House of the Dead 2 Deluxe (functional restoration)

[david656]

Hey all, as some will know I'm a bit of a 'long time lurker' and occasional poster but decided that I'd have a go at posting more formally about this one as it might bring visibility and allow others to share insight into the various issues I'm going to face.

Quick rundown from myself, I'm a 90s kid and House of the Dead 1 was my first memory of playing a proper video arcade machine - so obviously I had to get one in my collection. My collection is currently: HOTD1 U/R, HOTD2 DX, HOTD2 SDX, Vampire Night U/R, Daytona USA (woodie) twin, Virtua Cop 1 U/R (empty cab), The Lost World: Jurassic Park DX (basically an SDX).

I will post my story of the HOTD2 SDX when I get to it, but for now know I bought it non-working with a dead game board that apparently giz10p had looked at and said it was unrepairable, so the chap sold the whole machine as is. I've never tried to plug this machine in, it has an LCD TV 16:9 in it and it has always been my intension to make this as mint and original as I can one day.

Recently a HOTD2 Deluxe appeared on eBay, the listing was bad with a title of something like 'Arcade Machine' and the starting price was low with bidding, so I watched it (as it appears did other UKVAC'ers. The bidding looked a bit suspicious to me and out of principle I refused to bid as it got over £900, I think it was £950 maybe? I messaged the chap and said, "If the winner backs out for some weird reason, let me know". Somewhat unsurprisingly to me, the winner suddenly couldn't complete on the purchase, so after some discussion I got the machine for £800 cash. I can't confirm if debatable bidding was happening, and the chap I bought from was a nice guy and I've offered to keep in contact to help with his other machines if he hits issues. All that being said, (having now collected the machine), I think the condition was a fair bit worse than the auction brought to light, but I always was looking at this machine as a parts/donor cabinet for my super deluxe and maybe I can rebuild this one and sell on in the future.

The reasons I was interested in this cab:

• The game board set worked! (The game booted)
• the rear projection unit was still in place and worked! (Looked to have bad burn in)

I'll cover the bad points after I get it back!

Before I disassembled and loaded up the machine, I did some tests on the machine and took a picture or two.

• The convergence was AWFUL!
• The screen burn in was bad (The longer I look at it now its home the more I realise just how bad it is!)
• The colour calibration/brightness/contrast is just off the charts, all blacks are grey, bit washed out.
• both red and blue gun cases were smashed up badly, both were missing the finger guard section of the casing, the blue one had been smashed and re-glued more than once.
• The gun tracking was awful, it would reload automatically whilst the gun was still pointing at the screen (not a feature I remember it having) and even with a cursory look you could see at least one IR LED set around the screen bezel was dead - probably causing this issue.
• Some artwork was missing, multiple parts were incorrect and from a HOTD1 or just odd non-correct replacements.

With all that out of the way I decided to go into the service menu and confirm how bad the gun tracking was and do a memory test to make sure the game board was testing good. Unsurprisingly the gun tracking was indeed awful, but surprisingly/thankfully, the memory test and extended tests all passed with flying colours and no issues, so if nothing more came from this, at least I'd have a working game board set for my SDX, albeit an overpriced one!

I can’t fault the guy or his builders who helped load the machine into the Luton box van, the road to the garage was insanely narrow and he offered to reverse it the entire length effortlessly, whilst chatting and watching mirrors and reversing! And the 2 of them helped me load and strap the machine into the van.

Fast forward back to Bristol, I have a dusty industrial unit I use for storage until the day I get round to building my garage/arcade up. With my better half we unloaded the machine into the unit, and I took some pictures before we drove the van back and she kindly drove us home after a long day on the road!


Since the pickup we’ve had snow, rain, gale-force winds, freezing temperatures etc, so I haven’t had chance to get over and switch the damn thing on! After a few weeks the temps came up to a 15°C/17°C so I decided to pop over the unit and flick the switch. To my horror and sadness, the fans wurred, the machine hummed but NOTHING came up on the rear projection! After using the service switch to drop some coins it became apparent from the sound effects it was running blind and something was wrong with the rear projection unit! Was it too cold? Had a wire come loose in transit? Had I just killed it? All questions that haunted me for another 2 weeks whilst I ordered other parts and focused on other things.

