Ever since I'd completed the original MPCD for the simulator, I'd been
bothered about the comprimises I had to make to make it work out.

The result I achieved would work, but it didn't look very good close up.

When the opportunity presented itself to get a real MPCD display, I jumped
at the chance!

The unit I was getting was basically trashed.  It had been in a crash and the
CRT was destroyed.  I didn't really care about that however.  The gold in this
find was just the chassis itself.  None of the internals were of any importance.
I couldn't use them anyway, so they all ended up in the trash after being 
sufficently "de-milled". :)

Here is the unit as I received it:

Front view:



Rear view:



The color CRT that it used had a face crack in three places.  You can't see
them in the following photo, but the white marks on the CRT face indicate where
some of the surface glass flaked off in the crack area.



A replacement CRT for the MPCD costs $5300.00 for a single unit.  This pretty
much killed any idea of trying to get the reconstruction done 100%.

Unfortunately, no one makes a 7" color VGA CRT.  I checked with every vendor
I could with no luck.  This meant that I had to use the existing 7" monochrome
VGA CRT that I already had.

Eventually I hope to obtain an LCD panel of the correct size.  The MPCD does
use color and it won't look right otherwise.



The new CRT was an incredibly tight fit as I described on the main page.

Instead of working with the face panel that the MPCD came with, I was able to
use the unit I rebuilt last year.  This greatly shortened the work I had to
do to finish the work on the new unit.  This included all the wiring harnesses
and button matrix work.  I was even able to use the stores jettision switch
mechanism from the old project.  

Unfortunately, I don't have any pics of the interior of the unit, but here
is what it looks like in its (nearly) completed form:



If you look closely, you can see the bottom and top edges of the CRT that's 
behind the green plexiglas bezel.