Test Bench

This rig has been vital to the PCB and monitor repairs that I've done. I put it together out of extra shelving I had laying around from some cheap bookcases. I threw a box together, cut some grooves for t-molding, and put an old joystick and some buttons in it. Ta-da! A rig for my test bench!

In the picture below, you can see it testing my Donkey Kong PCB. For PCB testing, I hook it up to an Apple IIGS monitor. I can hook up other monitors, however, and there are built-in 1:1 and 1.2:1 isolation transformers for powering both normal monitors and Nintendo monitors.



You can lift up the mini control panel to get at some extra functionality. The switch on the left of the little circuit board turns on a hex inverter connected to the sync, so I can test Williams games (which use positive sync, instead of negative like most games). The right switch turns on an audio amplifier for boards without internal amps (and the volume knob, of course, controls the volume of the amp).



In this picture, you can see I connected a bunch of breakout strips to the power supply, video, and control panel inputs, and then I have a JAMMA harness connected to that. If I had to do it over, I'd skip the breakout strips and just have a JAMMA edge connector screwed into the side of the box itself (since I make all my PCB-specific adapters conform to JAMMA pinouts, it's infinitely easier than screwing a harness into the breakout strips every time I switch PCBs), but it's not really an issue.



You can see I built the rig before I got the Apple IIGS monitor, because it's just a half inch too narrow to put the monitor directly on the rig. So I use a piece of scrap lumber as a monitor stand.

Copyright © 2001 Patrick Wetmore. All rights reserved.

Last Modified: 12/08/01