Crystal Castles Part 1

So far this has been a fun project.  For the most part, I have been hurrying through the work.  This is a great looking cabinet with cute art and great colors.  It should clean up nicely and deserves a little respect.  It's not such a bad game after all.

Of course I couldn't help but to lay out the cash for the repro'd artwork, the control panel and the marquee.  Sadly the speaker overlay is no longer available.  The old control panel was stripped down to bare metal, sanded, and cleaned of rust.  It then received a good coat of Rustoleum primer and satin black.  The marquee was really a mess, and needed sanded down.  Since the wood portions of the marquee were questionable, I gave it several coats of the Zinsser sanding sealer.  The hardest part of the marquee was just getting the old artwork removed.  The glass portion was glued back in place with a silicone sealant.  Like I said, I've been really lucky just to find time to work, so I've been lazy when it comes to taking pictures.


The base of this cabinet has some water damage and the back corners have been smashed.  The water damage looks to be from someone mopping the floor around the machine for years.  I don't like for the wood to be crumbly and falling apart, even if it is just the bottom corners.  So I made new corners and replaced them using a biscuit joiner.  Here are a few shots of the repairs.  I hope to just touch up the damaged artwork.

For the trackball, being pretty much the basis of game play, I wanted it to work perfectly.  I decided to do a full replacement of the bearings and rollers.  The ball also needed replaced,  this game originally came with a lighted red trackball.  The ball, when lighted, is part of what made this game so unique in the 80's.


The back door on this game was missing, and replaced with cedar planks.  Well those had to go, so I made a new door, and replaced the upper and lower panels also.  I matched the panels exactly using a tracing bit and a router,  the only difference being the new pieces are plywood and not fiber board.  The door now looks nice and has a fine new cam lock.

The very front of the cabinet, above the coin door was split.  I braced this piece up with a piece of steel and bondo'd the crack.  After painting it black, it's hardly noticeable.  The control panel area needed some filler and it too was painted black just to make it all look fresh again.


As far as the internals, very little needed to be done.  The capacitors on the AR board got replaced and I did the whole Bob Roberts power brick rebuild, which included a new big blue.  I cleaned up the power switch and replaced the nasty power cord.  The bottom of this cabinet was pretty nasty, so all that and the harness was cleaned or washed.  The inside is looking pretty nice now, not perfect, not spotless, but clean and presentable.  Also you can see this is going to be a really pretty game when finished.

Crystal Castles Project

This is a game I never expected to own.  After finishing up the Asteroids Deluxe, I was looking for a nice simple project.  This was offered to me by brew_miester on the Village forum.

The game actually works, so that's a major relief.  This cabinet is considered by many to be one of the best looking of the early Atari games.  Sadly, all of the artwork on this cabinet has been damaged in some way.  The front kick plate is faded and has two lock bar holes.  The control panel and marquee are both cracked and flaking badly, and the bottom sides of the cabinet have both water damage and smashed corners.  There is also a split in the front panel just above the coin door.

I looked online and found the control panel overlay and the marquee had both been reproduced.  I believe the side art and kick panel graphics are available also, but that would put this project's budget much higher than I am willing to go at this time.

Since this cabinet is going to be for playing, and not for marveling at, I decided to clean it up the best I could, but try to keep costs down.  It's best to have a plan when doing these restores, so I decided to just fix the cabinet, replace the control panel and marquee artwork, then repair and replace the poorly functioning trackball.  Also, the back door is missing, oh joy!  In the end, I hope to have a nice looking game, it won't be perfect, but I'll have the option to make it perfect in the future should I ever decide to go that route.

Here are a few of the before shots.  Everyone loves the "planking" of the back door area.

When starting a project like this I prefer to look on the positive side, and this cabinet has a few thing going for it.
1. The game works, the wiring and power supply are original and "un-hacked".
2. The majority of the side art is in reasonably good condition.
3. The control panel and coin door are not badly rusted or dented.
4. It's a great classic game made by Atari.

Asteroids Deluxe Finished

As I often do, I neglected to get pics of some of the last stages of this project.

After getting the board back from road.runner, I picked up a sheet of the foam style poster board from Michael's (the store), and fashioned a bezel for the blue gel.  I purchased a gel from Wizzes workshop.  It was a hassel getting the cutout for the screen to look right, and also getting the gel to lay flat and wrinklefree was near impossible.

I had to glue down some bits of the background and touch up some faded areas with a black marker.  In the end the background looked quite nice.

I finished up a new back door.  The door turned out really well and I installed a new cam lock.

In the end the game looks quite good, not perfect, but really nice.

I'll post a set of before and after pics when I have the chance to get some better photos.  For now its finished, and I am quite happy with it.

Asteroids Deluxe vs. Mike Salay

This "project" Asteroids Deluxe came with a totally dead board.  I tried a few things but likely made matters worse.  I know the board had issues with the voltage regulators, and there were a few burned diodes, but after replacing a few components, an electrolytic cap exploded on me while I was just a few inches away from the board.  Wow, I couldn't hear for about 5 minutes!  That's when I decided to seek professional help!

