Almost Complete

So this weekend, in spite of all the holiday responsibilities, I managed to almost wrap up this project.  The new High Score Save kit arrived from Braze Technologies.  A fancy new back door was finely crafted and painted, with a proper cam lock.  This time the door actually fit, amazingly enough, I guess I'm getting better at the wood working.  Of course I couldn't be bothered to snap a picture of it, who wants to see a video game cabinet backdoor anyway. 

The control panel was hastily painted and the t-molding applied to the front edge.  All the controls were re-assembled and cleaned.  New buttons will need to be purchased and installed, cause I'm just not happy with these anymore, too many cigarette burns and they're just too stained and nasty.  But the control panel looks nice and here you can see Mario in his white overalls.  Maybe in this early stage Mario had not yet achieved his lifelong dream of becoming a plumber.  Judging by his attire, I would say he was perhaps in the painting business.

I ordered the new cpo and bezel instruction cards from Arcade shop.  These small things really dress up the cabinet ( and distract you from my shoddy paint job).  The lower marquee bracket was replaced with a nice new one from arcade shop also. 

It's difficult to see in these photos but the bezel has a nasty scratch right down the center.  A whole lot of scrubbing with novus #3 and #2 and it looks much better, but still somewhat noticeable.

Lastly I wired up the coin-mechs,  although they are basically useless and unnecessary, they're working perfectly.  Now a coin box/drawer will need to be located as mine is missing, and the coins just fall into the bottom of the cabinet.  I'll likely just make a small box to do the job.

Anyway, it was a bit of a rush, and I would've done a much better job with this, but with everything going on this time of year, I 'm happy just to have the thing back together and ready for any and all hapless holiday visitors.

Board repair

There is a common problem with Pole Position.  They don't work.  To own a working Pole Position, from what I can tell, is a small miracle.  I don't know a whole lot about electronics or the theory behind it, but it would seem the boards have a design flaw that caused the +5 contacts at the finger board and connector to overheat and burn up.  Secondly, in order to save the high scores, and I guess to save money at the time, the manufacturer opted to solder a battery directly to the main circuit board.  We all know that these games were never meant to last 25 or 30 years, but you can guess what happened, battery acid leaked out and destroyed many of the boards.  This one was no exception.  Asking around on the KLOV forum got me the e-mail address of a Dick Millican (causeddmillikan@juno.com ) in Washington that specializes in repairing the Pole Position boards.  He was very reasonable and had the board repaired and back in about a week.

Naturally when the boards came back I was excited to plug it in and go.  Sadly I was presented with this lame display on the monitor.  So my first thought was that I had done something wrong on the earlier monitor work.  After swapping out the original Matsushita monitor for a known working one, I still had this nasty dark and wavy display.  I put the original monitor back in, played with the connectors for a bit and the picture seemed to clear up for a moment.  Having heard all the talk about faulty connectors I decided to re-pin the edge connectors and see what happened.  Well it worked.

This was more like it.  Although the colors are a bit off.  The picture was looking good. 

I added a few credits and was happy to see that the game played and sounded perfect. 

With the back door closed, the inside of the cabinet got really hot in a hurry.  So I installed a 4 inch 12 volt fan into the back of the cab and wired it up.

This game is a blast to play.  The sound when you're sitting in the cockpit and racing are enough to put a smile on any ones face.
There are still some issues to be resolved.  On some days, when I turn it on, I just get garbage on the screen.  I then have to turn it off.  Move the filter board or connectors around a little, and then turn it on again.  Usually it starts up after this and works fine for the rest of the day.  Also the colors need adjusted, but that is best done by switching the game to service mode and using the color chart.  Right now there is something wrong with the service switch, so it will need to be replaced first.

Control Panel Work

My original plan was to have a go at restoring the control panel with some Bondo.  After a closer look at it and removing the plexi overlay, I decided to try and reproduce the panel from scratch. 

Another trip to Lowes and I was ready to have a go at it.  As typical, I was able to find (almost) what I needed.  The only 5/8 material they had was a piece of particle board shelving material, not likely to last long but worth a go for now.  I can always make another one if it doesn't work out.  There are several areas on the control panel that had to be routed out for the back edge and the joystick mount.  Rather than attempt to do this work with my fixed base router, I opted for a router attachment for my Dremel tool.  It worked perfectly, It was a little slower than using a full sized router, but much easier to handle and perfect for small projects like this one.

Here you can see I'm routing out the back edge that fits into the back support.  It is only an 1/8 of an inch smaller and runs across the entire back length.  So I used a strait bit, and clamped a guide for the router along the length of the panel.  I then had to work through and remove the remaining outside material.  When I was finished I had a perfectly smooth stair step look that I then test fitted in the back support. 

