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    Sega Astro Restore Log

    Picked this up the other day and thought I'd document it. Will do a proper walk through when it's done, as have made videos of most of the steps - mainly because I'd lose my way otherwise!

    While it's not in terrible nick by any means and the wiring is surprisingly good, there's some adjustments needed on the monitor, the marquee bulb is missing, the speakers are knackered, the control panel is not wired correctly with the sticks also being duff. There's quite a few scrapes to the body along with the side stickers and the doors are in poor condition; one hacked about. It's also pretty filthy inside with some slight yellowing on the front of the control panel.

    Started the tear down this evening, removing the CP, removing and discharging the monitor, as well as removing the chassis from the tube to send off for tuning and any repairs that might need to be done:




    Saturday February 9th 2019
    I began to take the Astro apart. Despite it looking reasonably fresh in pictures it was dirty as sin inside. However I wasn't focused too much on cleaning yet, rather, labelling all the screws into sandwich bags and making videos of each step. The goal was to get the monitor out tonight and to take off the chassis to send to Grant on Monday.

    The monitor was having a peculiar issue only on a PC via a JPAC It would wobble for the first 40 minutes, gradually easing off and occasionally it would pulse. This wasn't apparent on JAMMA boards so naturally I thought it was either a bad cap on the PSU or the JPAC as I'd had issues previously with the bloody Dino King monitor.




    Sunday February 10th
    With the chassis now out I took apart the rest of the cab and cleaned. And cleaned. And cleaned some more. I also labelled everything up.

    I also ordered an old PC from a chap I know on some PC forums. I'd ordered a few units off of him before. For about £70 I got a decent i5 Optiplex machine with a 2gb Radeon 5450HD, perfect for MAME and CRTEmudrivers. Also technically I could just clone one of my old setups saving some time faffing about reinstalling the custom drivers.









    Monday February 11th
    The frame may look mint in photos but there are enough dings, scrapes and colour mis-matches to want to touch up at least. Sadly I realised very quickly (and this would be confirmed by Nik73 on UKVAC) that trying to patch these things uniformly is not an option. Each part has aged differently. The only option to get this pristine would be a respray.

    After work I called into a local car body shop to check out respray costs. I had packed the bits in the back of my car and watched as the guy pulled a range of odd, 'this is gonna cost you' expressions. After telling me they weren't the cheapest garage around and then saying they only took cash, along with implying that the owner was dodgy he said it would be £1000...

    Now this doesn't seem bad for a car, and I appreciate he's a professional, but there's less than a litre of paint to be used on this and while I appreciate this is not as easy as a bonnet I thought that might be excessive so would look at other options.

    Later that evening I went on a road trip to Kent today to take my monitor chassis to see Grant. He's as super-duper whizz with anything CRT it seems, as soon as I walked in the door with the chassis half-covered in bubble wrap he identified it and took a look. He worked ridiculously quickly and told me he can get through 8 of these in a day! Anyway, he estimated it would be with me on Thursday, all re-capped. He'd also test pre-re-capping to see if he could replicate the 'pulse' or wobble issue.

    Tuesday February 12th
    Grant messaged me to say the chassis was solid on his tests. Hmmm, now I was stumped! He asked if I'd like it r-capped anyway, which seemed like a good idea. Grant replaced all caps in power supply, vertical, video b+ and deflection processor circuits- including mains smoothing. This came to a very reasonable £70-odd including shipping. He said it would be with me Thursday. In the mean time I completed all cleaning, carefully removing the original stickers from the back of the cab and scanned them in as a high quality .tiff to be cleaned up and replicated.

    Wednesday February 13th

    The PC I ordered Sunday arrived today. I set it up and soon realised he had put the 32-bit version of Windows 7 on, not the 64-bit needed for the custom GPU drivers. My fault, forgot to specify! No worries I'll just slam in my old 64-bit Windows 7 pro disc and upgrade...yeah...that didn't work. Anyhow, about 2 hours later and lots of failed attempted repairs of the boot record I gave up and cloned an old larger HDD to a 90gb SSD and got it all working. Phew. As with all these things the GroovyMAME setup should have been an hour job max, turned into a whole four hour evening. There was even more of a pullavah when I tried to reset Retroarch using SwitchRES on this system up with Dreamcast titles like Ikaruga, as they've added some extra options to the newer builds of the core and left off certain sync options which should be on, anyway...

    A PCB arrived courtesy of the wonderful @Zaki so I was ready to test my chassis with an actual board and the newer PC I'd just built when the chassis arrives tomorrow.

    Thursday February 14th
    The chassis appeared today, along with two paint testers I'd ordered from eBay. I'd ordered both of the recommended colours for the Astro body: LB9A for Audi and RAL 9002 (grey/white). Needless to say a few tests around the cabinet showed that neither as these matched well, as expected, and as reiterated by UKVAC member Nik, who'd also found the same issue. There's only one thing to get this pristine now for sure. Paint the bastard. Either myself or cough up £1000. I decided I didn't like either option so planned to call up some mates who might know some car painters.

