Disney reached out to our builders group, asking for 10 droids to attend their May 4th event at Hollywood Studios.  That's an offer no Star Wars fan can turn down.

After sending in a couple of pictures, R2-J8 was accepted for the event.  Lately this old droid has been needing some repairs, and I've just been letting it go.  So I decided I needed to fix some things, and if possible, use the event as an excuse to do some upgrades if time permitted.

Over the course of doing various events, I began to notice several panels not opening correctly on the dome, or not opening at all.  After doing a little testing, I came to the realization that I needed to replace 5 of the panel servos, and 2 of his holoprojector actuators.  I placed an order for 5 new servos on Amazon, and they arrived really fast.  So those were replaced without much grief, and J8 was back to his full 10 panel dome animations.

A few months ago I purchased an aluminum holo projector from the a guy on the Astromech forum.  Let me tell you, that thing looks sweet, really makes my 3D printed plastic holo projectors look shabby.  So I decided that would be a good upgrade to do, and that it would be a simple swap out of the old ones.  Also, if I'm going to do an upgrade, I want it to be something that everyone is focused on, and those projectors are front and center.  I had been having problems with the plastic 3D printed ones seizing up in the sockets, and I believe that has led to some of the actuating servos getting fried.

So once the holo projectors arrived, I got to work with the "quick swap out", which turned out to be anything but quick.  First thing, I had applied a loctite to the threads to keep them from working loose, so each and every little bolt was a chore to remove.  Then I found that the openings in the dome where smaller than the cowl for the new aluminum pieces.  This led to a few hours of sanding with the ol'sandpaper wrapped around a wine bottle technique.  In the end, I managed to replace the front facing projector and the rear projector.  The third top one I left alone, as I was running out of time.

With one day left before the event, I decided it was time to organize the womp rat's nest of wires I had created in J8's dome.  So using some woven cable tubing, I managed to get everything somewhat organized and looking much better.

So I met with most of the guys in the group over at Disney Springs for an early dinner.  I think the place was called Blaze Pizza.  The pizza was amazing, the weather was not.

We had two bouts of rain come through, one just before 8:00 PM and another shortly after arriving.  Fortunately I was able to get J8 assembled and into the building between showers.

The remainder of the night was excellent.  There were lots of great Star Wars fans, some even in costume.  R2-J8 had tons of pictures taken, with groups and dozens of selfies.  I had a great time as always, just driving around and working with the crowds.

We finished up around 12:30, and took a few group photos outside the Star Wars Launch Bay.

Alien Syndrome nasty power supply refresh

For the most part, I've always restored arcade cabinets from the early 80's.  Later in that decade, it seems the industry began to move from linear power supplies, to the smaller, switch mode power supplies common today in almost everything.  I can't pretend to know why, likely for cost reasons.  These can be purchased now for about $20.  Many collectors just chuck out the old power supply and replace it with a cheap Peter Chou knock off.  Seems to make sense, but on the other hand, often the new product has been made in such a way as to extract every fraction of a cent profit conceivable.  As I said in an earlier post, the game works, and actually plays fine. Which is a testament to the design quality of the power supply. It's voltages were correct when tested with a multi-meter, but I could hear a loud hiss coming from the base of the cabinet, and I'm willing to bet the capacitors in there are dried up and bulging or leaking.

Since I now own an oscilloscope, and I'm just beginning to learn how to use it, I decided to take a look at the 5V output.  The display should be a nice flat line, what you don't want to see is AC ripple passing through.  I got this:

Yikes, not good.

Once I opened up the case, I could see most of the caps were bulging on the tops, and two were leaking.

So, after discharging those nasty capacitors, I decided to give it a bath, yes with soap and water:

I like that it has the year 1987 printed on the board, and Peter Chou.  Again, I'm no expert on switch mode power supplies, but this would have to be one of the earliest original Peter Chou models.  So I did a quick inventory of the caps, and jumped on Digi-key's website to place an order.

