The eagle eyed of you may have noticed that the wiring loom (basically all the wires that connect everything together) was disconnected from all of the boards as the previous owner’s intention was to sell it for parts.

There are a number of ways to fix this and reconnect everything correctly:

1. Follow the schematics that can be found on the web and follow every lead.

Advantages: Will definitely work, Disadvantages: Quite difficult

2. Ask someone else with a Defender machine if they can be kind enough to take a few photos of one correctly connected for you.

Advantages: Much easier, should work fine, Disadvantages: Apparently there are two different types of wiring loom out there!

So I asked the nice people on UK Video Arcade collectors if they could help me out, and a super nice person P-Man took these great shots for me.

That's a pretty tidy wiring set there

Power - POWER (in the voice of Clarkson)

So I’ve followed this and bar the fact that our Defender CPU board is the DIFFERENT one from the pictures (go figure huh!) but we have everything back connected with the wires with key’d plugs in the correct places so can start working out what wires we have left to connect to make the monitor work when it arrives (*did I mention we managed to Buy a 19″ arcade monitor off of eBay too – one for another post…)

ROM, CPU and Interface connected

 

Yes I'm definitely missing that cable on the right...

The cable from the right to left needs to be connected nicely and unhooked from the Interface board

Dirty Power but at least it's connected

So that’s going to just leave the wiring for the speaker and the monitor that need to be connected/modified when the speaker arrives. It looks like the cables on the left as you look through the back, are carrying the video signals (RGB, Sync etc.) and the ones on the right are carrying monitor power and speaker power.

Here’s some shots for reference:

The cables on the left

The ones on the right and a push button??

Well one step closer and I’ve booked Parcelforce to pick-up the monitor so I’d better go and do some other work till that arrives!