Hooray!! I Have a Playchoice 10 Countdown Timer

It's actually out of a countertop, but I shouldn't have a problem fabricating a bracket to mount it in my single monitor cabinet.

I'm going to have to make a cable, but I'm not sure if I want to find the proper connectors to do it. I'm leaning towards soldering on a 12 pin molex, there's nothing remotely OEM about my Playchoice/VS hybrid anyways. I should post a photo of the ridiculous perfboard monstrosity that I created to do the switching, I should probably sketch up a schematic for it too, before I forget what I did and it breaks.

I have PCB layouts I sketched to make a few more of them a little more professionally, and a little more advanced, but haven't really set up to do any sort of etching or drilling I'd need. I should look into some of the web-based pcb prototyping services again. I could get a dozen boards, sell 10 on eBay to break even. I know that multijamma guy has a patent, but my approach and design is wholly different from his. I ain't 'fraid of no ghost.

I really need to get back to my cabinets, parts are cheap on eBay this time of year.

Why not list things to do?

Bad Dudes' monitor is fritzing, it's the flyback transformer. I have a parts chassis and a cap kit for it, I need to get around to rebuilding it. I also need to look up the dip switch settings and put it on easy. I am not a bad enough dude to rescue the president.

Puck Man and Playchoice 10 both have at least one gun on the CRT flaking in and out. The PC10 is beyond repair, but I'm loath to put a regular monitor with an inverter in there. I may swap with the Donkey Kong's monitor, it's in great shape and I'm unlikely to be jumping over barrels any time soon - I'm going to need to spend lots of hours trying to get anything out of that board (or lots of money replacing it).

Puckman is probably fixable, but I haven't been able to ID the monitor. It's no doubt a cheap chinese knock-off, but it's incredibly well built and has a really stable and sharp image. They really don't build them like they used to. I've never seen a TV set or PC monitor that came near the build quality of those things. On the bright side, it looks like a good tube swap candidate, and I have a TV tube with matching pins and impedances, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Both my tables could use new joysticks, I need to really start watching eBay again. Regular sticks don't fit. I'm likely to find original replacements for the Time Pilots, since there were plenty of those old Centuri/Konami/Sega cabinets out there.

Puckman is a chinese bootleg circa 1979, though. It's buttons and sticks are downright weird. From what I can tell scouring catalogs, never at any time did any manufacturer sell pushbuttons of that weirdo diameter.

I need to build/buy a new eprom eraser, so I can go ahead and patch Puzzle Bobble 3x into english, and put the unibios on the Neo Geo. I'm not ashamed to cheat to see all the endings to Samurai Shodown.

THEN, I can get to work on my NES cartridge adaptor for the Playchoice 10.

It strikes me that a Neo Geo rom emulator is a cost effective proposal at this point, flash is cheap now, and it's effectively the same setup as a genesis cart. I should put that on my todo list. If I can pull it off, a CPS2 rom emulator would absolutely rock. I should check into the timings, I'm sure it would work for both.

On that front, I lost the code for superufo ultimate mega SNES rom tool 2000 that I wrote. Now I need to rewrite it, I can't use my UFO now without it. I wrote it years ago to split up SNES roms, format floppies to 1.68 megs as it wrote it out - for use in my floppy based SNES cartridge copier. I wonder if that code I found to format the floppy would even work under XP? I guess a 4 line shell script in linux could do everything it did - I stole the muscle out of ucon anyways.

So that's my story, I can read this later when I'm bored and maybe be inspired to do something. I feel lazy now.