The usual first steps and woodworking

Since this game was only missing the original fuse block, there was some hope that it would actually work if the fuses were replaced.  Ha! Not!

So I set about restoring the AR1 board with new caps and two new transistors.  The power brick also got a new bridge rectifier, filter capacitor, fuses and fuseblock.  Then came time to test the voltages.  Usually this is just a precaution.  I have never had a power supply or AR board fail to work properly after replacing the caps and transistors.  The AR board should provide 5V for the system board, testing mine showed over 10 volts!  Ouch.  I took a long look at the schematics and decided it had to be either the LM305 or the two or three diodes on the board.  I had a few  1N7004 diodes on hand, so I set about to replace those first.  That didn't work.  The old diodes were good, which meant the LM305 was toast.  After studying the board for a minute or two,  I noticed that one of the legs on the LM305 was missing.  Now this thing is tiny.  Using a leg from a capacitor, I soldered a bridge in place for the missing leg.  Afterwards the voltages were perfect and adjustable to 5V.  Weird, but that solved the issues with the AR1 board.

The power brick is another problem.  Sadly it seems that the transformer has gone bad, either that or I'm not taking the voltage reading properly.  I'm almost certain I am.  Still, I've been told transformers almost never go bad, unless we're talking about Decepticons.  =)

The marquee wasn't lighting up, and I wanted to make sure the black light was going to work too.  After pulling out the top section of the cabinet, and studying the florescent light fixtures, I noticed one of the small ballasts had been removed.  The black light was missing, and had been replaced with a regular tube.  How sad.  The coolest part of this game, and the owner couldn't be bothered to replace a black light.  I had both items on hand.  After replacing the missing parts, and a few damaged connectors, I had it working again in minutes.  For the first time in possibly decades, the black light artwork was glowing proudly.

The cabinet looked pretty bad setting directly on the ground.  So I wanted to get it lifted up on leg levelers again.  This is normally an easy task.  When I tipped the cabinet over to screw in the replacement leg levelers, I realized why they were missing.  The bottom was in REALLY bad shape.  It had been eaten by termites, luckily they had long since moved on, leaving me the mess to clean up.  The base of the cabinet would have to be busted out and replaced.  Quite a mess.

This really went smoothly though.  The old base was easily knocked out, since it was badly chewed up.  I guess termites don't have a taste for particle board, because everything else was fine.  Cutting and installing the new base was a pretty straight forward deal.  I found some furniture hardware to mount the leg levelers in and attached those to the new base.  Now it looks much better since it's raised up off the floor.

Asteroids Deluxe

I have never owned a game that featured a cool black light effect.  So I started thinking that I wanted an Asteroids Deluxe for this reason.  Asteroids is likely one of my favorite games, I already own both a cocktail and the upright versions.   Asteroids Deluxe was released one year (1980) after the original, and features slightly different game play.  It has a cool mirrored display, the effect is that the images appear to be floating over a nice glowing deep space asteroid scene.  The best way to find something fast is to ask for it on the Village Forum.  I was offered one by Rob from Tallahassee, or Raikus as he goes by on the forum.  Here are some first shots I took of the cabinet.  The side art looks to be in pretty good shape.  Also, all the parts seem to be intact, except for a missing fuse block, and of course the back door.

As you can see, it's sitting on the ground, because it's missing the leg levelers.  Also the control panel isn't correct.  This one looks to be a reproduction decal meant for the original Asteroids, so that will need sorted.  

All things aside, the important bits are here, Rob has a great eye for finding a project, and this game should look nice when completed.

First work on Tail Gunner 2

The first of many repairs have been completed!  I was able to source the capacitors and bridge rectifier online, including the two huge 13000MFD 50V caps.  The one case mounted 2N6055 transistor was replaced with a brand new 2N6284.  Previously the +5 voltage and +25 were both dead, now I am happy to report they are all working nicely. The 25 is a little on the high side at 28 something, but the +5 is easily adjusted from the pot at R1.

The 5v circuit board with the new caps.  

The monitor received a serious cleaning.  I finally decided to try the water hose method, as scary as it seems.  The board got a good soaking down with Simple Green, and I scrubbed it with a small toothbrush, to remove any really nasty bits.  After spraying it down with the water hose, it looks nearly spotless.  Of course I let this thing dry for almost a week before attempting to apply power.  While this was down, I replaced the 4 power transistors mounted on the two huge heat sinks to the side.  Bob Roberts supplied the two 2N3792's and two 2N3716's.  On Wednesday I hooked everything back up and gave it another test with the power supply.  I'm happy to say the monitor now has the familiar vector chatter sound, but still no picture.

Lastly, I got busy doing the artwork scans.  It took 9 scans to piece together the whole image.  Microsoft makes a free image stitching program with which I was able to join the 9 images together.  My boss, Mike Gerrish, was kind enough to clean the final image up greatly, by tracing the edges and making all of the white bits perfectly white, and all of the black, black.  It looks really good now, and is very detailed at 500dpi.  I have contacted This Old Game to see about having it printed.