I have always been a window seat person. It's the only way to capture images from the air.

One subtle change I made on the WPC-95 CPU board is the LEDs were moved from the bottom left to the top left of the board (much like how they are placed in the WPC-89 CPU board). I always found it annoying that I couldn't see the LED status on W95 without lowering the speaker panel. Lowering the speaker panel meant I couldn't see the display. With the LEDs relocated in W95, I can see the LEDs without lowering the speaker panel. It's the little things that make the difference. Anyone with the knowledge/experience can reproduce the board, but a reproduction is an opportunity to improve things in small or sometimes big ways.

I have a full backbox board set queued for this month that I will be starting shortly. Since your request is similar, I will build both at the same time since it is more efficient to build multiples concurrently. I have to temper my time with commitments to the local Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show which has planning and events in the months leading up to it (as well as having to prepare my own machines for the show) so this time of the year I am a little busier than normal.

But not busy enough to keep away from small little things that are done opportunistically.

Of course, attempt #1 didn't work. I should know that nothing ever works on the first try. I had to postulate reasons why it didn't work. There was some interesting behavior exhibited. It didn't crash but it didn't work.

So I went back to the drawing board and tried a completely different implementation for attempt #2. I had those made in green (demoted the project to prototype) and added a bunch of different options to help differentiate a postulation of the reason why it failed.

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The red board failed. The green board works. A single 27512 containing the image of the 27128 (U26) and 27256 (U27). I haven't figured out whether to keep it THT or go with SMT on the logic ICs to keep things tidier (smaller). What you can't see on the green board is the 2x SMT 103Z bypass capacitors on the back of the board.

@slochar: Since I doubt there's much demand for something like this, if you want a green proto board, I can make it available to you. If you want a quantity of these then I may not be able to meet the requirement - depending on the quantity.

The small board above is a 5101 adapter. I made one of these with a 7400 SMT on the solder side of the board. I revised the design to use two small single gate SMT components on the component side. This keeps everything on one side of the board. I haven't tested this because I don't have a WMS3-7 machine or OEM board set that uses a 5101.

Another small update. I still have a build queue a mile long and this is the busy time of the year for me. Local show preparation is what consumes my time. I have a local repair party coming up in a few weeks and there's another show planning meeting coming up. Then there's yard work. Keeps me busy.

I did have (leftover) time to get some things tested and verified.

boards_359.jpg

This is the revised board. I revised the logic again to use a single SOIC-14 gate IC. It works. The single IC will reduce cost (not by much) and make assembly a little easier but since it's SMT servicing will be a little more difficult. The IC should not fail so it's unlikely to ever need servicing.

boards_360.jpg

The other day I went to help a (good) friend with resolve an issue with a MMr. I did a little research on the driver board and saw an IC I was unfamiliar with. I looked it up. Looked interesting. So I made a test board to see how it works. I re-implemented the master double alphanumeric logic to use this new IC. It incorporates brightness adjust. That's the potentiometer that you see on the board. I used those super close pitch (0.65mm) TSSOP SMT ICs to reduce board size. What you see there is the guts of the display logic. There are some ICs on the back of the board as well and the boards are connected with ribbon cables. I implemented it this way to modularize it into "units" so that if I needed to revise something I could do it independently of any other subsystem.

I'm happy with this implementation. The board is the bare minimum. Contact me if you're interested. I have your desired quantity available.

Someone local to me tested the 5101 and it works as well. Thanks for the offer.