I don't have a picture of it here but the original control panel has a rectangular recessed area on both sides for the joystick to mount into.  It was a little more difficult to do, but not hard and took only about 15 minutes to knock out.

After that I used the original panel to mark off where the buttons would need to be mounted, and used a forstner bit I had from a previous project to drill those out.  Naturally they were a bit off from the original which had me worried.  So I grabbed the control panel overlay and the buttons and test fitted
the whole thing.  Since the buttons holes were slightly

larger than the buttons it had enough play in the layout to get the alignment correct.  Here's a picture I took while test fitting.  Now all I have left to do is route out the slot along the front for the t-molding and drill out each of the mounting holes for the 8 carriage bolts that hold the overlay on.  Then I'll give this a good coat of paint followed by a coat of Polycrylic and hope for the best.

A little work between Christmas parties

So let's see, I managed to do almost nothing on this project today.  I masked off the orange areas of the kick panel and painted the black on each inside portion.  After that I attempted to paint the slots on the inside of the speaker grill by masking them off with tape and hitting them from the inside with some black spray paint. Well that turned out to be a big fat FAIL.  The paint ran down the back side of the tape and ruined the orange paint.  So that had to be repainted, and didn't quite look right after that.

Now to the t-molding. I needed to do something that I couldn't screw up.  I was blown away at how good the cabinet looked after installing the new bright white t-molding.  So I mounted the freshly painted coin door and took a few pics.  Not bad, I'm starting to think this is going to look pretty good when I'm finished.

Oh and Scott Brasington was having a holiday sale on all his high score save kits over at www.brasington.org/arcade, or Braze Technologies.  So I ordered the High Score Kit for DK jr.

Pizza Joint Memories

There is a bit of a story with this Asteroids cocktail.  I found a listing for it on Craigslist in Sarasota. The owner claimed it was working recently and just needed some tweaking to get the monitor working again, wow what an understatement. He then said that he'd rather get it fixed and keep it than sell it, and that he had it and another game called Sinistar that he'd like to get fixed.  Somehow between emailing back and forth for three or four weeks, he got around to offering me the Asteroids if I would drive down and repair the monitor in his Sinistar.  Not a bad deal I figured.  Not that I'm an expert at monitors or anything, but he did send a few pics showing what it was doing, and I consulted the legendary Bob Roberts.  So I ordered the cap kit for his Wells Gardner and a couple of transistors for the deflection board and headed down there on a Saturday. 

His monitor repair went off without a hitch.  I did the work right there off the back of my sister's truck and had the Sinistar working in about an hour.  He was totally stoked after that, and Started playing Sinistar almost immediately. I was just glad everything worked out, since it was about a two hour drive from my place, and a wasted trip would've sucked.  Well long story short I got the Asteroids, and he tossed in a non-working Playchoice 10 also, for the price of a cap kit, a few transistors and a little of my time.

Now for the fun part.  This thing is nasty.  Not to say that its in bad shape, it looks worse than it actually is. If not for the rope tied around it though, I think the cabinet would've fallen apart on the ride back. I've restored two cocktail cabinets thus far and both cleaned up real well.  So I was confident that I could bring this one back to life.
My biggest concern was getting the monitor working again.  It came with a 15" Electrohome G05-805. I have a working Asteroids upright so testing the board and monitor against that working system will be a big advantage.  First thing I did was test the board from the cocktail in my working cabinet.  Sadly it was not working, or not working very well. Testing the 15" monitor with the video signal from my working game produced equally disappointing results.  So chalk it up, bad monitor, bad game board, bad cabinet, nasty power supply and voltage regulator board.  Quite a project.

I started by ordering the usual parts:
New "big blue" capacitor
New fuse block and fuses
new power cord
overhaul kit for the Audio/Voltage Regulator board
cap kit  with transistors for G05-805 xy monitor

These to me are the basics. Once I get a solid power supply and correct voltages on a machine, I usually feel like I'm halfway along.
Normally I wait until the game is working properly to do any cosmetic work.  In this case I had to make an exception.  As I said earlier the cabinet was at risk of falling completely apart if not moved carefully.  So I stripped most of the hardware out and vacuumed the 30+ years of dust and rodent fecal matter out of the cab.  The base of the cabinet had been pulled loose from the top and sides.  So a little wood glue, a few drywall screws and my giant clamps held overnight and it was solid as new.