    I fitted the chassis and neckboard back to the tube of the monitor and fired up Zaki's PCB:



    Looks lovely! Made a minimal adjustment to the focus and then fired up the PC, with very little hope it would work...



    BOOM! We're in business. The image is bright and crisp with no pulses or distortion. I ran a few different games in different resolutions and the monitor handled them all admirably. That was one of my key concerns addressed. Now off to pack up the PSU to have that recapped.

    Friday 15th February
    My mate linked me up with a car sprayer who was just the corner from me. I took the bits to him and he had a look and came up with the figure of £200. Bargain! However I was then told by my mate occasionally he can be a bit hit and miss. Still, a step in the right direction.

    Saturday 16th February
    I called up a couple more local body shops today and with the bits packed in the back I visited one early in the AM. When I arrived at the first place I realised I actually knew the bloke! And he had previously serviced and repaired vehicles from a business I used to run; this was clearly a sign my brain is failing rapidly, since I forgot he even did body work, and moreover had forgotten he existed. He took a look at everything and quoted me £400 all in, although I'd have to get my mate to weld the slot some goon cut in the PCB door. He's been in the car body business about 20 years and assured me he could get a perfect finish. His reviews on-line looked ace, so it seemed liked a no-brainer.

    Wednesday 20th February
    I'm out of town this week but a family member kindly posted the PSU off the Grant to be recapped.

    Monday 25th February
    Not much to report. Took the chassis to the painter's today. We went through a few colours, but settled on a nice shiny LB9A 2K paint which is often used by other folk restoring these. He reckons he'll have it all done within the week, which is pretty quick!

    Grant has already re-capped the PSU and tells me that one of the caps was leaking and all were reading off so was a good idea to have it sorted, especially as this has been sitting in a Japanese arcade for over 20 years.

    Started making the front-end of Attractmode look pretty trying out a few themes and collecting and finding my HQ video snaps and logo art.

    Friday 1st March
    Reasonably quiet week on the restore front. My shell should be painted early next week and the PSU arrived back from Grant. Today I ordered a new panel from alberto1225 on arcadeotaku. Apparently his work is excellent and he screen prints directly on to the material, making it look like the original panel. He also includes 3 types of stick mounting plates, which is ace. I also picked up an instruction strip place holder since mine was missing.


    This evening I made a trip just 30 minutes from me to collect new old stick Astro stickers! These seem to be increasingly rare and the seller actually picked these up over 10 years ago from Japan. As far as I'm aware no-one has been able to successfully colour-match the original neon stickers so lucky to have found these. I'm also slightly terrified when I come to apply them!


    I also ordered a starter for the light tube and finished making Attractmode look pretty!

    Thus far still need to:
    -Source caster wheels (these are a ballache and may have to abandon)
    -Ordered 6 pink buttons and 2 new sticks (I'm replacing the snap-in's for screw-on
    -Go through and see what screws I'm missing - certainly need some more coach bolts for the CP
    -Sort out speakers
    -Clean the coin box
    -Source speakers. I've been recommended these: https://www.ebay.com/itm/122684221284 but I'm considering cheating and going with some PC plug-in speakers and since it will initially use MAME
    -Source SEGA locks and keys. I've actually found these but will pick them up further down the road I think. This will be the last thing since I have working keys and locks in there currently
    -Pick up some more 100 Yen coins!

    Tuesday March 5th
    Actually forgot these were on the way and when I ordered them. Had a guy in Spain restore all my cab stickers including ones I didn't have and print them on the original material used by SEGA:


    Saturday March 9th
    Quite a few bits have arrived this week:
    -New wheels for the casters as the old ones are hammered
    -New buttons and sticks and some octagonal gates
    -Fluorescent tubes (which turned out to be the wrong size! I thought the NAC and AC would have the same bulb)
    -Starters for the bulbs (which now may be surplus to requirement!)
    -Carriage bolts for the control panel

    This morning I sorted out the casters and switched out the wheels:


    In the afternoon I went down to check on the painting progress. Most of the larger sections had been done and looked way better than I imagined! They'd be professionally painted and polished. However he'd noticed this odd 'pitting' in some of the fibre-glass:


    So he agreed to have another sand and paint over it all to remove all imperfections. In the mean time I decided I'd remove the marquee light panel as the dirt underneath now looked horrible.

    I found it tricky to find any guides as to how the panel and speakers were actually fixed to the frame as most restore logs focus on NAC (hence the earlier bulb confusion!). However with a minor bit of force I figured out the speakers and the header panel were affixed with some kind of double-sided sponge tape:



    With that removed I could see just how grimy the underneath was, so took to cleaning and removing all sticker residue, until I got something like this:



    With it all cleaned I took it back down to the painters to be re-prepped and re-sprayed.

    In the evening I thought I'd finalise the GroovyMAME (+other systems) PC and make sure I could replace the Windows shell...this is where I ran into problems.

