Building a CMVS - Part 3

While the previous part was more about the gathering of the parts, this part is about the making, and that part is easy too !

First is drilling holes. While any dumb guy can hold a drill (there should be a law for that), you have to be careful when makings the holes. You must carefully select your drill bit. In doubt, choose the smaller one. You can always make a holes bigger but not the other way around. It's also good to plan in advance the settings of your connectors, especially if you have one of a different size. As you can see in the picture, I went with the video quality and then sound. The other side only has the power connector, so I didn't bother to take a picture of it.

One you're done with the holes, it's time to bust out the soldering iron, your best friend in this adventure ! As you can see in the pictures, I also used a glue gun since I wanted everything to be nice and tidy. You can also note the use of only one ground wire. I find it easier and less messy that way. They would all connect together anyway at some point.

Once every video connector was connected to the encoder, I had to connect the input wires to the MVS board. Sorry I got no picture for that, but as long as you know your JAMMA pinout, you'll be ok.

Once the video encoder had both connectors soldered I did a small test. It was one of those occasions were I was glad I picked up a small Commodore monitor a couple years ago. It's bulky but it does the job when it comes to testing a console. I connected the board to one of my arcade and ran a long RCA cable to test the composite video on the monitor. Success !

The rest was easy, connect the power connector to one of the 5V line and 12V line and done. Now I could test on the big TV.

Arcade monitors are made to run with a native input, the original RGB input (not to be confused with Y/Pb/Pr input, or Component) so even on big screen, arcade games then to look very good. Much better than a NES connected over composite. However, this picture can not do justice to the quality for 2 reasons :

• It's hard to take a good picture of a screen
• You can notice the black line in the middle of the screen

While the black line is a problem with my TV itself, I was kinda glad it happened. This was the best proof that what I had been saying for the past 2 year and a half was true: there was something wrong with the TV! I was able to exchange it for a new TV since I took the extended warranty. I never thought of taking a new picture after the fact, sorry about that.