As I'm writing this, I can't actually recall what came next.  I believe I struggled with the monitor for a week or more,  I eventually caved and took it to our local expert Atari Jim.  He went over it and found a capacitor that I had soldered in with reversed polarity (amature mistake), and that most, if not all of the connectors on the monitor had been either damaged or were so completely worn that they weren't making good connections.  After he replaced the pins in each connector it began working perfectly.  It was all a hard earned lesson for me, check the connectors, double check your work.  Jeeeze!
Once I had the monitor working I felt satisfied that the project was worth completing and I ordered the replacement artwork from Arcadeshop.com.  The underglass artwork was nasty and destroyed, and the control panels were also toast.  The control panels would need to be stripped down, sanded and repainted, then the artwork applied and buttons remounted.  So I took this time to decide that I'd add a little bling to the finished item, perhaps some new lighted buttons in a light blue to match the artwork would be just the thing.  This is where the bulk of the expense for this project is going.  New artwork is a little expensive.  The underglass art was $45 dollars and the control panel overlays were another $40.  I didn't mind really too much, I feel like if I can keep this project under $300 It will be well worth it.

Now to have a look at the glass top and whatever is underneath.  These glass tops and their artwork have always been full of surprises for me.  I now accept that by taking up the glass you're never sure what you'll find.  My Ms. Pac cocktail had Galaxian artwork under it, and my frogger cocktail had a dark wooodgrain under the black painted glass.  This cabinet had what looked to be a piece of imitation leather on top of the craziest looking wood laminate I've ever seen.  This was pure 70's delight baby. 

So here I am, with another dilemma.  I needed the top to look similar to the woodgrain on the sides of the cabinet, not this crazy garbage, this is why it had the imitation leather overlay.  I contemplated finding a piece of matching or similar laminate to go over this top, but settled on buying a piece of birch or oak plywood with a similar grain.  This way I could just replace the top, and stain the wood to match the existing woodgrain on the cabinet.
A trip to Lowes and I had exaclty what I needed.  I found a piece of 2' x 4' oak plywood for about $13.  It had a clean open grain and looked very similar to the imitation woodgrain on the cabinet.  I clamped the old top to the plywood, and using my router made an exact copy.

This was a piece of cake, biggest problem was the mess it made.  I then used a rabbit bit to cut the inside bevel for the smoked monitor plexi. If you're paying attention you'll be wondering about the t-molding on the sides of the top, I have a slot cutting bit for my router that I used in a previous project, so that was a simple fix.  A little Minwax Red Oak stain and it looked surprisingly good.
I have a buddy in the glass business, he stopped by and measured the old glass top for me.
A few days later I had the new glass top, new artwork, and a pretty spiffy looking Asteroids cocktail table.

Cabinet Work Begins

As you can see by the date of  my previous post, it's been over a year since I did any work on this project.  The cabinet isn't exactly awful looking.  I guess the biggest issue I have with it is the stupid location of the added credit button.  At some previous date someone decided to drill a hole in the front of the cabinet and mount a button there for adding credits.  Its right there on the front panel.  Both myself and my daughter Kylie hit it with our knee while playing a game and its annoying to say the least.  The only way I see to get rid of the button hole is to fill it with Bondo and paint over it,  so I may as well take this time and repair the whole cabinet and repaint it.

So I finally try Bondo.  Awesome, amazing, I can't believe I didn't try it sooner.  It took a little getting used to how it works but its so sweet.  Basically you can build up missing corners and fill holes and scratches to your hearts content.

It took me maybe four applications and sanding sessions to get it right.  After that the cabinet was smooth as silk, and looking good.

As you can see, I had parts of the speaker slots missing or de-laminated and other splits and cracks here and there.  There was the usual security bar holes and a well placed button hole in the front, perfect for adding credits with your knee, installed there by a previous genius.

I then used a color code for some oil based paint I found on google:
Valspar Anti-Rust B-4 Clear Base and 107-7, 111-1Y26, 113-30, 116-32.5
from Lowes.

Well the paint was excellent, the color was dead on.  However, I suck at painting, and I won't even go into all the damn little gnats and flies that decided they should end there miserable little lives by flying strait into my cabinet.  Its time I invested in a decent paint sprayer, cause I certainly cant roll paint worth a damn.

As you can no doubt tell from these pictures, its a little too shiny.  Maybe that will change as it cures, but I'm not exactly proud of the look.  While all this was drying I took the time to sand down the nasty coin door and painted it with Rustoleum Hammer Textured Spray paint, then a light coat of gloss black over the door and top marque holder.  Those turned out to look near perfect.  I then added two new coin mechs that I had ordered from TwistedQuarter.com.  The coin door looks great, but obviously I couldn't be bothered to take a picture of it.

