Dragon's Lair gets a new monitor

My plan with Dragon's Lair is to run the game from a PC, using software known as Daphne (named for the princess in Dragon's Lair). Daphne emulates a number of arcade games that ran on laser discs.

My DL cabinet came with a 19 inch Electrohome G07 monitor. Unfortunately, an off the shelf PC cannot put out a 15 kHz RGB signal that an arcade monitor can display. Ultimately, I ended up swapping out the monitor for a new one. I ended up getting a 19 inch tri-res monitor:

The picture on this thing is great! It's a cool rig, since it can accept a VGA signal or traditional arcade signals. The screen was nice and bright, which made photographing it a bit of a challenge. In person, the screen images are fantastic.


I added in an Ipac (from Ultimarc) for interfacing the controls, and built a new harness for the joystick and buttons. The game plays great with the PC I was using for testing. I'm still ironing out a few kinks with the PC that will ultimately reside in this cabinet.

Restoring a Swiss Cheesed Control Panel

Like many Dragon's Lairs, this one was ultimately converted to another game. This particular one became a Clutch Hitter, which required 2 joysticks with 3 buttons per joystick. The original Dragon's Lair had one centrally mounted joystick with 2 sword buttons, one per side.

Here's the converted panel:


Here I am in the progress of stripping the panel. My trusty heat gun, box cutter and scraper are clearly in view. For removing the adhesive, I used some Goo gone and a brass wire wheel brush on a power drill.


Check out the cleaned off panel--I see way too many holes! Fortunately, when they converted it, they did not fill any holes--they just cut new holes, put on the overlay, and bolted a piece of plexiglass over it.

My strategy for filling the holes was simple. I bought a thin piece of aluminum sheet metal, and cut it to the exact size of the panel I was working on.


Next, I clamped it in place behind the panel, and traced out only the holes I wanted to keep with a sharpie.

The 'keeper' holes were then cut out (roughly) with a dremel. They need not be perfectly round, since they won't be seen or touched in the finished article.

Next, I slathered on some quick setting epoxy:

Then I glued the aluminum sheet (carefully aligned) to the original panel. You can see that I clamped it in place with some spare junk buttons and some spring clamps. Now I have nice solid metal behind every hole I want to fill.


Bondo time! Here is the first layer after application:


Here it is after some sanding. I ended up putting on another layer (mounded up over the holes) and repeating the sanding process.

Next up I had to do some work with a metal file--some of the holes were kind of rough cut with the drill from the original conversion. After the edges were flattened out, I cleaned the panel with 409 (to get rid of dirt/fingerprints) and then primed the sanded panel:


That's starting to look more recognizable. After priming, I put on a coat of black paint.


Next, I lined up the overlay (from Quaterarcade) and put in some buttons for alignment. I pulled the backing off of the top edge, and tacked it down.


Next, I removed the buttons, and slowly removed the rest of the backing, sticking the overlay to the panel. I used a heat gun (very gently) to heat the portion of the overlay that had to make the 90 degree bend. Then I clamped it down (with spring clamps and some buttons).


Here's a shot of the panel in place on the machine, with a leaf switch Wico installed and a few buttons loosely tossed in.


Here's the machine with the restored panel and marquee. The cabinet still needs a lot of work, but it's identity crisis is over.

Hidden Treasure!

It's nice when you find a little something extra in a cab. I bought my Dragon's Lair cab assuming everything of interest had been stripped out of it. One bummer was this:

That's the scoreboard plexi--painted over. I figured I would have to hunt down and buy an original (or a repro) scoreboard. When I got the cab home and took off the back door, I was pleasantly surprised to find this:


That's the scoreboard card, between the two speakers. When the machine was converted, it was left in place. Score! I did some digging online and found a wiring scheme that makes is possible to hook the scoreboard up to a PC parallel port for reading scoreboard output from Daphne. I ordered the appropriate connectors and ribbon cable, built the cable and plugged it in for a test:


It works great! This cab is one step closer to delivering an authentic Dragon's Lair experience.

Getting Medieval

I've been kinda busy lately with work, but in my not so copious free time I have been trying to do bits and pieces of my many arcade projects. One of the big items on my list is deconverting a Clutch Hitter back to a Dragon's Lair. I started with the marquee, which was kind of a tricky task. The Clutch hitter marquee was stuck on there pretty good, over the original Dragon's Lair plexi:


So the trick was--removing this thing without ruining the plexiglass. Fortunately, the repro I ordered (from Quarterarcade) sticks on over the plexi, so slight imperfections in the plexi wouldn't be a problem, provided that enough light passed through. My tools of choice for this were my trusty heat gun, a metal putty knife, paper towels and a can of 'Oops' remover. I started by GENTLY heating the marquee material, and peeling it back. Some gentle scraping with the metal putty knife helped me get the stubborn bits off. This left me with a piece of plexiglass with a TON of adhesive left on it. There was so much, it would have made it tough for the new marquee to stick properly. This is where I came in with the paper towels and just a little bit of 'Oops' at a time. The nice thing about the 'Oops' is it was gentle enough not to melt/fog the plexi, but strong enough to lift this particular adhesive. It took some time (and elbow grease) but I was able to get the plexi pretty much crystal clear! I was very happy with the results:


(I took another pass with the 'Oops' and got it even clearer than that pic.) Next up was applying the new marquee. First, I cleaned off the plexi with some Windex, to get rid of my fingerprints. Then I lined up the marquee, clamped it in a few places, and then removed the backing on one edge. I stuck it to that edge, and slowly worked my way across the marquee from left to right. Fortunately, there is a bit of wiggle room with this application; the edges of the plexi get covered by the angled marquee brackets, and the marquee sticker doesn't quite fill out the plexi.



Next up, I tried it on for size in the cab:


For the full effect, I killed the lights and fired up the fluorescent fixture in the cab:


Next up, I'll be showing you my progress on the control panel.

Dragon's Lair

Yay! After a bit of searching, I finally snagged a Dragon's Lair cabinet today. It's pretty cold up here, so I'm just glad to have this one in the garage. I can't wait to dig into this one..

Lead on adventurer.. your quest awaits!