I had heard from a few folks on KLOV that Mike Salay was the Atari Vector Ninja.  Here is a list of things he repaired.:

Diodes/Regulators for the power section
A burned trace on the board
Chips in the ram, clock, and vector circuits
A TL082 and 4016 (to recover graphics)
A bad POKEY and LM324 op-amp (was causing sound issues)
bad LS251 (was causing an auto play issue)

His thoughts were that the board had sustained a major power surge. 
I'm thinking it had something to do with the Mayan end times prophecy.

Mike 1, Asteroids Deluxe 0. 

He even provided these pics.  Rad!

Asteroids Deluxe CP

Time to clean up the control panel on this beast.  I'm guessing an operator, trying to clean this cabinet up a little, painted the control panel black and slapped this aftermarket Asteroids overlay on as a quick fix.

There really isn't anything special about this job.  I ordered the correct Asteroids Deluxe control panel overlay from Arcadeshop.com.  The old panel peeled off easily after setting it to warm in the sun for about 20 minutes.  The panel needed a good once over with a wire brush followed by a good sanding with some 200 grit and then 1000, just enough to remove the small amounts of rust.

At this point I basically rummaged through my collection of spray paint and found a can of Rustoleum primer.  The whole panel was sprayed three coats and then a final coat of Rustoleum satin black on the inside and edges.  The important thing here is to leave the top portion of the panel white.  This helps the overlay graphics to look bright and colors to stand out.  If the whole panel is painted black, the graphics on the overlay tend to look muddied and dull.  After this, I set it aside for an entire week to allow the paint to cure.

So the hardest part of this project was getting the control panel overlay to line up properly with the button hole locations.  I clamped the new one in place with a pair of wood clamps, and adjusted it by looking through the button holes in the back to align with the blue line along the top row of buttons.  It's not exactly perfect but looks pretty close.  I considered using the original buttons, but they were all pretty much stained, like maybe the guy who played this most was a chain smoker. I replaced all 5 buttons with new leafswitch buttons from TwistedQuarter.  So here is the final product, with the Rustoleum primer and new overlay, it should last a good long time.

First Game of 2012

Ok maybe the second pickup, but the WWF doesn't really count.  Anyway, since I saw this nice looking Sega Turbo on Craigslist, not far from work, I couldn't resist.  Here are a few shots after a whole lot of the usual elbow grease, Simple Green and Magic Eraser.  The cabinet is in really nice shape.  The original blue t-molding is looking pretty nice, and the side art is not bad at all.

And, bonus! This one actually had the back door.  I'm so tired of making and replacing cabinet back doors, I  felt like if this one were missing it would've been a deal breaker.

So, it's not like I needed another project, but ever since I played Mick's Turbo, I've wanted my own.  This one is in almost working order, and I'm guessing with a few tweaks it should be up and running smoothly.

I started by replacing the missing lights and tracking down any simple issues that I could fix.  The marquee light was dead and needed a starter too.

 I disassembled the entire control panel, then cleaned and lubed the steering wheel and shifter.  The steering wheel had been painted black, so I stripped the paint off and polished up the chrome wheel with a little steel wool.  I wanted to brighten up the tired old steering wheel a bit, so I opted to paint the center cap a bright red.

The previous owner,Paul, was nice enough to throw in a working board set.  This game would boot up fine, and play for about 5 minutes. Then suddenly it would crash, and display garbage on the screen.  After swapping in the extra board, it plays and sounds great.  

I'll still need to replace the 12" woofer on this game, its responsible for playing the engine rumble.  I also ordered LED bulb replacements for the various 12volt lights.  The bulbs in the control panel that light up the faux dials get pretty hot, so I'm thinking the LED's will be a good idea there.

You have to admire the attention to detail that Sega put into this cabinet.  The top five scores are displayed to the left of the monitor in red digital panels, it's a nice touch.  Also they went to the trouble to add a push button start, and a 12" woofer for added bass.  The cabinet design is wicked cool too.  So that's it for now, I'm totally happy to add this one to the collection, but there is plenty more work to be done on this beauty.

High Score Saved Again

A little more love was given to the Pole Position II today.  I replaced the ghetto fabulous score saving cordless phone battery with a Dallas Semiconductor nonvolatile SRAM.  Now my dismal hi-scores will be saved for all posterity.

This chip replaces a socketed ram chip about three spots north of the old battery location.  Previously I was using a rechargeable battery to maintain the scores, but found it to be a bit unreliable.  This is a much better solution, and should last a good long time.

Pole Position Cockpit Topper

This most excellent item arrived months ago and I only recently got it installed.  Kudos to Phet for having the dream and making this happen.

I don't have any memory of ever seeing one of these back in the day.  It is however, in several drawings in the owners manual.  To get the story of how this was made you'd have to be following it on KLOV.      Here's a link to the two threads:
http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=45723
http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=187749