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Ethan O’Toole’s Blog – Technical & geek logEthan O’Toole’s Blog Technical & geek log Main Navigation Donkey Kong – Cabinet re-art Donkey Kong… one of my favorite classic games. I’m not good at it, I’m pretty terrible at the game play. But it was one of the favorite games (along with Centipede) from when I was younger. I’ve had the machine for 15 years now perhaps. I bought it broken, and repaired the monitor (which needs a bit more repair now.) The side art has always been bad, but it usually sat sandwiched between other games so I didn’t care. During a black friday sale, Phoenix arcade had side art on sale. I grabbed a set. And it sat. For a long time. Finally motivation hit to get it done! Partial art was present on left, and removing it was a PAIN. Goo gone and a plastic scraper is what it came down to. Rubbing alcohol also helps but the minute it evaporates the glue is fixed back in place. It took a lot of work. I took lots of measurements and c-clamped stuff to the machine to help guide the art. That being said on the right I went a little quick, and had to peel it back and relay it down. This caused a small bubble in the art, smaller than a penny. While I was at it I also took the opportunity to paint the base black. It was a re-creation done as the original one had deteriorated. I probably made the base 10 years ago and somehow it has held up, even though DK has been to MAGFest several times and a few events when I lived in Norfolk. Anyways, here is a gallery: Donkey Kong cabinet re-art April 20, 2020 By ethan Uncategorized Leave a Comment Dance Dance Revolution SuperNova 1 – Pad repair andRepair would be daunting, since there was at least 15 bad spots on the thing: I contacted BEST Electronics, but didn’t notice the email timely. I bought a replacement (mine is a mitsumi keyboard, however the mylar did not say mitsumi or have a part #?) The replacement was around $30 shipped. It feels less thick than the original which worries me long term, but it works 100%. With these two things fixed, the 130XE is 100% working. In the process I also ended up repairing two 1050 floppy drives and built a SDrive-MAX! More on that next posts. June 12, 2019 By ethan Electronics repair , Retro computing Leave a Comment B-Sides Charm 2019 ATGeek and I got to handle Audio and Video for B-Sides Charm 2019 in Towsen, MD. Great fun was had! Music acts were three artists well known to us: Inverse Phase, Mikal kHill and Wreck the System. The talks of the event were interesting, and overall it was a fun con. Some things are likely to change for next year as things are tweaked. Overall, a fun time! The picture above is Inverse Phase on stage. June 12, 2019 By ethan Events , InfoSec Leave a Comment Elation AR-32RM DMX-512 show playback controller, repair and software driver issues Elation AR-32RM repair, software Story time…. So a friend and myself volunteered to do lasers, sound and lighting for an upcoming IT security conference. Seems cool. We get up balls early to drive to Towsen MD to do a walk through on the hotel and try to get the ability for fire watch and haze for the lasers (denied by hotel. Sigh.) On the way back we stopped by the MAGFest warehouse, another event we volunteer with. Right near the warehouse is this music store (drums/guitar/keyboard/perc/pa) that has a lot of new and used music equipment. I always like to peek at the keyboards and Rob wanted to check out the PA subs. I see this unit in the racks of random bits, an Elation AR-32RM. Maybe Rob spotted the DMX connectors. Not sure. I had been thinking about looking at the OLA software on Linux or Pi/Arduino for instant playback to some RGB LED wash lights I got from a deal back in the Norfolk VA days. This thing is pretty broken. The welds that hold the front on were broken off, so someone used thin strips of gaffers tape to hold it together. No way, I think. Last time I was in this store drooling over some old Roland analog rack synth they quoted eBay fully working prices, but it was worth a shot. Hey man, would you take $20 for this thing? It’s pretty broken but I might have a use.” $20 if I never see it again, no warranty” Oh yea, deal man.” $20 in the hand, $20 in his drawer, the next step we were out the door. Two nice black cap head screws and nuts, some time on the drill press and some luck…. good to go! Looks pro! Getting the stupid gaff tape gum off was more work then fixing the damage, goo gone was no match. Magic eraser seemed to work best. Last step…. the software! The software is BROKEN! So, after downloading the software distro and digging out some old laptops I found that the Windows 32bit drivers… are broken. Off to the 64bit drivers… which are… broken. After all the work to get the thing looking good, and with the DC Dive Show around the corner (where I plan to use it) the clock was ticking. I emailed Elation but didn’t catch a response. I decided to dig a bit. The drivers portion of the software contain a FTDI driver, which is pretty common. But the vendor ID from the unit doesn’t match the driver ID in the INF files from the FTDI driver. By changing the vendor IDs in the driver files to match, it made it work. I was able to get the software to work on both 32bit Windows running on a physical laptop, and Windows 10 64bit running in a VM. The thing is, it might have broken FTDI support for other things, I’m not really sure about that part. I will try to post the driver bundles soon but WARNING … I fudged it to make it work, no idea how proper things are or what will happen to other hardware that uses FTDI. A friend thinks you can edit the device ID and vendor ID with some tool and just make the thing use a normal FTDI driver but not sure on that. Overall I was able to overcome limitations and get the unit recording some DMX sequences from Freestyler/Entec OpenDMX. The unit works pretty well, but there is a timer that is global not per sequence which is really annoying. But happy with the unit, and it will come in handy in driving Color Kinetics lights without a sexy City Theatrical power supply but with the PDS-500e supplies that I have. It’s possible that some of these units have a different set of IDs? I tried archive.org and got some earlier revisions of the software and the drivers from those failed to work also. March 4, 2019 By ethan Uncategorized Leave a Comment Williams Pinball ASIC Troubles – Twilight Zone (WPC) WPC ASIC socket replacement From the world of arcade repair… as the cold of winter hit a few of my pinball machines started acting up. On game nights with friends, it was creeping up to a 75% failure rate! Ouch! This one took me for a bit of a ride. Twilight Zone was getting random resets. Sometimes, I was getting audio and graphics errors, as if the ribbon cables between CPU and Audio PCB needed reseating. But things weren’t adding up. It turns out that tapping the ASIC chip would cause all sorts of issues. I attempted to do a sloppy job prying out the ASIC and cracked one corner of the socket. My goal was to carefully deoxit the legs of the IC and maybe pins of socket. Oh well. Found some sockets on eBay, ordered them and thanks to Hakko 808 desoldering tool it took about 15 minutes total to remove the old ASIC socket and solder in the new one. So far, things seem good. I won’t believe the game reset issues are solved — that seems to be an issue with the AC input connector on the power driver board, but time will tell. March 4, 2019 By ethan Arcade repair Leave a Comment Posts navigation Page 1 Page 2 … Page 5 Search for: Recent Posts Donkey Kong – Cabinet re-art Dance Dance Revolution SuperNova 1 – Pad repair and upgrade Atari 1040ST Overhaul Arista switches, virtual-router not working MBT-300 Haze Machine / Hazer, loud compressor Recent Comments ethan on Lightwave Research / High End Systems Status Cue Lighting Console – Communications Protocol ethan on Digital Music Corp MX-8 MIDI Patchbay power supply repair ethan on Digital Music Corp MX-8 MIDI Patchbay...