New Astro City cab

Received a New Astro City cab yesterday. Its in pretty decent condition, the monitor looks really nice and the price was right.

After checking and adjusting the voltages at the edge connector I fired up Puzzle Bobble 2 on the Taito F3 platform and had a few games.
There are a few problems to start with. Both the start buttons didn’t work. This ended up being some dodgy micro switches but was quickly sorted with a dose of WD40.

After a few games I decided to check out the inner workings of this thing. What a shock I had.
Looks like the good people of Hong Kong arent too fussy about safe wiring practices.

After making the loom safe for use I decided to check out the rest of the wiring.
First of all, this cab was originally designed for 110v supply but a step down transformer is fitted to convert 220v to 110v. I checked the voltage coming out the noise filter, 143v! Turns out the step down transformer was for a 200v input to get 100v output.

I removed this and fitted a proper 240v one. The output is now 108v, much better.
I also replaced the power supply wiring as this was 22AWG for something more substantial.

I decided to check the incoming wiring on the back panel, more dodgyness.

These are actually the supply wires.
I also found a set of redundant RGB-S wires in the loom, these have been removed too.