More updates to follow!

 

[david656]

In the mean time whilst being pretty upset about the whole rear projection thing I decided to go about sourcing parts to renew the gun casings. I had a good look around and considered Suzo Happ and others but came across Andrew - http://www.leisureservices.biz/sega.html who was by far the cheapest that I could find (although prices are excluding VAT which I didn't realise).

After a few email exchanges I decided to get:

• Red gun case half set
• Blue gun case half set
• Red trigger
• Blue trigger
• 2 x trigger microswitches
• 2 x trigger springs
• 2 x screw sets
• 1 x IR LED board for bezel (used)

The postage was reasonable and before you know it a big box of parts was delivered to my neighbour because the Fedex guy decided to deliver just as I'd popped out to the post office to sort something out!

Here are the parts:


I did/do plan to do a Youtube video of the strip and rebuild, but I can't find my microphone set at the mo (we're part way through ripping out and replacing the bathroom and there is just stuff everywhere).

Here are some comparison after pics:


In the strip and rebuild I took the opportunity to repair/disassemble the loom/harness and refit into the metal base the outer sleeving, I also soldered all the connections on the connector at the gun sensor board, and I did my best to polish up the cover/cap, however it wasn't perfect and I've since tried with the Dremel to get better results, although still not perfect. I'll need to get a packet of wet/dry sandpaper as I've lost all mine in the garage somewhere and only had a sheet of 1000 grit.

I also decided to have a quick peak in the rear projection unit and see if the tubes were showing any sign of life and they were not:


I have since rebuilt both guns and observed that the blue gun was missing the metal pin/bump stop for the trigger and that the red one still had it! as my Lost World guns was also missing this, it was handy to finally find the pin in something - it is 5mm metal bar and approx 17.4mm in length. looking online 5mm metal bar is cheap so I should be able to buy and hacksaw some down to 17mm length and have that fit no problem. The only issue I had worth mentioning was that the trigger didn't work after the first try. I didn't have my multimeter to hand at the time and soldered the new switch in as the original was, it turns out the new switch was pinned differently and I needed to solder to the outer pins top and bottom instead of the lower 2 pins (as per original switches).

The next task was waiting for the weather to warm up so I could pull the machine apart and have a look for some loose wires or reasons why the rear projection just wasn't powering up. I also needed to wait for some friends to come over and help me lift the PTV off the pedestal so I could gain access to the wires.

 

[tin]

Damn man I'm crossing my fingers and toes for that RPTV!

 

[david656]

Whilst waiting for the weather I decided to start looking into the Gun Sense board. I guessed the one in the machine was working fine, but I knew there was different firmwares and I had the one out of my Lost World to hand, so I decided to desolder the capacitors from it, start to build up a bit of a Mouser order and start researching more about the board. This is where things get a bit interesting It seems I loosely re-discovered there was a firmware for this board that launched with the 'Sega Brave Firefighters' game in some regions that is pretty much undocumented and not backed up - obviously happy to be proven wrong on this! But after 2 guys in the UKVAC community checking their machines they found they had a more common firmware, not this undocumented one - although I have seen old eBay pictures with the firmware sticker - so it does exist. The missing firmware is EPR-21786A

I've decided to document all my findings here:
https://github.com/theretrobristolian/Arcade/tree/main/838-13143-XX
I'm not hugely familiar with GitHub so I'm still learning about formatting and how best to upload this info, if there is a better more central place to contribute I'm happy to jump ship and do that instead, a lot of my findings on 'known' information is based on the phenomenal posts here: http://solid-orange.com/1670

I plan to post the capacitor values and sizes to that GitHub repository so others can order their caps in advance and not have to desolder/take out of service their board first to work it all out. This was a bit of a rabbit hole so I don't want to go over it extensively here, but just ask you look at the GitHub page and let me know your thoughts/missing information.