My next step is to let this cab cure for a week and repaint the black parts of the cabinet.

Fresh Paint and new T-Molding

This Galaga is in great shape.  With a little effort it could look even better.  Some folks on the forum have replaced the black t-molding on the Galaga and sometimes Galaxian cabinets with a bright green.  I like the way it looks and ordered mine from  www.arcadeshop.com.   The black areas on the inside of the cabinet have been worn down over the years and could use a fresh coat of satin black to clean it up a bit.

Oh Yeah, looking good!

Cap kit and Power Brick

This was the result of one of those things you do when you're in the middle of a task.  After discharging the monitor and unbolting it from the cabinet,  I decided to place it on top of a small shop stool that was nearby.  Then I grab the can of compressed air and thought " I don't want this dust in here" so I wheel the whole thing out into the driveway.  Shortly there after I notice people gawking and pointing.  Yes folks I'm a dork.

I don't need to go into details here.  Suffice it to say that I replaced the capacitors on this monitors chassis.  Not particularly difficult, in fact, it may have been one of the easiest so far.  It was very dusty, obviously hadn't been touched since the early 1980s.

Here's a shot of the chassis of the Matsushita TM202G layed out on the workbench ready to have all those little capacitors unsoldered and replaced with fresh ones.  This also gave me a chance to wipe away some of the accumulated filth and dust.  If you're doing this, be sure to familiarize yourself with the various on board controls, they're very hard to see once you put it all back together and mount it in the cabinet.

Okay, one last shot of the monitor and you can forget about it for another 25 years.  Notice how clean it looks now.  Nice.  I know some of you folks like to take a water hose to these and get them squeaky clean.  I haven't been able to bring myself to that yet. 

Now on to the power brick.  These are almost always nasty.  This one looks pretty good.  Bob sells a kit that comes with the various fuses, a new fuse block, crimp connectors, bridge rectifier, and a new Big Blue capacitor (http://www.therealbobroberts.net/).  It really doesn't take long to clean this up and replace the parts.  If the base is nasty, clean it up with some sandpaper or just remove everything and give it a good coat of rustoleum bronze spray paint.  This one was pretty nice, so all I had to do was wipe down the wires with some simple green and dust it off good.

Ching! Sparkle, sparkle.  That's better.  This puppy will now be throwing out proper voltages, and looking stunning all the while.  I then replaced the busted, tired old power cord with a brand new one, complete with a proper ground pin.  A lot more vacuuming in the base of the cabinet, and then I replaced the second Big Blue.  I find a few more tokens that Kylie missed in the base of the cab, and clean out what looks to be spilled Coke that must have seeped in from the cockpit area 20 years ago.

This is perhaps the best thing I've found so far in a cabinet: An out of order sign from the early days of desktop publishing, half eaten by mice.  I can just remember using these kind of graphics and printing things out on a dot matrix printer, it sucked, but sure looked better than a handmade note. That wraps up this order of parts.  I still don't have a working game.  The monitor now does an excellent job of displaying a screen full of garbage that only looks remotely like the original game (ah someday ).  Next up, the AR boards. 

Once over and order parts.

Same as always here, I break out the Simple Green and the Magic Eraser and remove 25 years of spooge and bubble gum.  It cleans up nicely and would be A+ if not for the few places with torn or missing artwork.  The coveted shifter is still intact and the steering wheel is in great shape.  All the important parts are there and in great condition.  Inside it has the usual finger board burns and has had a switching power supply installed to provide the 5V.  The monitor is the original Matsushita TM202G.  The original power brick is still intact, with two Big Blue capacitors and a nasty looking fuse block.

I ended up by ordering a cap kit for the monitor, the Atari Power supply rebuild kit, and an extra Big Blue from Bob Roberts.  I know some of you wouldn't bother, but I always like to start with the power and work my way up.  Seems to work for me.  Besides, once the voltages are correct, most arcades just seem to work happily.

My daughter, Kylie, finds almost 5 dollars worth of tokens in the coin box and in the bottom of the cab.  Later that day we drive over to the now modern and updated Family Fun Center in Lakeland and play some laser tag and spent the tokens playing games. =) 

Prepare to Qualify

This was one killer score.  I was looking at ads placed on craigslist for a couple of games, I think they were Buck Hunter and Bowling something.  Neither of which I gave a crap about.  But none the less I was looking at the post and noticed this Pole Position cockpit in the background of one of the photos.  That got me excited so I wrote the guy back asking if he'd sell the Pole Position.  Weeks went by without a response, so I tried again.  After perhaps a month or so, the guy finally made me an offer, sweet!

