Now you have a friend in the paper business!

I finally dug my Paperboy machine out of storage. This one has had quite a journey.. I found it out in California while on a warehouse raid with my friend Dave (and his friend Mike). I was only out there for the summer, and had to return to the east coast to finish up school. Dave shipped the machine out (many thanks!) and I took it back to the apartment I was renting. I managed to get it working, but it was always flaky--it had power issues I was unable to track down, despite a lot of tinkering. I managed to pick up a Championship Sprint kit for it, which is a lot of fun with two players. After finishing grad school, I stored the machine at my parents' business, and moved back to California. There it sat in (literally) cold storage for about 7 years! Then, I moved back to the east coast, got a house, and started assembling an arcade in the basement.. it was time to reclaim the Paperboy.

Given that it was flaky when I put it away, I was not surprised to see that the machine was dead 7 years later when I plugged it in. Paperboy is a power hungry machine; it has the normal power block that most Atari machines have, but it has an extra big blue bolted to the floor of the cab. It uses an ARIII board for +12 volts, +5 volts and audio amplification, and then has a second power supply (in my case a switching power supply) that supplies +5 volts for the CPU board. (The machine needs +5 volts for both the CPU and the video board--both of which take up a lot of room in the cabinet.) When it's running, it pulls about 2.3 amps, more than twice what typical older machines require.

The troubleshooting went like this.. I noticed that I had a cooked fuse on the power block, which was traced to the circuit that is supposed to supply 12 volts DC to the ARIII board. This is a very simple circuit, consiting of a transformer, a fuse, a bridge rectifier, and two big blue capacitors. Upon replacing the fuse (slow blow) I found that I was getting about 3V DC, where I should be getting about 4 times that much. I thought I might have a short in the big blue.. I unplugged the leads that lead to the big blue, and tested to see what kind of output I was getting on the DC output of the bridge rectifier--and I was getting no where near the 12 volts (unsmoothed) that I was supposed to be getting. Then I checked the output from the transformer itself--12 volts right on the money. The problem was a bad diode in the bridge rectifier. One order to Bob Roberts for $3, and I had a new rectifier. (I also picked up a replacement big blue, and an ARIII repair kit just in case.) I replaced the bridge rectifier and the big blue--now reading a solid 12V DC on the ouput. I tossed in an ARIII board and bolted it into the machine. (Had to run out to the hardware store to pick up some 6/32 bolts to hold the board in place.) I plugged in the machine.. nothing. I got out the multimeter, and found that while I had good voltages on the CPU board, I only had 2.5 V (instead of 5 V) on the video board. The video board has its 5 V supplied by the ARIII. I happened to have another spare ARIII, so I popped that one in. As I looked down at the multimeter and saw +4.97 V on the readout, I heard the test tones go, and then the speech test said "Now you have a friend in the paper business." I walked around to the front of the machine, and saw that it was operational:


Then I proceed to play the game for the next three minutes, in that wonderful feeling of joy/disbelief that often accompanies an easy fix! I did a bunch of cleanup on the machine--the control panel, the glass, marquee..it was pretty dirty. The handgrips were really funky from being in storage, but some hand soap and some scrubbing with a brush in the sink got them back in order.

The kicker is this--the day I got this thing back to my house from storage, Rich (from thisoldgame) announced that he is selling a reproduction overlay for the handlebars (conspiciously missing from this machine). This is the first time that part has been reproed.. is that good timing or what? I just got notice that mine is in the mail, and I'll post an update when it is installed.

If you need me, I'll be on Middle Road.

Activate interlock! Dynotherms connected! Infracells up! Mega thrusters are go!

(Disclaimer: if you plan on doing this repair, make sure to unplug your machine first--120 VAC can be dangerous.)

Ok, so this repair is not as exciting as the title appears. When I recently put my Centipede back together, I noticed that certain parts had been stripped, particularly the coin door area. Atari liked to put interlocks on the coin doors of its older machines, for safety reasons. Open the coin door, the power to the whole machine goes off. (That way the guy collecting coins has little chance of getting shocked.) My interlock had been stripped out, likely used as a repair part on another machine. You can see where the wires were twisted/black taped together. This is a sloppy and possibly unsafe scenario:

I took them out, separated the wires, and attached some quick disconnects:

Here's the interlock. If the plunger is pressed in (i.e. when the door closes on it) it makes a connection. If it is manually pulled out (i.e. during servicing) it also makes a connection.

Here is the interlock attached to the quick disconnects:

You can see in that picture that the AC wires leading to the interlock are fed through a rectangular mount. This is where the interlock snaps into place:

That's it. It's a small repair, but with these machines, every little bit counts.

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.

Unfolding

Well, I finally did a cap kit on my Sanyo 20 EZ monitor in the DK Jr. It did a nice job fixing the vertical fold over problem. Also, the screen size was set way too small due to poor adjustment (which is usually the case with malfunctioning monitors). Instead of fixing the problem, people will try to 'adjust' it away. Check out the before and after pics:

You can also see that I was able to find a replacement control panel overlay; with it, the last vestiges of 8 Ball Action have been swept away.

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!