The weather had warmed up a bit at the weekend just gone so I decided to take an old monitor over, hook it up and make sure the Naomi was still outputting video, thankfully - it was.

Now I knew it wasn't a Naomi issue I could focus more on the wiring. You can see it in the lower right of the above photo, someone had cut the power cable to the PTV and reconnected it with Wago connectors. When I removed the wire from the Wago connectors I found it was kinda curled up stranded cable and probably not making all that great a connection. In an ideal world I think I'd heat shrink and solder it back together (as it's a connector based wire anyway so never needed to be cut), however for now I stripped a bit more cable back, fitted ferrules and refitted the Wago connectors. I put a bit of De-Oxit in the connector socket and the connector itself and worked it back and forth to try and clean off an oxidisation here. I also took the opportunity to connect and disconnect the RGB/VGA cable multiple times to try and clean that connection also.
Now it was time to plug the machine all back together and see if I'd been successful in anyway... and what would you know:

Just look at that rear projection go! (and my lack of ability to set the camera on my phone right to take the photo - but hey I was very excited. I managed to convince someone in a neighbouring unit to come and help me lift and put it all back together. After that I plugged the guns in and realised the trigger switch was back to front (which as explained previously I've fixed). I can now confirm that with both guns connected and some rather debatable calibration I was able to do a 2 player game with my partner and complete the game!

There is something odd I have to ask the community if they know, on power up from cold if you jump straight into the gun mark check you see the pointers jumping all over the place like crazy which would make it unplayable, but after it warms up they stabilise - why is this? Also I've completely forgot to mention that somewhere in all this I realised 3 LED units around the screen were dead - 2 were totally dead and 1 rather dim. I've switched these out with spares from my Lost World and as stated got the game going again.

I've taken a picture of the convergence test pattern with the right settings on my phone so you can see just how 'out' it is:


The next problem is it didn't come with the remote which is stupidly expensive and rare to find - the Toshiba CT-9908. however I have a bit of a plan for this coming up next.

 

[david656]

One last update for today, in other news I forgot also that when I disassemble the cabinet I noticed loads of loose/cut/missing ground/earth cables. I had a reel of 16mm earth cable left over from doing the new gas and water bonding in our house renovation so whilst utterly overkill I made up with some crimped ring lugs some grounding cables to go from the PTV cabinet back to the lug on the main transformer case. I did this for the IR bezel grounding point also (apparently to avoid shock hazard). I'm not sure if either cable was absolutely necessary but it made me happy to see them connected on the off chance they did have some sort of positive impact on the PTV coming back to life.

On the missing remote situation that's been an uphill battle, it seems I'm not the only one struggling with this and a chap on another forum has recorded the IR commands: https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/toshiba-ct-9908-remote-jp-upgrade.331040/

it seems 'hailrazer' had dumped and programmed a one for all remote to control the Toshiba PTV. those one for all remotes seem awkward to find and the software a bit clunky as well. sadly his dump is on a google drive that when I tried it said it was request only and I had issues getting access, but after joining the forum and asking he allowed me access and I was able to download it.

After a bit of fiddling I was able to find the 'learned IR commands' and open them up to find the commands in raw pronto.


After a bit of fiddling I was able to import this code into AnalysIR which is a purchasable bit of software from here: https://www.analysir.com/blog/

I've been dealing with Chris at AnalysIR on and off for a few years as I purchased the software and a LearnIR dongle. whilst there are many ways to skin a cat and get this over the line I like their products, they aren't the easiest things to get your head round (I wish the software had a bit of a 'getting started with examples' walkthrough, but other than that it is incredibly powerful and diverse in what you can achieve with it. after some last minute tech support from Chris on Sunday we managed to find ARM64 drivers and get the dongle and the software setup on W11 ARM64 in Parallels on my Mac! I can't stress enough how helpful these guys are with this stuff. Today I went over the unit armed with my laptop, the software, the IR dongle - that does reading and sending of IR signals and I was able to successfully bring up the onscreen menus on the rear projection!

