Arcade Cabinet Status

It has been quite some time since I mentioned anything about the arcade cabinet. I did "finish" it, in that games were playable on it. For some time there was some good game playing action on it. Then, the problems began to rear their ugly heads.

The first crisis occurred when the computer's video card died. I managed to snag an old one from a friend for the cheap price of free. Unfortunately, the card wasn't good enough for playing games. =( So, the cabinet became more of a beatmania and Guitar Hero arcade game using the PS2's. After we moved to San Diego, the next issue appeared. The TV the arcade cabinet uses would flat line occasionally. What I mean is that the TV image flattens into a thin line through the center of the screen with normal sound output. I slight smack to the side or top of the TV would cause it to fix itself. However, the issue began to crop up more and more frequently. It now happens pretty much every single time I play beatmania. Finally, since I got the new laptop, I decided to put my old Alienware computer into the arcade cabinet to be the main game machine. While working on reformatting the computer with an optimized version of Windows XP using a program called nLite, the computer suddenly turned off! I suddenly smell the acrid odor of smoldering electronic components from the power supply!!

Juri always says that bad things happen in groups of threes. So since three things have happened, I hope that I can make fixes to the cabinet to get it restored to life. I plan on fixing the TV myself, since I've always wanted to open up a TV and check it out anyway. Don't worry Dad, I will make sure to avoid the TV tube!! =) I did some research on the problem and I hope that I can figure out the cause and repair it. I'm also waiting for a little bit of money to get the power supply that I need to replace the bad one in the computer. Then I can get back to preping the computer the rest of the way.

I really hope to have this all done soon though. I'm really excited to have some friends over to enjoy some gaming action on the arcade cabinet. There are still some finishing touches to work on as well. I STILL need a name for it, I need to touch up the paint, and I need to do the artwork. These aren't necessary, but they will need to be done to consider the cabinet completely finished.