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!

Centipede on a Budget

When people find out I have some games in the basement, most of them say: "Sweet, do you have Centipede?".. and I've always had to say: "uh, no."

I've kept my eye out for a machine, but it's one of those popular/recognizable titles that's a bit of a cross over. What I mean is this--collectors want it, but so do people who only buy one machine for fun. Centipede prices can be a bit higher than the average game, despite the large number of machines made. That being the case, I set out to find a decent converted cab.

Here's the one I found:


This is a Mania Challenge, but in a former life, it was a Centipede. It has the screen burn and the painted over side art as proof of its former greatness! When I called the guy about this machine, time was running out--he said I could come pick it up in the morning if it didn't get rained on in the meantime. (It was outside--he had just moved, and there was no room for it inside.) I got there and struck a deal for $50. Interestingly, when he found out I wanted to convert it back to a Centipede, he led me to his parts room, where I picked up a beautiful marquee, a completely populated control panel and an original painted glass monitor bezel. I ended up offering him $60 for those items, and he was fine with that. It just goes to show--if you don't like the prices on the internet, it's time to get out there and start pounding the pavement.

He said the machine wasn't running, which wasn't a big deal to me, since I wanted it for the cab (and perhaps the monitor). When I got it home, I found that the Mania Challenge boardset was sitting loose in the cab--I plugged it in to the wiring harness, and it fired right up! The monitor takes a long time to warm up, but it works fine. The cab is in exceptionally good shape--glad I got to it before the rain did! Time to convert this thing back to Centipede! For the rest of the parts, I went to the 'conventional' source--the internet. I was able to score a wiring harness for $25 shipped, an Atari ARII board for $13 shipped, and a working boardset for $50 shipped. Fortunately, the Atari power/transformer/fuse block was still installed in the base of the cab. A few miscellaneous parts from Bob Roberts (a new AC cord, a big blue capacitor (I had a spare from a while back), and a cap kit for the G07 ran about $20). All told I have about $218 into this project, with enough parts to make it go--I hope! Stay tuned!

On your mark, get set...

Track & Field is a really fun game--you can't beat the button pounding, and it has appeal to a wide array of people. In an effort to make my row of games more appealing to visitors, I've set out on a quest for a Track & Field.

A few years back, I picked up a cabinet that had been partially converted to MAME. It was a Track & Field cabinet (painted black) that was stripped, but otherwise in really nice shape. At the time I thought, hey, I can use this for MAME and *maybe* convert it back at some point in the future.

The parts didn't seem to fall into my lap though, so the project was on the way back burner until a few weeks ago, when I bought some parts and the guy threw in this for free:

I believe his exact words were (while chuckling): "You want that?" I was pretty psyched, since this would finally get my project off the ground. The panel had seen better days, but the metal was good, and that's pretty much all you need. If you find yourself restoring a control panel, there are 2 tools that are an absolute necessity in my book. The first is a heat gun. It looks like a hair drier but gets a lot hotter. Hitting the trashed overlay with the heat from the gun loosens up the adhesive, which allows the overlay to be easily scraped off.

Next off I had to remove some of the adhesive. There are a lot of products out there that are supposed to do this, but I went with an odd recommendation from rgvac--peanut butter. It worked ok, but next time I think I will try something stronger. Apart from the adhesive, I had to remove a lot of rust. Both sides of this panel had a lot of rust; maybe it was left outside at some point. This is where the second tool comes into play: a power drill with wire wheel brush. I've sanded stuff by hand before, but this bad boy ate it up like nobody's business! If you already have a drill, you can get a wire wheel for about $3.00. After cleaning off the metal, it was primed, and painted satin black on the control panel side. (I did this so only black would be visibile on the sides if the overlay was slightly offset on application--it's usually a good idea to do this.) This was all done with spraycans (Rustoleum), since I don't have a fancy painting setup.

After letting this dry, I placed an order with Pheonixarcade . They do great screenprinted arcade artwork, and Track & Field appears to be one of their specialties. Here's the sweet overlay they sent:

Installing it went smoothly. It arrived with a the backing punched out for two of the buttons. This allowed me to set the overlay on the control panel with two buttons aligning it on the button holes. I pulled away the backing on the opposite side of the panel and tacked it down. Then, I unfastened the buttons, and removed the rest of the backing, and carefully smoothed the overlay into place. I would have pictures of what I just described, but my hands were kind of full at the time! Here is the final result, finished off with some leaf switch buttons from Bob Roberts: