Galaxian Cocktail Restore

This is a project that I finished in the spring of 2009. It sold almost before I could get it finished. A co-worker knew that I had been repairing old arcade games, and one day asked, had I seen any of the "sit down - two player tables".

I purchased this non-working game in Tampa, on a Sunday morning. It had been converted, rather poorly, to a Ms. Pac Man. My hope was that I could simply do a few repairs and sell the thing off in working condition. I later found that the internals were a total rat's nest of old wires, and the monitor was basically toast, due to the previous owners repair attempts.

I knew that the game had originally been a Galaxian. So for a time I considered trying to locate a Galaxian PCB and controls. That would be the right thing to do, but would probably end up being worth less than what I gave for it. So instead I opted to install one of the Multicade boards into this cabinet, rebuild the control panels and replace the glass top and artwork. The game would retain most of it's original look, I used reprinted Galaxian Artwork, but would play 48 classic arcade games.

I gutted the cabinet and repainted all of the black areas. I cleaned the outsides with a scrubby and some Simple Green. After this I was amazed at how good the wood grain laminate looked.

Everything had to be rewired, so I started with the power supply and transformers. From there I was able to use most of the old parts, including the switch and fuse holders.

I mounted the new Multicade Gameboard and wired the entire cabinet. I had an extra monitor and used it to replace the damaged one that had been in the cabinet previously. As you can see, I was quite happy with how it was all coming together.

The original control panels had been drilled and re drilled several times. So there were a lot of extra holes that were causing problems. I had to rebuild two new control panels from scratch in order to have the buttons and joystick placed in the proper positions. They turned out better than expected.

Later, I covered these with a generic blue laminated material that could take a lot of abuse. The blue happened to match the blue used in the new Galaxian under glass artwork that I ordered from Arcadeshop.com.

I learned a lot about hooking up the wiring and building control panels from this project. The game looked fantastic when it was completed and I actually hated to see it go.

Here is the finished game, complete with lighted control panels. As you can see it retained much of it's retro late 70's look. The new owner set it to take coins and has it setting in a prominent place in his new gameroom.  If you would like to see more detailed photos of this project, click on the slideshow above and to the right of this page.

Sound repairs and oops.

So my second night of work, and I was totally excited to get the sound working. Here is a shot of the little sound amplifier. As you can see it has several capacitors and two transistors, that will be swapped for the ones provided in the kit by the living legend "Bob Roberts".

This little piece had several cables attached, some coming from the monitor chassis and one coming from the main PCB, which I carelessly unplugged.

It took me maybe 3o minutes to desolder and resolder the new parts in place. A quick once over and I plugged it back into the machine for testing. Still no sound. Aughhh!!! What is the problem. After looking around with a flashlite, I discovered that a little brown cable, coming from the amplifier was running up and around the front of the monitor. I reached up and to the front of the machine to feel about for the cable and there it was, not plugged into anything. A quick look at the main board and I locate a plug labeled "TV audio". After plugging that in, you guessed it, sound! Okay, so I now have a perfectly working sound board that I probably didn't need to re-build. Oh well, you live and you learn!

My guess is that Scott (the previous owner) while placing the monitor back into the machine, a job which is a back breaking pain in the you know what, managed to snag the sound cable and shove it ahead of the monitor. I guess he must have thought he had done something wrong on his monitor repair that caused the sound to go out.

First Night of Repairs

This could not have worked out better. The parts arrived from Bob, on Wednesday, and the best part, Lizzette is out of town for two days. Which basically means, that should I have to pull a late night work session, everything is good.

I didn't waste any time after seeing Kylie off for the night, we usually go out to dinner on Wednesdays. First I pulled the boards out, making sure to take pictures of all of the connectors and where they go.

Removing the old pots and soldering in the two replacements was a snap. Although it is way past time for me to be looking into a real soldering station. I am still using the old 30W POS that I picked up at Radio Shack. Here is a picture of the two bad "nobs" as the guys on the forum like to call them.

After I replaced the boards and fired up the game, everything seemed fine. I sat down and started playing the game and after about 3 minutes, the old scrambled screen issue re-appeared. Great!

So I resigned myself to doing the cap replacement on the monitor and seeing if that resolved the problem. Scott had mentioned that he had done a previous cap replacement on the chassis, but I wanted to be sure. It looked as though the kit I had, replaced a lot more of the caps than he had previously. I saw some on the board that looked to be original and others that were clearly replaced with new. After a full hour and a half of soldering and replacing capacitors, the chassis was ready to go back in the cabinet.

I fired it up and watched for smoke. Everything good, and walked around to the front to check out the display. It was looking good. Now to test if it would stay that way, I sat down for a much deserved gaming session. After about 15 minutes the problem hadn't returned so, Hurray!

Break out the Simple Green!

I finally managed to trade off the Operation Thunderbolt for a Donkey Kong Jr. This game has been on my short list for a long time. I had seen several for sale, but this was the first non-working one to hit Craig's list. I traded the "100% working" Opt. Thunderbolt for this rather nice, but not working machine, in the hopes of doing a few repairs and cleaning it up. A good working Donkey Kong Jr. is worth about 3 times more than the game I traded, so if I can get it working and looking good, it will have been a pretty sweet deal.

Overall the cabinet is in fair to good condition. Mostly, the usual 28 years of grime, and scrapes and bruises. A half bottle of Simple Green and a ton of paper towels and it's looking even better. The bezel has a few scratches that I plan to buff, and I will need to replace the t-molding and instruction card. Also this machine is lacking a proper back door, which is a serious health hazard should anyone go sticking their little hands back there while the game is running. "Zapp!!!".

There are basically two major problems with this game. The first problem, no sound. The sound effects are one of the best things about the early Nintendo games. So, that will need to be resolved. The second issue is, and it's a big one, after about 3 minutes the screen goes to garbage. That looks to be a potentiometer issue.

The previous owner, thanks again Scott, mentioned that he had done a cap replacement on the Sanyo monitor, but that he was tired of fooling with it, and believed that the problem was somewhere in the monitor adjustment potentiometers.

I adjusted the pots (potentiometers) on the monitor and they seemed fine, it turned out to be a pair of pots located on the PCB. There were two located on the first PCB that controlled horizontal and vertical arrangement of the display. A quick look up on Bob Roberts site, and there they were, he sells them for a dollar a piece.

Next I checked into the sound issue. On Nintendo games, the amplifier for the sound is located on the chassis of the monitor. Bob Roberts also sells a rebuild kit for Nintendo sound boards, I think it was 7 dollars. I ordered that and went the extra mile and ordered the capacitor kit for the Sanyo EZ monitor. All total with shipping and the two pots mentioned earlier, came to 21 dollars.