But keeping up with the theme, Mr Wei Ya is unhappy

I had put extra filtering on the class D amp but its clearly too noisy. Sound is 10/10, but all my games have snow-like distortion.

Time for me to design a class AB amp I guess..

 

[neokoen]

I installed a 2.1 PC speaker system in my AWSD, a logitech Z533 which has 3 autoswitching audio inputs, volume/bass regulation. The jamma mono and amplified stereo goes through one of those cheap audio attenuators for cars and I can use line level from Naomi and other boards.
The result is better than I could ever have hoped for, has the advantage of being cab-contained but I'm not a true audiophile so some people might get upset about it being 'good sound' I guess.

 

[mourix]

I installed a 2.1 PC speaker system in my AWSD, a logitech Z533 which has 3 autoswitching audio inputs, volume/bass regulation. The jamma mono and amplified stereo goes through one of those cheap audio attenuators for cars and I can use line level from Naomi and other boards.
The result is better than I could ever have hoped for, has the advantage of being cab-contained but I'm not a true audiophile so some people might get upset about it being 'good sound' I guess.

Definitely considering something like this now. The screen is amazing but it does deserve a sub..

 

[bagheera369]

Having 3 of these, I've left them all stock audio, with no taito amp, but I run pcb's and misters in them....not JVS stuff.

The monitor is far and away, the more important aspect.

I'm about to go sit in the arcade and test a recalbox Jamma setup I picked up, and looking at all the cabs, I can't imagine how loud they'd be with subs in them ALL. It's kind of a scary thought that the arcade cabs would drown out the pinball mechanics at that rate.

 

[mourix]

Having 3 of these, I've left them all stock audio, with no taito amp, but I run pcb's and misters in them....not JVS stuff.

The monitor is far and away, the more important aspect.

I'm about to go sit in the arcade and test a recalbox Jamma setup I picked up, and looking at all the cabs, I can't imagine how loud they'd be with subs in them ALL. It's kind of a scary thought that the arcade cabs would drown out the pinball mechanics at that rate.

The whole point of these original audio systems is indeed to not bother the rest of the arcade room too much. The side effect is that they do end up sounding rather thin if you are only running the one machine at a time. A sub definitely has a place in that setting.