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myPinballs Drop in Replacement RFM/SWEP1 Computer Systems Now available

PeteB said:
Every LCD monitor on the market suffers light leakage. It's due to the backlight (either fluorescent or LED) always being switched on so you never get true black levels. You can try this by placing a monitor in a dark room and setting it to a plain black screen. You will see the black has a glow to it.

The only alternative to CRT's for black levels are OLED screens where each pixel emits its own light. When a pixel is black (off) it really is black, but they're extremely expensive and the only ones available are large TV's in the 50"-65" range.
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There's always going to be this discussion of LCD or original and maybe OLED will offer a better solution in the future when the price comes down, but i'm all about keeping games running and in peoples homes. I believe there are plenty of great LCD LED backlit screen available nowadays with very good black levels that work lovely in pinball 2000 and i've brought games to shows over the last few years to back up this and allow people to play them and see what they think. I don't think you can say 'The LCD (and even LED) screens are not suitable for Pin2K games' or 'They ruin the Pepper's Ghost illusion.'

In my view CRT's are never going to be remade and should be properly serviced and rebuilt if being used in the home. I've seen what happens when a flyback fails on a high voltage CRT.
 
myPinballs said:
I don't think you can say 'The LCD (and even LED) screens are not suitable for Pin2K games' or 'They ruin the Pepper's Ghost illusion.'
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I would say they are suitable for video games (or pins) where the monitor is directly facing the player, but not where there is a reflection on glass (a few vids come to mind and also pin2k), because the illusion relies on images magically floating over the playfield. Every pin2k with an LCD monitor you can see a square white haze which is a bit distracting and doesn't make for a convincing illusion.

myPinballs said:
In my view CRT's are never going to be remade and should be properly serviced and rebuilt if being used in the home. I've seen what happens when a flyback fails on a high voltage CRT.
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Yeah. I've done a few flyback replacements. They're tricky but it can be done.

Was looking on Alibaba earlier and there are still factories in China making CRT tubes. It will go away eventually but by that time I hope OLED has gone mainstream and finds its way into small monitors.
 
well happy with the lcd in my rfm much better than the old crt plenty black enough
also much safer and lighter as my crt ht part cracked and caught fire luckly i turned it off before it burned the house down not sure i would ever trust an old crt again in my home
 
Great results with LCD me too..and I was one of the very skeptical ones. I did use a 20 inches DELL 4:3 2007FP Ultrasharp, search for the IPS model (more than half of them were built with IPS technology, but not all of themm you can check it by the serials, there are lot of thread about this on the web). I did put black tape on the edge of the screen, so no leaking at all. Playing with monitor settings combined with CGA/VGA converter gives great results, deep blacks, and if you daisy chain a scanline generator like SLG 3000 ..the results are awesome. More than a CRT, without a CRT :). And I forgot to say, that Dell monitor once you strip down the plastic bezel (you can make it in 15 secs just with your fingers, super easy), fits EXACTLY the hole from the old crt, you just fix it with washers and you are done. My CRT made a scary end, arching all over the flyback with smoke and sparkles.
 
myPinballs said:
So i've been working on another project. - A drop in replacement computer setup that can run nucore/pinbox for pin2k computers. I wanted to create a system that contained everything that you need to upgrade an existing game and one that you could just slide in and connect up. No messing about and after a lot of sourcing different parts, connectors,cabling and components i have created just that.

View attachment 16276View attachment 16277

You get a full system mounted on 2mm zinc plated metal base that can be slid into the existing game computer bracket with motherboard,cpu,ssd,power supply and amp. The audio cable included will plug straight into the existing game wiring, as will the driver board cable and monitor cable.

View attachment 16278

You will need to source a 22" or 23" lcd monitor to use with it, but these are easily found nowadays. I also have a list of ones i use myself. The power supplies are set for 120v operation, so you can just plug direct into the games old computer power lead. All voltages needed including the amp power are generated form a single psu.


View attachment 16279

I use solid state drives, which are basically just flash ram, so boot up is fast and there are no moving parts like old hard drives had, so no danger of vibration issues, or the hd head smashing into the data plates etc

View attachment 16280

As you can see the full unit slides easily into the existing game.

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The amps i am using are 2.1 surround with adjustable treble,bass and sub crossover level with separate sub volume. They are seriously loud!! :) Great care has been taken to orientate all connectors so existing cabling will connect easily.

Here's a quick vid of how it looks and sounds (sorry for the bad playing, was shooting the vid and playing one handed!)


The price for a setup like this is £380* plus shipping, or you can buy a kit of parts to build your own version and mounting ideas using my research of parts and cabling for £250* plus shipping. All parts are guaranteed to work with pinbox without any major setup headaches.

*Prices correct as of Jan 2017
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I have got mine hooked up and It won't boot....its brand new. Can you please contact me asap?. I'm hoping it can be something easily corrected.
 

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If anyone is having problems installing Pinbox/Nucore, it's due to the version of Ubuntu being outdated you have to point to another resource.
So if you get a load of errors and get to the login prompt, then login and use the following commands below - they really work, I know, I tried it last night (14th Sept 2017) with 100% success.

sudo su
sudo sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
apt-get purge lxdm
mv /etc/lxdm /etc/lxdm.orig
apt-get install lxdm
cp /root/pinbox/scripts/pinbox.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart
rm /etc/init.d/pinbox
reboot


Regards,
Andrew
 
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Is there any reason to install this official but not compiled version over the version most people in this thread will be running already?
 
My rule of thumb in IT is if its not broken, don't try to fix it.
 
kevlar said:
Is there any reason to install this official but not compiled version over the version most people in this thread will be running already?
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What, there's another version? Oh poo, have I been trying to install the wrong version on my PC? No wonder I was having so many problems.
 
Andrew Hannay said:
What, there's another version? Oh poo, have I been trying to install the wrong version on my PC? No wonder I was having so many problems.
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Oh sorry, you are referring to the original post about the drop in replacement.

Question to MyPinballs, What sort of boot time are you getting from power-on to ready and can you just power off with a flick of the power switch or do you have a proper shutdown procedure you have to follow?
Andrew

P.S why do some of my posts change what I've typed to links to ipdb? Can I turn that feature off?
 
Not sure if we're getting confused here but I thought you were talking about the official Nucore version which has now been released for free ( by Nucore creators this time), you have to compile it yourself though. Obviously we're all running the old dodgy pinbox version.
 
kevlar said:
Not sure if we're getting confused here but I thought you were talking about the official Nucore version which has now been released for free ( by Nucore creators this time), you have to compile it yourself though. Obviously we're all running the old dodgy pinbox version.
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There are many reasons why the nucore people had to release a free version. When you take open source code and then violate the licence terms it comes back to bite you....

My view would be stick with pinbox. Maybe pinbox will get an update to
 
Andrew Hannay said:
Question to MyPinballs, What sort of boot time are you getting from power-on to ready and can you just power off with a flick of the power switch or do you have a proper shutdown procedure you have to follow?
Andrew
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With my hardware systems you can just turn the games cabinet power switch off and it all turns of together. there is no separate shutdown or anything stupid.
 
kevlar said:
Not sure if we're getting confused here but I thought you were talking about the official Nucore version which has now been released for free ( by Nucore creators this time), you have to compile it yourself though. Obviously we're all running the old dodgy pinbox version.
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Ok, I see. Yes, I was getting confused.
I had a copy of the dodgy one from a few years ago and thought I would install it last night but after the install it fails at reboot due to Ubuntu being no longer supported. I found the solution and now it boots up. My interest was re-sparked after hearing about the Nucore update being released for free and I believe the update works on the Pinbox version.
 
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