I've now ordered their modern programable remote which is Arduino based and very scalable, I hope for that to come this week so I can get to calibrating the convergence on the PTV.

There are so many amazing communities out there and it's great to see dots being joined and a picture building. That's me all up to date on how far I've got with the machine for now. If anyone has a real original HOTD2 Deluxe manual I can borrow to do a proper scan and upload to archive.org that would be helpful, otherwise I'll have to buy one when one comes up on eBay. the publicly available scans are OK but not great, it would be nice to archive and document as much of this knowledge as possible.

 

[John Bennett]

The thing with convergence on these screens is that the electronic control circuit is doing a LOT of work. As the beams scan across, the circuit determines whereabouts on a grid the beam is, then reads a lookup table to see how much X/Y deflection to apply. With the circuit switched off, the screen turns into a round mess in the centre.
When you use the remote, you're programming the lookup table to move each beam at different points of the screen. But anyway, it doesn't take a lot for a beam to drift a millimetre or so in a certain area, which when magnified looks horrible on the screen. However the control should hopefully get it nice and you've got better convergence control than most normal CRTs. The burn-in is another matter though....

 

[K1ngarth3r]

I enjoyed reading your write up and seeing the progress made so far.

is recapping the boards in the RPTV a thing?

 

[david656]

I enjoyed reading your write up and seeing the progress made so far.

is recapping the boards in the RPTV a thing?

I should imagine so! there was enough caps in there when I had a nose the other day! the thing with the RPTV is that the 3 physical Red / Green / Blue CRTs have serious burn in, so if I can't find replacements then sadly this RPTV is a little bit useless to me. I'm so SO grateful it actually works though, but I could never put this on my super deluxe and call it mint. John B was looking at fitting a short throw NEC projector, I've bought one of those and will experiment with it at some point, but I'd love to keep it RP if I can.

Arguably for the amount of hours the HOTD2 super deluxe will be on I'll never burn out a better set of tubes if I can find some!

 

[tin]

I will buy the guts of it if you do decide to replace the innards, but I will try and persaude you to not do it first!!

 

[david656]

I will buy the guts of it if you do decide to replace the innards, but I will try and persaude you to not do it first!!

What do you want that for... I'm intrigued..

 

[tin]

Just to keep others running in future. What I really mean is don't bin it.

but as I say, starting point, try and see if you can get it to a state where you don't mind it. My Daytona's got a load of harsh burn but after a while it doesn't look so bad.

 

[david656]

Just to keep others running in future. What I really mean is don't bin it.

but as I say, starting point, try and see if you can get it to a state where you don't mind it. My Daytona's got a load of harsh burn but after a while it doesn't look so bad.

Don't worry I won't be binning anything any time soon (not arcade related anyway). I'll see how it goes once I get the remote and calibrate it up as best I can.

I have a small update today, got bored over lunch so dug out the topper from my SDX to take over and plop on the top of the DX.


It isn't plugged in as although in my mind it should be the same part, it seems the wiring is different. the topper is wired to what this machine calls the 'winning lamp' connector. and not the 'billboard' connector. I didn't have my multimeter to hand to check the ports for voltages, but when I had it in bits the other day the 'winning lamp' connector on the lower front of the PTV was disconnected and I couldn't find any wiring hanging around that would of connected to it. Also I would class the topper light as a billboard light. I need to try and have a nose at the top of my SDLX and see what connectors are hanging out on top of it. I think I will end up having to make up a pigtail loom adapter temporarily to be able to connect this topper to the DLX. This is temporary and for testing purposes as eventually it will be returned to the SDLX.



Also somewhat interestingly I think I've confirmed it has an odd 'cold start' issue with gun calibration, I did take a video but also caught it as a photo:

Notice how the gun sight has duplicated? its shaking about so much and seemingly doubled all over the screen - both guns are the same, but after 20 minutes the doubling goes away, the shaking settles down and it isn't too bad, just badly calibrated due to waiting for my remote to turn up to dial everything in.

Thanks all for now.