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.

More water damage repair

The two back corners of the Asteroids Deluxe have water damage.  It's pretty common, and often I just let it go, and don't actually worry much about it.  Other times the damage is too great, and it simply wont hold the t-molding any longer.  In this case, it's time to try and patch or replace the corner section.

I'm not planning on replacing the side art on this machine.  My plan is to peel it back and glue it back down after replacing the corner.

Here is a pic of the corner with the bad section cut away.  I used the front corners to make a copy using the tracing bit and a router.  I then cut that new piece to fit on the back corner.  To hold it in place, I used glue and a biscuit joiner.

Once this is dry and feels solid, I'll reattach the artwork and route a groove for the t-molding to go around the outside.  This should clean up really well.

Asteroids Deluxe Facelift

I'd like this cabinet to look pretty nice when finished.  Unfortunately it doesn't have much going for it.  Ok, the Side Art isn't terrible, but that's about it.  Last time I worked on this, I completely replaced the bottom section.  The front kick panel of this cabinet has numerous chips and nasty swollen water damage.  So I'm going to remove the front half and the coin door, cut a matching piece, laminate it, and put it all back together.

Here is the old front section.  Using a tracing bit, and my router, making a copy was relatively simple.

I already had a nice piece of black laminate and after gluing it down it was a simple matter to once again use the router and trim the edges smooth.

Here's the finished product.  Not bad, seriously it was worth the effort.  I used a few scraps of wood, some wood glue, and my cabinet clamps to get this in place and solid.

The coin door didn't look that bad, so a light coating of satin black and it was ready to go back on the machine.  Here is a shot of the final product, minus the chips and cracks.  It's a much cleaner edge and finish, a look worthy of an excellent classic game.

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.