Meanwhile I cleaned up the enclosure, being careful not to scrub away the labels.  You can see it's a nice shiny blue, and it cleaned up really well:

I ordered the best quality Nichicon caps I could find, and had them by Wednesday evening:

A few months ago I was doing a lot of work on an old Vectorbeam monitor chassis, and I picked up a used panavise on ebay.  It makes working with these boards so easy:

To keep this post from getting really wordy I'll just say I swapped those caps out and got it looking spiffy. As David L. Jones would say, "Ah, she's a real bobby dazzler"!

Then I connected it to the oscilloscope again and as you can see, the signal is excellent, no AC ripple this time, and that annoying hiss is gone:

Alien Syndrome Has Arrived

Alien Syndrome Restoration

 I'd been wanting this game for quite a few years.  It's a fun game to play, and an interesting game to have in a collection.  When these are fully restored, I feel they are right up there with Tron as far as quirky artful presentation goes. Put simply, it's just a very cool game, with a great cabinet design.

A few weeks ago, one of these came up for sale, just over in Tampa, and I contacted the seller as soon as I saw it.  The listing had been up for two days, so naturally it was already spoken for, bummer.

I logged into the local collectors forum "theVillageBBS" and posted, asking who had snatched this game from my grasp.  Turns out it was the guy I had purchased a Battlezone from just last year.  As luck would have it, another collector, had one and since he was more of a pinball kinda collector, he offered to sell his.  Only catch, the game was in Jacksonville.

So I arranged to drive up, planned to meet with my daughter Kylie for dinner, since she's a student at UNF, and head back, all on a Wedneday afternoon.  This went as planned, and by Midnight that evening, having braved the perils of Interstate 4, I had the cabinet sitting in my shop.

So while the game is complete, and working, and the parts are primarily original, there was very little that wouldn't need some attention. 

Cosmetically it just looks better in pictures than in person.  It's just rough on all the edges. 

Starting with the control panel, there are little plexiglass windows, which when lighted from behind, serve to illuminate the instruction panel and the Sega logo.  The top plexi window had been pushed in and broken.  Then someone screwed a clear plexi onto the entire top surface of the panel to protect from further damage.

The front and sides of the cabinet have the usual scars from decades of being moved from place to place and generally being in public places.  While the side art is largely intact, it is torn off in places and there are several deep gouges. From the looks of it, there were either ashtrays or drink holders attached to the sides at some time.  There were also lock bars added, and the power switch had been unscrewed and mounted inside. 

The inside of the cabinet looks to be original.  The original power supply was in place and still working after 32 years.  Upon powering up the game, I could hear the power supply making a loud hiss.  I'm assuming the sound was coming from two large leaking filter capacitors, just visible through the dust.

Lastly the game circuit board, a Sega System 16 B Type, was still working, with it's original battery backed FD1089 suicide chip.  There are fixes for this, which involve replacing the FD1089 with a standard Motorolla 68K processor, and swapping out some of the ROM chips with non-encrypted versions of code.  If the battery dies on the current processor, it takes the encryption key with it, rendering the game dead.  This will need addressed, since after all these years, that little coin cell battery could go at any moment.

R2-J8 at Yuri's Night Space Coast

This year R2-J8 was invited to attend Yuri's Night at the Kennedy Space Center.  How could I pass up the chance to get some photos with the Space Shuttle Atlantis?!

To be honest, J8 wasn't the only droid invited.  My local R2 builders club "Southern R2 Builders" was there, along with some very talented Wall-E builders.

Our event organizers suggested we arrive early to get set up, as the party was set to begin at 8:00 PM.
For this event, I was determined to show up early and get some good pics, as it turned out, so did everyone else in our group.  We had nearly an hour to drive around the Atlantis Visitor Complex and take photos, and while the lighting wasn't exactly ideal, we managed to make the most of it.

Driving on the glass smooth floor was a droid wranglers dream.  Once I even took J8 to the 3rd floor just to see how well he handled the incline.  Out of fear of back charging the control circuitry rolling down to ground floor, I decided it best to take the elevator back.

Basically the entire place was transformed into a space age night club, with shuttle Atlantis suspended overhead, unbelievable!  Guests were actually better behaved than some of the Disney events I've attended.  There was a groovy DJ, a first rate laser light show, and special effects a plenty.

