My AV Famicom commissions for: Detroit44

This's easily the biggest commission I've ever been hired to do. Two AV famicoms getting the works (every mod I offer for sale). And one of them I'm building a rig to plug it into a jamma arcade machine. The first box-o-stuff arrived today.

Let's start this party by showing my super ultra mega secret to getting the heatsink off of the rgb ppu chips:






Looks dangerous...looks unsafe....YOU'RE GONNA BREAK THE CHI...






I've removed probably 20 heatsinks this way without a single issue

Apply enough torque against the heatsink and it simply comes right off. It really doesn't take much to pop these heatsinks off. You can also see I stuck the chips in precision sockets for the sake of keeping the pins protected (after I bent all the pins back into being straight, mail guys tend to bend pins from rough handling).

The next logical step....ppu testing party!



PPU 1 is good..



PPU 2 is fine..



PPU 3 is enjoying life..

PPUs all work great so into the storage they go





You're probably wondering what I used to test these rgb chips. My purpose built AV famicom:



This AV famicom is custom built for testing stuff. It contains headers that let me plug in / unplug all the stuff that gets bypassed when using rgb or the upgraded audio circuit. I can switch it between upgrade audio and video to factory defaults in less than a minute. It also sports a fully assembled av famicom upgrade kit which is needed for testing rgb and stuff with upgraded audio.

Oh yeah...and incase anyone's wondering where I got the backplate for my rgb nes 2 from:



Here's just a few of the things being used in this project:

Got a bunch of stuff done that I didn't take any pictures of. I desoldered the ppus in these av famicoms and installed precisions sockets where the ppus used to be. I also swapped out the chips that're needed for the powerpak to work with a rgb chip. I 100% assembled one of the two upgrade kits. Here's some pictures I took after..

The heatsink in these systems is bigger than it needs to be, and it gets in the way of installing the audio switch in the back of the console:



Thanks to my jigsaw this's no longer an issue:



Here's the s-video from the first system with all the video connections wired up:



And the rgb + sync test using my rgb test circuit:



Systems in their current states:



Tomorrow or whenever I get time I'll wire up audio for the system with a kit.

system 1 (the home use one) is 100% finished:



I crashed and took a nap, finishing 2 consoles on 6 hours of sleep is no fun.

Wow that looks great! Good job

Conker wrote:

Wow that looks great! Good job

It's full of awesome that's for sure.

Ll any commission done by you is full of awesome

Conker wrote:

Ll any commission done by you is full of awesome

I'm more looking forward to building the jamma rig for the second console detroit44 sent me. Honestly I can build these av famicoms while chatting on windows live that's how second nature it's become to me.

Hah! That's awesome!

I 100% built the kit for system #2. Tested s-video and the audio circuit and everything works great:



I also got the scart cable in today. I wired up video and it works but it's really dark:



It's odd the cxa2075 amps the signal strength for s-video and composite but maybe not rgb? I've got an ultimarc rgb amp sitting in my drawer I could sell off and install it if the client wants.

you sir, are a master at your hobby, so in that case, i challenge you to make a portable snes. do you accept?

Conker wrote:

you sir, are a master at your hobby, so in that case, i challenge you to make a portable snes. do you accept?

No. There's really no appeal to me in taking a snes with me, or any console really.

lol fine fine, just thought it would be cool to see what a man of your modding talent could do.

Conker wrote:

lol fine fine, just thought it would be cool to see what a man of your modding talent could do.

I CAN do a lot but I only do the stuff I'm interested in. This all started as a hobby of mine that I was doing purely for myself. People kept bugging to pay me for this so I set a price I'd be comfortable doing the work for.

I figured out why the rgb was too dark on my supergun. Apparently arcade rgb is around 4x as strong as the rgb that comes out of consoles. I wired up the ultimarc rgb amp but right away I was presented with a whole bunch of problems. I attached trimmer resistors to the output lines of my ultimarc rgb amp so I could adjust the rgb strengths. When I had the amp turned up past a certain brightness the picture would become completely unstable and lose sync. This is obviously no good. I remember years ago someone posting in the rgb nes mod thread on gamesx that his ultimarc amp wasn't working until he wired it into a different power or ground source. I looked up the old thread and he said that powering and grounding the amp from the nes instead of the jamma machine fixed the problem. I tried powering and grounding the ultimarc rgb amp from the famicom instead of my jamma rig and sure enough the picture became permanently stable no matter how bright I had the amp set. However.....the ultimarc rgb amp doesn't amp the image properly at all. Sure the ultimarc rgb amp gets the brightness level correct, but the colours become all washed out and lose all definition (suddenly all greens look the same, same with the reds and the blues). This is again completely no good, I was really starting to worry about how easy it would be to amp the rgb to the point where it'd look proper on a jamma rig.

I next started going through all the old amp circuits I have built over the years. I tried a single transistor 2sc1815 buffer, no effect because it's only a buffer and not an actual amp. I found one other amp I built years ago for when I had just started out with the rgb nes, that's the njm 2267 amp. This amp had been in my closet for years and the wiring was in rough shape so I had to clean it up. I wired it up....and BAM, perfect brightness rgb on my supergun!!!!



Once again here's how the image looks without the amp:



win!

Here's the schematic if anyone's interested:



It's a modified version of this:

http://gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=av:nes_rgb_amplifier

Which is actually just a clone circuit of the old version of the av famicom kits I buy and install. This njm2267 circuit was never intended to be used this way but clearly you can see that it works.

Now that I think of it, way back when I built my first rgb nes systems the encoder that's now in my arcade supergun was being used on its own externally to encoder the s-video after the rgb passed through this very same njm2267 amp circuit. The only difference is now the rgb passes through a sony cxa2075 circuit first which keeps the rgb as crisp as possible, and converts that rgb into super crisp s-video as well. And also the kits I use now have the upgraded audio circuit included as well.

Looks like I've hit the major hurdle of this project and cleared it well! Everything that's left to do has been done before and should be no problem.

I've had to work out some more kinks haha. First while tinkering with my supergun I accidentally soldered a couple of traces together and spent half the day figuring out where the problem was. Anyway once that was sorted I noticed that going to upgraded audio caused buzzing....but I talked to the man tiido and as I thought you only need to add resistors to be able to mix the signals. Two resistors later and all was good. I also wired up the system to run off of power from the jamma rig. I even managed to buy the right kind of power jack for the console from ebay so check it out:



This jamma rig is taking longer to build than expected because it's a lot of stuff I've never done before so it's been a learning process for sure. Anyway all that's left now is to wire up the pad hacks (that's simple I've done that many times before) and build everything into project boxes so it should be nothing but smooth sailing from this point onward

Here is a link to some photo bucket pictures of my new Jamma NES unit. This thing is freakin' awesome! I cannot believe how clear the pictures is and the improved sound is great in the Blast City cabinet. These pictures do not due the unit justice (my camera is not the best). I could not be happier with this unit. Well worth the time and money. Dom did a fantastic job and kept me updated every step of the way with posts, pictutes and videos. This unit is now one of my most prized possessions. Thanks again Dom!

Here is the link:

https://s1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee371/markrhurst/NES%20Jamma%20-%20Awesome/

Awesome stuff! Give me the arcade machine

ProD1gy84 wrote:

Awesome stuff! Give me the arcade machine

Save up and buy one like everyone who owns one did?

*edit*

Here's the pics of the stuff I built for detroit44 in action:





hmm.. How come detroit44 has a power bar inside of his cab? The psu of a cab should only need one power plug.

Also I demand pics of your entire cab and pcb collection detroit44!!