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!

Go!

I haven't been posting much lately because I've been spending more time working on these machines. Track and field is now among the living! This is the first time I started with just a cabinet--no monitor, power supply, boards, lights, marquee, control panel.. just the wood and a beat up coin door. It wasn't my goal to build a Track and Field out of this (I got the cab from someone who had made a MAME panel for it) but things kind of fell together over the years.


Starting with nothing, power was a necessity--so I went with a switching power supply that I had yanked from my Mania Challenge-turned-Centipede, and finished it off with some parts from Bob Roberts' AC power starter kit. The kit has some nice stuff in it, including a fuse block, distribution block, isolation transformer, line filter, plug/cable, power switch, wires, and a bunch of other stuff. If you are looking to build a game from the ground up, these things are a necessity. Many of these items (like the fuse block and the isolation transformer) are there for your safety. Here's what I put together--it's all mounted on a 3/4 inch thick piece of MDF, about a foot square:


Now I needed to connect this thing up to the Track and Field board set I got on Feebay. As luck would have it, after digging around a bit, I found out that Track and Field (Konami) had the same pinout as Mania Challenge (Memetron/Taito). Apparently some manufacturers latched on to the Konami standard for a while there. This meant I didn't have to track down or build a wiring harness--I could just use the one that was already hooked up to my switcher from the Mania Challenge I deconverted. Sweet! One thing to note--Track and Field does not use -5V, so I disconnected that wire. (No need to send voltages to the board that are not neede--not that it did any damage--yes, I had it connected that way for a short while.)

Here's a shot of the boards being tested:


I had my eye out for a monitor, and managed to pick up an Electrohome G07 for $20. That's it in the picture above. I like these monitors because they are easy to work on, reliable, and produce a nice picture. I bought it in untested (aka sitting on a shelf for 15 years) condition, but it fired right up! Sometimes in this hobby, luck is on your side. Next up I had to rewire the connections for the Track and Field control panel. (Mania Challenge had things going on joysticks/buttons, whereas Track and Field is a nonstandard layout.) It took a lot of molex crimping and fiddling with pins on the board's edge connector to get everything going, but in the end, it was worth it! I bought a new fluorescent fixture from Home Depot and wired that in to my AC power center. I also picked up a marquee from Quarterarcade--it's fine for right now, but will keep my eye out for a nicer one. The machine needs some cosmetic work, but here's a picture of it in action:


We had some friends over so I hastily buttoned it up and we tried it out on a 4 player match. It worked like a charm! This is going to be a great addition to the arcade.

Let there be light!

Tis the season for lights, and I've been doing my best to take care of a major pet peeve of mine--games with nonworking lights. Collecting and playing standups is about the arcade experience, and part of that experience is lit up marquees and coin door lights. I was lucky to score an original marquee when I purchased my Centipede cab, but the fluorescent fixture was dead. One trip to Ace Hardware and I was able to find a starter and a fluorescent bulb. I'm pretty happy with the results:


Next up was a tricky puzzle with my Gauntlet coin door lights. (As you may recall, this game has 4 coin slots, one for each player.) They have never worked since I have owned the machine, and as it turns out, the problem was deceptively simple. I had tried changing lights/checking voltages on the left side door, and never found voltage. My big problem was I had 2 dead coin door lights on the right hand side door. As they say with Christmas lights, when one goes out, they all go out--and this is true for Gauntlet coin doors. They are wired in series, so if one side is entirely dead, the other side will be too. This is not true for most games--since there is only one coin door. Live and learn! The lights are lit, but I still need to fix them up with some new inserts and a new plastic piece for the rightmost slot.

Return of a classic

I've been going great guns on the Centipede restoration, and am happy to report that Centipede lives!

There were a few twists and turns (literally) along the way. First, let me get the obligatory trackball comparison shot out of the way:

The one on the left was nasty. It looked like someone poured lubricant directly on the ball in order to lube the bearings! The control panel I picked up got new bearings, rollers, and a snow white leaf button from Bob Roberts. Here's a shot of the control panel.


I *thought* the overlay was an original that had faded, but upon closer inspection, it appears that the overlay is an inkjet reproduction. It's not wide enough to cover the whole panel, and the cutout under the fire button hole is kinda ragged (but hidden here). I have a new silkscreened overlay on its way, but right now we are getting scored on functionality. Cosmetics will come in time.

After plugging in the new ARII (audio regulator two) power board, harness, and testing all the test points on the ARII, I was ready for the moment of truth--installing the game PCB (printed circuit board). Usually it's a bit of a nail biter, but you can only sit around and test voltages for so long.. I plugged in the board, and this is what I saw:


Upside down success! It was suprisingly easy to play, because I had installed the trackball backwards by mistake. After inspecting the monitor a bit more carefully, I discovered that someone had cut and swapped the yoke wires. These are the wires that go from the chassis board to the yoke (a set of deflection coils) on the monitor neck. Swapping wires allows you to reverse the way the picture is drawn on the screen. (The person who converted this to a Mania Challenge did this in order to get the correct display.) It's weird that they cut the wires, since the wires go to a molex connector where you can easily pop the pins out (with a paperclip) and reverse them. This is the route I took, which put the screen in the proper orientation.

With all this attention to the monitor, I noticed that the circuit board was held in place (literally) by a thread. Only one of the bolts was in place--the other was wedged between the bottom of the board and the cabinet shelf. (It's amazing it didn't short anything out.) Another annoying aspect of the monitor was the pinkish glow that it had. I wasn't able to adjust it away. I figured it was time for a cap kit, so I ordered one from Bob Roberts. I just finished installing it tonight, and the difference (shown in my blurry pic below) is clear:


No more annoying pinkish tinge! I also reflowed the video connections for the monitor and bolted the chassis board in place properly. I also got out the Windex and gave the thing a good cleaning. The monitor is now in good shape on this machine. Here's a picture of the Centipede in the row. (This is pic pre cap kit--I got the machine up and running quickly on a day we had some friends over.) I have the glass bezel, but I'm planning on touching it up before installing it.


There is still a lot to do on this one--marquee lights, coin door lights, uncovering the side art, etc.. but those can wait for a little while. I had forgotten how much fun this game is to play! I'm chasing GAB's high score (whoever that is), but I'm off by an order of magnitude right now.. See you in the arcade!