Arcade Repair and Restoration - Sega Astro City

Two or so years ago I had a Sega Astro City arcade cabinet imported through a friend from Japan with the intent to restore it to full working order. I did that, and then some. I've owned a Naomi Universal, Neo Geo Big Red 4 slot, and a Mortal Kombat II cabinet previously when I ran my video game store and spent a good bit of time in my early 20's fixing arcade machines for another company that I used to work at. I love arcade stuff, and if the hobby wasn't so expensive and reliant on having space I would absolutely be ding it all the time.

The Astro City is a bit of a rabbit hole, I'm going to flesh out the repair log from memory at a later date and try to discuss why I made some of the choices that I did. The monitor situation specifically deserves it's own lengthy explanation.

I deep cleaned the whole thing, refurbished the power supply, rewired the control panel and replaced buttons and sticks, swapped out the MS8 monitor chassis with a MS9 chassis that I refurbished and then modified for sharpness and to accept 31khz, added better speakers and a subwoofer, added a switch between the sub aux and Jamma edge audio, wired up a CRTEmudriver PC and MiSTer and installed a KVM switch between them. I mounted a smart power strip inside so everything can be plugged in with only one wire being ran from the machine to an outlet.

I brought it all together by programming a Raspberry Pi Zero to connect to my HomeAssistant instance for powering on the smart power strip outlets connected to everything, except the outlet that the Raspberry Pi is connected to which is always powered on. This is controlled by a guitar pedal button switch that I mounted on the underside of the control panel. I also have a toggle switch connected to the Raspberry Pi that lets you switch between the PC and MiSTer using the KVM, which is controlled via optocouplers that I soldered to the board.

I still need to figure out a good painting situation. I don't really want to repaint the whole thing but I feel like I don't have the skill to make filling in the damaged spots actually look good either.