It's a one day before Christmas miracle! After some overnight parts from Japan* and a night on the whiskey and iced coffee syrup (goes well I found) my new caps were in..
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| INSTALLING, please wait.. |
*
When I say overnight, technically I mean 2 weeks from eBay. When I say Japan, I actually mean Hong Kong. Meh..
Okay so the eBay listing said Panasonic capacitors but there's no way of identifying them as such. But the print on them say they're the ones I needed so I'm just going to go with that. They went in as well as a badly soldered recap job could go and if you don't flip over the motherboard, you'll be none the wiser to the multitude of burn marks and gobs of solder everywhere. What's a good M.A.M.E setup without a couple of battle scars?
It powered on first time, loaded up Emuloader just fine and then promptly froze trying to load King of the Monsters. Hoping that was a once off I hit restart and bada boom bada bing (wait..) we had Punisher lift off! The game started...
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| Okay don't tease me now.. |
...and the game worked!
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| Ha ha YES! Get the money! GET ALL THE MONEYS!!! |
Amazing! Angels wept! Horns exploded! Celebratory things...er..celebrated. Which means now it's time to ready the weapons of war and have at our home made arcade cabinet. Thankfully I ended up with a couple of hardware store vouchers for Christmas which meant costs for this project have gone right down. Picture a giant leather sheet unraveling, unveiling the following:
To do the grunt work when it comes to cutting: I've selected the Bosch 1500Watt 184mm circular saw. (I've got the PKS 1500 - the US version would be closer to
this one) Just the right size for what I need to cut and a decent price too. Yes there's much cheaper options available but I've wanted a circular saw for some time already (I do a lot of hand sawing) and figured I'd might as well get a decently built high speed cutting machine of death rather than one with a chance of spinning itself (and possibly me) into an early grave. Figuring the saw that came with it would be great at ripping apart my ever growing pile of scrap wood and nothing else, I've opted for a
40 tooth Irwin carbide tipped 184mm replacement blade instead - since I'm using MDF board and a lot of it, any non carbide blade would quickly turn duller than a marathon of Downtown Abbey with the sound down. In testing this afternoon putting together an MDF toybox for my daughter, I can happily report that once the new blade was locked in tighter than a tax department official, it sheared through 16mm MDF like butter. Of course there's a lot more dust than when you cut butter with a power tool, but hey, that's MDF for you.
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| Killer of MDF... |
For the trickier and smaller cuts, it's my old Ryobi jigsaw time (closest version on Amazon I could fine would be
this thing). It'll probably create more dust of course but the angles will be far easier this way as it has more flex it in than that Funkmaster bloke. I might need a couple more T-shanks by the time this thing is over.
For the screwing, my
Ryobi hammer drill will suffice. Recently I bought a couple of long Irwin driver bits for it and they've kept up easily with all the abuse I've thrown at it - previously the bunch of cheap bits I've had would disintegrate faster than me attempting a vow of celebacy. (Old man voice) Don't chew through bits kids, but a couple of decent ones to steer you right for a long time to come.
For the sake of my eyes, I grabbed a pair of funky looking work shades. Handy for MDF dust, handy also for hot days in the sun mowing the lawn. Since I'm doing most of the cutting at the entrance to my back garage there's plenty of airflow so ventilation shouldn't be too much of an issue.
Which means our tally for Last M.A.M.E Standing so far now includes (
Anything marked with an asterix is what I bought with my vouchers but I'm including the price in case you're following this silly plan and need a rough guide as to what things cost.)
Motherboard: $20
New capacitors to replace those terrible leaky ones that were causing random restarts and had me pulling my chest hairs out in mad fury: $6.40
Bosch 1500w 184mm circular saw: $79*
Irwin 40T Carbide blade 184mm: $22*
Oh hey you look damn good safety work shades: $12
Total so far: $139.40
Up next:
What fun is a game you can't hear? Find us some speakers Igor!
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