I go out to look at this thing and it's in killer shape, non-working, but looking nice.  Turns out it was from the local Family Fun Center, they had put it in the warehouse ages ago, when it stopped working.  I have fond memories of playing Pole Position at the old Family Fun Center when I was a kid.  So, this is the actual arcade I would've played at 11 or 12 years old.  Nice.

I finally get to meet with Scott ( a super nice guy ) the owner of said Fun Center and exchange old war stories. 

My Scratch Built Renegade

During the mid 80's, I would take my nephew to the old Lakeland mall arcade.  That arcade is long gone, and the mall is now a church!  Anyway, our favorite pastime there was Renegade.  It was the first "beat'em up" game I can remember playing.  If I were to ever own a stand-up, full size arcade game, it would have to be Renegade.  So that is how I got started in this hobby.

Renegade was never sold as a dedicated machine.  Story has it that in the waning years of the video arcade boom of the early 80's, game developers began providing conversion kits.  Operators were then able to convert an older game, something that was no longer earning them money, into a new and hopefully profitable game.  And convert they did.  Most cabinets were painted black to conceal their previous identity.  The conversion kit would come with a few pieces of art, usually a new marquee and control panel overlay.  It was around this time that game rooms began to look, well, shabby to say the least.

After researching this, and learning that poor Renegade was never actually sold as a "dedicated" cabinet, I decided to build one from scratch.  I located a working circuit board (PCB) for Renegade on Ebay and after several more months, located a few pieces of original art from the conversion kit. 

Having already bored you to tears with the "why", I'll spare you  the "how".  Just know that if you plan to ever "scratch build" an arcade game, that it will be a slightly costly and time-consuming endeavor.  Three tools that were very helpful were a "biscuit joiner", a router, and large clamps.  Without those tools, I cant see how I would've created a square cabinet.  The entire cabinet is held together with biscuit joints and wood glue.  It is extremely solid, no worries there.  I used only basic hand tools, and I'm quite happy with the final results.

Alive and well

Tonight I came home to find the conversion kit from Bob at the door.  Fifteen minutes later I was playing some sweet Galaga.  If you haven't installed one of these before, it couldn't be easier.  I think a 5th grader could do this one.  Bob includes instructions,  and the AC line is fed from the monitor power lead.  I made the extra effort to install the frame ground from the switcher to one of the legs of the transformer.  After powering up, I checked the voltages, and adjusted to right under +5.2v, but I could already hear the game playing, and could hardly wait to take a look.

This is perhaps the first game I've repaired that has a decent looking monitor.  I doubt it even needs a cap kit, it's clear, bright, and actually centered.
Of course I played a few games, right away.  Galaga is much more difficult than I remember.  Now I've got to get the marquee light working, it's missing completely.


This has been one sweet purchase.  I'll probably strip the parts out of the cab, give it a fresh coat of black paint on the inner painted surfaces, and replace the t-molding and control panel overlay.  After that this game will be in A+ condition.

Nice Score!

Naturally I wasn't looking for another game, this one was just too good to pass up. It was posted on e-bay, but pointed out to me by the guys on klov.com. From the pictures, and the description, I could tell this cabinet had potential. So I clicked the buy it now option and crossed my fingers.

Turned out to be one of the cleanest, best condition games I have purchased to date. There were the usual scratches, only much fewer. The control panel overlay is a bit worn, but still very nice. The side art, bezel, and marquee, are all in excellent condition. As it stands this game is an "A" and will soon be an "A+" on my VAPS page.

As always, with these old games, it had it's fair share of oddities. First would be the hacked power supply connectors. Wires were cut all about the cabinet and left hanging, as if someone had simply went wild with a pair of cutters. After repairing the wire loom damages and replacing the original connector (they were kind enough to leave the original in the bottom of the cab), I flipped the power on and it came up in test mode. I flipped the test switch to normal play, and the game came up, with sound, graphics, looking good! I stood there for a second or two in amazement, jaw open, and then the game just died.

Checking the voltages now (something I should have done first), the +5v that was needed at the PCB was fluctuating into the 12-13V range. Yikes! I shut the game down and unplugged the power going to the main boards. Upon checking further, the voltage could not be adjusted within a proper range of +5 to 5.2.

Bob Roberts to the rescue. I ordered his "switching power supply conversion kit". I plan to leave the original linear power supply intact and in the cabinet. I'll install the new "switcher" and rest easy that this one won't catch fire.

Lastly a big THANK YOU, to my bud Brian Rodocker for the loaner truck! And also for the "buy it" words of encouragement.