    So, Attractmode is a funny beast and only an older revision seems to be able to focus GM correctly on a CRT. I'd prepared for this and set it all up with art and looking purdy. Instant sheller or any shelling program doesn't work correctly with AM since it won't read the config files so starts a new instance of AM every time it boots, which is useless! Unperturbed I thought I knew the answer simply alter the reg using this guide I'd used before:

    'open Registry Editor and locate the following registry entry:


    Key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon


    Name: Shell


    Type: REG_SZ


    Value: Explorer.exe


    now change that value to read this: C:\AttractMode\attract.exe -c C:\AttractMode
    (change path to whatever you have)'

    So I did this rebooted the system and everything seemed fine.Until I tried to run Marvel Vs Capcom 2 or anything using a Retroarch core. Every time RA wouldn't focus properly and threw up some bizarre resolution. This was odd as I'd set up several PCs with Retroarch running at the correct 240p res and this one was no different. What I figured is RA needs the explorer.exe loaded BEFORE you run Attract Mode otherwise the whole thing buggers up. So to correct this I pondered if I could put the Windows shell back to launching explorer.exe and just write a .bat file to launch from the startup folder. I thought I'd give it a shot so I created a batch script for launching attractmode, then created a shortcut, then put that shortcut in the startup folder, and...it worked! So my PC is now completely setup. I spent some time manually removing all Windows branding and audio as well as the boot logos and startup screens. I won't put a full guide here but lots of useful stuff is available on www.sevenforums.com.

    So for now it feels like the bulk of the work is done or is getting done at least! There's still a few bits on the way that I ordered over the last week or two:

    -New CP from Alberto
    -New SEGA locks and Keys
    -New speakers (will probably pick up an amp to run them via the PC but leave the JAMMA stuff all intact)
    -Batch of 100 Yen Coins
    -Probably other stuff I've forgotten!

    -Finish paint job

    Still to sort:
    -Lighting (My Dad is an electrician and I think has decided he is going to sort this for me after the bulb fiasco )
    -100 Yen sticker from Olly

    ...sure there's more!

    Saturday 16th Match
    Another slow week and been hectic at work! Received the screen printed control panel yesterday and it's a stunner:



    Also received the speakers yesterday. I'm quickly realising that most of the restos that focus on restoring a New Astro City don't apply to the original machine. Thus far I've found bulbs and speaker sizes to be incompatible.

    Finished off the PC today. Video here on how it works as I got a couple of PM's. This uses GroovyMAME and Retroarch to output everything up to Dreamcast in native res. Some things look a bit jerky potentially in the video that's simply the refresh rates clashing with how I've captured them, in real-life things are buttery smooth.

    Last edited by Escape-To-88; 16-03-2019, 17:54.
    3DS FC (updated 2015): 0447-8108-3129

    #2
    Will be following this thread without fail. Really looking forward to your restoration. Good luck.

    Comment


      #3
      Novus plastic polish might help with cabinet scrapes that stuff is fantastic at removing scuffs number 2 & 3 will bring your machine back to looking scuff free. Looking forward to seeing how nice you make it look.

      Comment


        #4
        Sylvania Luxline Plus T8 15W - 865 Daylight | 44cm - Buy online for only 6.972001 at Any-lamp.co.uk ✔ Benefit from fast dispatch and the best price!


        Good luck with the clean up. Assuming the ballast is ok, the above tube and starter should be right for you.

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by zipper View Post
          [SIZE=3]
          Awesome cheers mate.

          All totally stripped, update coming in a bit.
          Last edited by Escape-To-88; 10-02-2019, 20:16.
          3DS FC (updated 2015): 0447-8108-3129

          Comment


            #6
            Just wanted to say how much I enjoy these threads, mate!
            Keep us posted!

            Comment


              #7
              Awesome. I'll just live vicariously through your efforts.

              Comment


                #8
                Updated with a proper log-style format.
                3DS FC (updated 2015): 0447-8108-3129

                Comment


                  #9
                  Cracking thread, loving it :-) Thank you for sharing!

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by mmmonkey View Post
                    Cracking thread, loving it :-) Thank you for sharing!
                    This.

                    Most of what you are doing is completely over my head, but I really enjoy the journey you and your cab are taking.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Are you doing any work on this at the weekend?

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Originally posted by mmmonkey View Post
                        Are you doing any work on this at the weekend?
                        Just got back from Norfolk as off for the half-term. Loaded up the bits of the frame to take it to the painters tomorrow after work Will update tomorrow or when it gets back. Tracked down some NOS side stickers, so will probably update when I get them later in the the week.
                        3DS FC (updated 2015): 0447-8108-3129

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Nice :-)

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Bit of an update for those interested
                            3DS FC (updated 2015): 0447-8108-3129

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Originally posted by Escape-To-88 View Post
                              Bit of an update for those interested
                              Regarding putting those stickers on you can spray your cabinet sides with window cleaner spray then put the sticker on with a layer of moisture underneath you can slide them around to your hearts content till they are perfectly in place then use a squeegee to press out the window cleaner under the sticker it will dry flat and as it dries the sticker glue will grip. It’s a common technique, google it to read up if you have never tried it but it’s far safer than trying to put them on dry especially with valuable stickers.

                              Comment

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