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.