Really enjoying reading your progress. The hinge, I debated on what to do with mine, ultimately I did similar steps to the hinge but ended up painting it white with high stress enamel paint. The original silver looks good, but personally im not a fan of how it sticks out against the rest of the white of the cab and I didn't want to change having an exposed piece of metal start discoloring or rusting on me again. Just a thought and quick/easy change.
Thanks! I'm still keeping an eye on it, not sure if this is quite the optimal way to do it. But I'd prefer to keep it metal (as opposed to painted) since that's a bit more 'original'. I'm certainly not too opposed to painting it if this method starts corroding again, though.
Thank you for documenting your teardown/clean up with process! I have several NAC's that are probably around the same as yours, but quite playable... and someday I'd really like to clean them up thoroughly and learn them inside and out like this.
Super helpful guide!
No problem, glad you're finding it useful!
January 11-13th, 2021
I've wanted for a while to learn how to make my own wiring harnesses, so I spent a while researching the connectors and wire routing in the New Astro City. As mentioned above, while I was sleeving the cabinet wiring, one side effect of that process was that I learned a lot more about how the cabinet (and JAMMA in general) is electrically connected, so that helped a lot. I also consulted the wiring diagrams included with the cabinet manuals; those documents are hosted on the Arcade-Otaku wiki, which is an amazing resource for cabinet restoration.
One byproduct of this research is that I've come up with what I think is a complete and concise map of earth ground wire connections in the New Astro City -
you can find a wiring diagram and documentation at my git repository here.
I ordered a crimping tool (Hozan P-706) on the recommendation of several friends, and a bunch of connector housings and pins. Originally I placed this order two weeks before Christmas, but it got lost in mail insanity; spent a week a mile from my apartment, was never actually delivered, and then returned to sender at DigiKey three weeks later...
I reordered in the new year and parts came in two days.
Everything all sorted out:
JST VL 6 and 8 male (for NAOMI - I was originally planning to make my own power harness before I got a Sun PSU)
AMP-UP 4 pin male and female (for stereo audio)
AMP-UP 3 pin female (for integrating with the AC power wiring)
AMP-UP 2 pin male (to make the CP ground cable I'm missing)
AMP-UP 10 pin male (for kick harness)
AMP-UP 12 pin male and female (for CP wiring)
Note: AMP-UP and JST VL use female pins in male housings, and vice-versa, but since the housings are what you as an operator interact with, it's what I'll be using to refer to the connector gender throughout this post.
Spent a while learning to use the crimping tool, practiced on a few crimps before I felt confident enough to do real wiring.
First up: 4-pin AMP-UP female to stereo banana plugs. This connects into the back of a standard audio amplifier (in my case, the 'Nobsound' branded TPA3116 amp I discussed a few posts back) for providing stereo audio when using JVS or other stereo compatible games. So now the original cabinet speakers are working in stereo!
Honestly when driven by a proper amp like this, I'm quite impressed with how they perform. There's certainly an absence of bass and lower mids, but that's to be expected given the size and age of the drivers. I'm considering swapping to some newer 3" full-range drivers, to see if that offers any improvement. I know some people also add a sub, but that seems a bit overkill to me...
Next, a '2'-pin AMP-UP female to 3-pin AMP-UP female cable. I didn't have a 2-pin AMP-UP female, but the top 2 pins of a 2x2 AMP-UP 4 pin are directly compatible (and even latch properly), so that's what I'm using until my next Digikey order comes in. This is something totally custom; the idea is to connect to the 2-pin AMP-UP male AC passthrough on the -01X PSU of my cabinet (which is originally intended to power the audio amp, I believe), and use that to tap
switched AC, so that I can power other components that switch on along with the cab.
Warning: Due to the limited gauge of the original 2-pin cable, anything connected to this connector needs to be relatively low-current to be thermally safe. I don't plan to put more than a few amps on it.
This custom cable allows me to 'chain' the Sun PSU off of the -01X PSU built into the cab. You can see it on the right side of this photo, between the Sun PSU and the -01X PSU. This accomplishes three things:
- Powers the NAOMI from a real Sun PSU, instead of an old server PSU. The ATX PSU was working fine, honestly, but it was way overkill for the power needs of the NAOMI, and didn't have manually adjustable voltage rails.
- Powers on the NAOMI along with the cabinet. Previously, I had to manually turn on the Naomi and the cab separately, with two separate power switches.
- Cleans up the wiring a bit, since now there are fewer AC cables running through the cab and less overall cabling length in general.
Now that I had everything working, I spent some time re-mounting the NAOMI setup and consolidating it onto a single board. The whole thing just
baaaarely fits inside the cab, but it does indeed fit. Way cleaner to work with now compared to having most of the NAOMI gear outside the cabinet before!
Finally, hooked up my Xbox 360 to my SCART->JAMMA adapter. I remember this being a bit temperamental a few years ago; lots of time spent tweaking sync and and picture details... but to my surprise, it worked immediately and without any issues when I set it up again! I think all the issues I was seeing before were due to the underlying monitor problems, and now that I've spent some time repairing the monitor, it also cleaned up a lot of those little quirks.
Next up will probably be finishing cleanup on the 2L12B panel and building a wire harness for it.
