Notices by Boosty Collins (ieure@retro.social), page 5

My daily driver is using Jellyfin MPV Shim from Flatpak and it is so, so much nicer not to have to deal with that stuff.

All this hacking to get the setup I want is definitely A Lot compared to more mainstream Linuxen. It's definitely not for everyone.

But it's also awesome that the system lends itself to this kind of hackability, for those inclined.

I keep vacillating between "Guix rules, actually" and "what the fuck is this nonsense."

I'm in the latter place today, as I found that an important part of the Scheme code doesn't work unless the path to the process it's running in ends in "bin/guix". This means that when you use Emacs and Geiser to run Guile to hack on Guix packages, it can't use any packages from any channel other than the default one.

https://issues.guix.gnu.org/67290

Broke my Guix config in a way that prevented X11 from starting. SSH'd into the box, ran `sudo guix system roll-back' and it gave me back the exact previous working setup.

That's awesome as hell.

Okay, I fixed the Xorg config, but it's disgusting and hacky because the extension mechanism for this is jank.

But stuff scrolls the right way round now, and the video doesn't tear, and I have a package for LibreWolf that works.

In the unlikely event that you care about any of this stuff, code is here: https://codeberg.org/ieure/atomized-guix

I haven't been complaining about Guix lately, because I've mostly figured out how stuff works, or can figure it out when stuff comes up.

I submitted patches to add LibreWolf packages, which have been completely ignored, like most of the patches I've sent in. That's not great.

But I can just... drop that code into my own channel and use it. Or fork the official Guix repo and add it and run my whole system off that instead. So I am, and that's honestly pretty nice.

I looked into packaging a Matrix client, since that's another thing I use daily. It looks like it's going to be exceptionally difficult, since both the popular ones are webapps wrapped in Electron and almost none of the inevitable 10000 JS libs are in Guix already.

FluffyChat uses a proprietary binary-only framework and build tool, so that's never going to make into Guix proper.

Element uses yarn, which is open-source, but not packaged and seems challenging. Yarn docs recommend installing it via npm, which like, just.... sigh. Installing a package manager to install a package manager to install a library that does like "if (x > 0) { return true; }" is peak JavaScript brain.

is this good
i don't understand

@craigmaloney @keithzg Loved how X11 is "30 year old" tech, which they've been trying to replace for 15 years. Sounds like it's time to start replacing Wayland to me.

@mnemonica @joshmillard @annika @ranjit @muffinista @casey Bite, sweet thumb

Dad helped me build this platform and ramp system this afternoon, which makes it easy enough to move games in and out on my own. Spent $13 on some 2x8" for the base, everything else was scrap. The big wood bookcase-like thing left in my garage at the new place got deconstructed and reused for the ramp.

Most of the games I have in this place are "cabaret" cabinets, which are much smaller & lighter than the regular upright. I can muscle those in without issue.

But now that I'm into uprights a bit more (mostly because cabarets I don't already own are few and far between), I either need a helper or a ramp.

Especially when it comes to the real big bois, like my Neo-Geo.

Several of my B&W games have some monitor funkiness I need to fix. Space Encounters had a bit of flicker happening after a few hours running.

Didn't have a key to the upper back door, but I save any keys I come across and have a ring with several dozen on it, one of which opened it right up.

And... Yep, original caps in here, date code 8052, so somebody spent Christmas week 1980 manufacturing this monitor. It's almost as old as me, and nearly as tired to boot.

Got Mario Bros and Gyruss set up.

Got Space Encounters and the MVS-4-25 v1 cab inside using the ramp. Woudn't have minded a spotter on the MVS tbh, but I got it done okay.

Okay, time to tackle this M7000.

First thing you'll notice is this seeping gunk by the anode. In the 1970s and early 80s, they made these out of some kind of rubberized plastic material. It breaks down over the years and gets all sticky and awful.

Lots of people see this and think the tube is leaking or something. It's not, just the rubber breaking down. After discharging the tube, you can clean it up with isopropyl alcohol.

Next step is to disconnect everything. Most monitors have the yoke hooked up with a single four-position connector. This one has four individual push-on connectors.

Rule #1 of working on electronics: take lots of pictures, lest you forget how things went together. Take as many as you think you need, then take a few more. You'll thank yourself for it.

If you swap the positions of these wires, the image will display mirrored, or upside-down. But if you mix the X and Y axes, you'll smoke components on the chassis, and maybe the yoke itself.

Take photos.

Pro tip: IPA will clean up all kinds of degrading rubber! This has been super useful to know, both for arcade games and not.

Oh yeah, I guess I should tag this junk, even though I continue to dislike hashtags.

#arcade #crt #monitor #repair #retro

B&Ws have a semi-standard 12-position Amp 0.84" connector which supplies both power and video; and on some configurations of some models, outputs +5v to power other stuff. (not pictured)

The chassis is mounted on an angled wood shelf, and held in with four carriage bolts, which have washers and nuts on the underside. I like to replace the nuts with wingnuts, since it makes future servicing much easier.

The washers tend to stick to the underside of the wood, since they compress into it when the nuts get torqued down. Remove these! They love nothing more than to fall down into the bottom of the cabinet and land on your power supply, usually across two different fuses.

Okay, getting into the recapping. This is using a preassembled kit. You can buy them for many vintage electronic devices, because we haven't figured out how to make ones that don't fail yet. So they fail, constantly.

The kit comes with a sheet saying which caps are what. Some nice ones label the caps themselves, or stick them in tape with labels on it. This one just has a printout with the values and positions, and you have to figure out where they go.

Rule of electronics repair #2: Go slow. Slow and works when you're done beats fast and broken every time.

Here's the chassis on the bench. I've never worked on an M7000 before, but this is pretty typical for the era. For years, TVs were built much like radios -- wired point-to-point on a metal chassis pan. Over the years, the pan shrank, then vanished. This is right on the cusp of that era.

Left side is a big transformer, guessing this is a step-down -- the manual says it needs an isolation transformer, which was very common for monitors of the era.

Middle-right of the PCB is the high-voltage transformer, aka the flyback. Big metal canister is a multivalue B+ filter capacitor, part of the power supply.

Rule #3 of electronics: trust nothing and nobody. Don't trust the person who told you what they think is wrong with a thing. Don't trust previous repair work. Don't trust the instructions for your kit. Don't trust the manual.

Pull together all the information you can, and use your judgement. Then double-check. Then check again.

You might think that with three different sources of information -- say, the original hardware, the manual for that hardware, and the instructions for the cap kit -- they'd all agree, or at least 2/3 of them would, right?

Well. Not always.