WWF Superstars

Last Wednesday a friend drops by and asks, do I have any games I'd like to place at his new laundromat.  The short answer, not really.  The first thing that scene brings to mind is, vandalism.  Since I actually enjoy the look of most of my games, I opted out.

Instead, I asked on the local forum, and did a quick look on Craigslist for any potential so-so games that could fill the role.  I found a cheap and clean, well, somewhat clean, WWF Superstars being sold in Largo.

So after talking to the owner, I decided it wasn't that bad of a deal.  The game wasn't working of course, but the sounds were playing and the cabinet looked to be in decent shape.  I decided to fix it up a little, and offer it up to the local laundromat crowd.

The monitor was toast.  A fuse on the deflection board was blown, and after replacing it, and powering up, there was a nasty burning smell and a small amount of smoke.  Wow, nice!  My answer at this time, just pull it out, and set it aside.  I have three working spare monitors, so simply swapping in a good one seemed like the right thing to do.  After this, the game came up and played fine.

It's actually a fun game.  I like that it has the original WWF members, Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Andre the Giant, etc.  The game play isn't half bad.  You can play single player vs. the computer or tag team against the computer.  It also offers two player vs. mode, so it has plenty of replay value.

The cabinet looks rather dull, and one of the controllers is pretty much shot.  I placed an order with Twisted Quarter for some new t-molding and a couple of new Happ joysticks.  That should give it some much needed bling.

The Haunted Arcade

The game room was made available to the trick-or-treaters this year.  Though not many actually took the time to stop in and play a game, there were a few.  There were some dad's that wanted to hang back and play a few games, and this caused a few grumpy mom's to storm off down the street.  All in all it went pretty well.  Some younger kids got to enjoy the games, and I met several guys my age that wanted to talk about the hobby. 

My neighbor, Dean, came over early and we set up a fire pit and built a nice fire.  We then sat around and handed out candy and drank ice cold Sam Adams.   Later that night Mick from the Village BBS came by along with his kids and wife Jenny.  It was a nice relaxing evening. 

I really didn't do a whole lot to the game room, just some lights and a skeleton. I hooked up a few old tv's and had them playing a horror movie, and played some old 80's music in the background.
Here are a few shots I took just after getting everything set up, before any kids came along.

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.

Xentek Power Supply

Today I started cleaning up what I could on the Tail Gunner 2.  The cables had all been wrapped up with electrical tape, so I took that all apart, and started examining the harness. 

The manual shows the monitor, power supply, and PCB all slide out as a drawer for easy access.  This wouldn't happen on mine, the cabinet had been modified somehow, so after removing the lower plywood section I was able to pull the drawer out and get a better look at the internal bits. 

I pulled the power supply out and cleaned it up.  After looking online, I located replacements for the two 13000MFD 50VDC capacitors.  My plan right now is to track down the remaining capacitors, and replace those.  Then I'll test and maybe replace the diodes and the one 2N6055 transistor.

Arcade Boneyard Road Trip

The other day I was looking through some old posts on the KLOV forum.  I found a long rant about how a guy was trashing old games and selling off the parts.  After reading several posts I realized they were talking about The Arcade Boneyard.   I had visited the website, and seen several of his posts on Craigslist, and knew that he lived somewhere north of me, in Ocala or Gainesville.  One of the rants on KLOV was that the guy had a "kill list", really it's just a list of stuff that he plans to take apart and sell, and that certain members found that to be offensive.

Next thing you know I'm on his website, examining the "kill list".  On the list are a few odd ball games that would likely be of interest to collectors.  There was a cockpit Red Baron, and a Tail Gunner 2!!  In spite of there being a notation that he doesn't sell these as projects, I dropped him an email asking.  He responds almost immediately and explains that the cabinets are in very bad shape.  Actually the back half of each cabinet is missing, the previous owner sawed them in half to save space.  He sends me some pics, and I'm already planning on grabbing the Tail Gunner.

We work out a price, me going low, and he angles for a take-two for one price strategy.  So wow, I was totally on the fence about getting this as a project and now he wants me to take both the Tail Gunner AND the Red Baron.  Luckily I find out from Mick that a local collector had an eye on the Red Baron, and later that night confirmed that he wanted it.  I was clear to make the haul.  So with everything in place, My daughter and I set off early Saturday morning for Ocala.

Not knowing what to expect, the Arcade Boneyard was a very pleasant surprise.  The owner Rob was a super nice guy, and his place was very clean, organized, and professional.  He loaded up both games and showed us around his shop.  He has a very large collection of parts and manuals, as well as complete machines.  Many of his games had been restored and looked like new.  And there were a number of cabinets there also, ready to have parts installed, because they were just too nice to be destroyed.  I would recommend this place to anyone looking for projects or hard to find parts.

So now I have this sweet rare game, Tail Gunner 2.  It's one of the early vector games made by Cinematronics and Vectorbeam, a gem indeed.  I'll not only have to repair the game, but research and build a replica of the cabinet.  It's sure to be an epic restore, let's hope it's not an epic fail.