Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

Thanks, I've never been to Iceland, the whole trip was centred on the Fagradalsfjall Volcano, but it's stopped erupting, so now I'm just being a general tourist.
I have 1 day tour booked, which is the Southern Coast for waterfalls, glaciers and a beach, I'm mulling over the Golden Circle or not.
This is also my first true holiday since October 2019, which was when I flew to Kyiv for a week.

Sam

 

We intend to go back at some point and go inland as we went around the coast, from Reykjavik around to Ísafjörður, Akureyri and, well, I can't remember where else now.

Some parts just look amazingly otherworldly and it's a great place for spotting whales.

Be nice to hear about it when you get back. Ideally we'd do a massive long trip next time and take in Greenland as well.

 

Flat-pack bartop arcade kit





20ft of t-moulding



Have no desire to cut the MDF to the desired shape myself. I don't have the tools to do so, and investing in the tools I need will cost me more than the cabinet kit did. It means I can't customise the control panel layout, but tbh I'm not much of a beat-em-'up player so I doubt that'll make too much difference.

There's a lot to do on the inside though - there's going to be a PC running the show instead of something like a Rasberry Pi. Oh yeah, and I need to git gud at painting...

 

Lots of fun ahead @Byron C, our LAN host renovated a Jamma Streetfighter cabinet which still has its original running gear but is hosting MAME on a low power ITX rig that I sorted for him.

Popped into Lidl earlier and picked up a £12.99 precision screwdriver set, which seems pretty decent.Probably not as good as a genuine iFixit set (sadly lacking in the Jayztwocents explosions too), but will be fine for my work office. Will probably wait for my birthday to add a genuine precision iFixit bit set. Lidl feels good and the bits magnet in well and drive cleanly.

Also added an Asrock Deskmini to the SFF fleet. I have been looking for ages for an H110 one to use my i5 7500T and DDR4 SODIMM, but could only find the odd expensive fully configured one, or a bare Asus H110 S1 board on ebay.de. It was good on paper at £62, but import fees and finding a suitable PSU put it at more money than the A300 I found.
Things went a bit sideways when I realised that the A300 AMD variant was equipped with 2 M.2 NVMe slots, nit just the newer X300 model. That opens up the possibility of a 4 lane PCIE external GPU mod in the future!

It's not a neat and solid as a NUC, with it's thick alu case, but it's a bit neater than most ITX setups at about 2L + power brick.

I'm curiously attracted to the vertical SODIMM mounts that are unusual compared to the 'flat' ones found on laptops and Thin ITX boards.

The ability to upgrade the CPU is a big draw. I'll be starting on a budget setup with a 2c/4t APU and 4GB SODIMM, as I really hadn't intended to go in this direction. luckily I have a Samsung 250GB M.2 drive ready, so that's one less
item to buy.

 

Honestly configuring the software is going to be a ballache. I'm not really a fan of EmulationStation as a front-end so it kinda rules out anything like Batocera, RetroPie, etc. I'm prototyping right now with a creaky old Athlon 5350 system that badly needs an SSD!

It's the painting I'm not looking forward to... I did a shite job on the last lot of MDF painting I did. I started out using one-coat rattle-can spray paint, a few years later I tried to sand it back and re-coat with a brush but I don't think it ever really recovered from that initial half-arsed job. No, this time I'm going to do it properly: foam roller(s), MDF sealer, primer/undercoat, multiple layers of final colour.

 

Calling @Vault-Tec - Painting monster of the parish

 

Yeah, MDF is a serious penis ache to paint. Well, not paint, but get ready for paint. I used this.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001GU6GP6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

However I was lucky and spoiled because I was using hidrafugal MDF which is over £70 a sheet. So IDK whether that would be enough. Apparently its just watered down PVA. However, no one mentions what ratio it needs to be and it's not terribly expensive. MDF is like a frigging tampon with paint though, so it for sure would need both that and primer. I got away with the primer because that barely even soaked in. Due to the properties of the MDF I had.

Years ago we used to use satin finish wall paint, as it was sort of rubber based and would seal the MDF really easy as opposed to a powdery matt which would just continue to soak in coat after coat. Only issue with the satin paint I used to use was that it did not sand well, so you had to be really good at painting.

BTW "One coat" anything is the biggest bull s*it ever uttered by any one anywhere.

 

Seen that stuff pop up all over the place when I've been looking for MDF sealer - sounds like that's the one I'll be getting.

I'm anticipating multiple coats of all layers, tbh - sealant, primer/undercoat, and gloss paint. This is part of the reason I didn't want to buy the tools to cut the panels myself - the paint job is going to be difficult enough!

Oh yeah, I learned that pretty quickly!

 

@Byron C give me a shout if you want some help setting up a PC in an arcade box. It's fair to say I have a little experience

 

Willdo! Not too concerned about the actual hardware TBH, so long as the case itself actually has room. Power supply is a bit of an unknown at the moment; I'd like to use a 24V 30A power supply that I have, but it's going to limit my power budget for PC components since I'll need further step-down converters to go from 24v down to 19v or 12v.

I'm planning to use LaunchBox/BigBox as the front-end. I eventually plan to upgrade to illuminated buttons with a PacLed board, and LaunchBox has a plugin for LEDBlinky. Unlike something based on EmulationStation, it's going to mean a lot of manual setup!

 

I am a big fan of AttractMode - mostly because I run everything at native res, and with a JAMMA interface. It's nicely configurable.

 

APPLE MacBook Pro 16" (2021) - M1 Pro

 

Very nice.

That's a good chunk of change you've just plonked down!

 

Keycaps

 

I bought the same ones and fitted them last week. They're really cool. Look best with a white backlight !

 

Time to put a claim in for your cashback if you haven't already

 

Was gonna give you a nudge to do the same

 

This is what my recent purchase of the Accelerated free fall course looks like. This is Level 7 (7th Jump)

The back flip is actually meant to happen. The spinning in the middle got sloppy, but I recovered just in time.

I can honestly say this thing had a severe impact on my ability to eat and sleep normally. The fear that ran through my body on a daily basis was no laughing matter.
I felt physically sick before every jump and nearly binned the course on more than one occasion.

My next Jump I do I will jump alone! no safety net of any instructor to rely on

Don't ask me why I do it to myself. I think you have got something wrong with you to want to do this course.

But on a strange note, it is also FKNG awesome

 

Seen the price of it now?!!