For most of the evening I drove J8 around, and through the crowd, often out onto the dance floor.  Once he even scooted into the VIP section, just under the nose of the bouncer.  My biggest concern when taking the droid out to an event is keeping him from running into people or hitting things, and I wasn't entirely sure a full on party would be possible.  Needless to say, all went well.

For me, it's always great to see a person completely startled at the site of an astromech droid, and this night had plenty of those moments.

  There were some awesome Star Wars, and Star Trek costumes, as well as other various space themed outfits.  One of the best outfits of the night was a 60's style engineer, with pocket protector, short sleeve button up shirt, and skinny neck tie, so classic Apollo era.

Anyway, even though I got home very late, and I mean 3AM late, I have to say I had a nice time, and I'd do it again.

If you're looking for a unique and nerdy night out, check out Yuri's Night, it's an international party, held on April 12th each year to celebrate space exploration.

Battlezone

I've been getting back into the 80's Video Game hobby lately.  So it didn't take long for me to locate a project.  

A member of the villageBBS posted an Atari Battlezone as a non-working project, so I jumped at the chance to get it.  The game was located in Ocala which is a few hours away from me.  So since I had planned to drive up to visit my daughter in Jacksonville on Saturday, I made for the Battlezone early in the morning, then after pickup, continued on my trip north.  

The cabinet was much like any other basket case project I've had over the years.  It needed a new power cord, the back door was missing, the insides were caked with 30+ years of dust, and it showed very little sign of ever working again.  On top of this, the two controllers were in disrepair, and needed to be cleaned and rebuilt.

I started off as usual just looking everything over.  There were a number of things I needed to correct right away.  I always start by replacing the power cord and on these Atari cabinets, I check out the power brick and make sure it's even the correct model for this game.  I ordered a replacement "Big Blue" capacitor for the power brick and a cap kit for the AR2 voltage regulator.  The operator had spliced into the power cord and added a light switch to the inside of the cabinet.  I guess this would've been convenient at one time, so he could reach through the coin door and power off the machine.  I removed that and crimped a new power cord down using the original three pin plug.  I then replaced the capacitor, checked the fuses and tested the power brick voltages.

I then turned my attention to the AR2.  The first thing I noticed was a little silver serial number sticker on the AR2.  That got me thinking I hadn't seen one of those labels on earlier Atari vector games.  In the past, I remember seeing them on my Space Duel and Gravitar.  When I started investigating further, I realized I had the wrong version of AR2.  This was a version 4 which I believe would've originally been from a Gravitar or Space Duel, but not Battlezone.  Battlezone requires a version 2 AR2.  Fortunately the AR2 boards are very similar and mine only needed a half dozen parts soldered in place in order to make it work like an AR2 version 2.  There were a couple of large wire wound resistors that I needed to order so I got to work doing other things while waiting for the parts to arrive.

The cabinet was dusty and filthy so I got busy cleaning up what I could.  I removed the monitor and saw that the colored overlays were stuck to the surface of the screen.  The half silvered mirror was so dirty that I couldn't see through it.  Once it was removed, I could then see the fluorescent cardboard insert was intact and in good shape.  I used a soft brush and the vacuum cleaner to lift the dust off of the cardboard artwork.  I cleaned the glass and wiped down the monitor.  Battlezone used a black and white vector monitor, I believe mine is an Electrohome G05.  They added a green and red color overlay to the screen to produce colors and those were reflected up onto the mirror which gave the effect of presenting the view upon the cardboard backdrop.  The backdrop has some fluorescent paints, which are then lit up by a white black light mounted inside the front of the cabinet.  Its a pretty awesome effect.  

I did a little searching online and found that Bill at Biltronix had already sourced the needed replacements for the color overlay.  He also pointed out that many of the Battlezones have the monitor mounted incorrectly, usually after having been removed for repairs.  After looking closely I realized my monitor was indeed mounted incorrectly and that led to the original overlays being stuck to the screen rather than being supported above it.  I ordered replacements, and decided I'd have to sort that out once the machine was working again.

Battlezone is unique in that it may be the first or one of the first virtual reality games.  The front of the cabinet has a plastic shroud with a small window.  You have to press your face against the periscope style bezel in order to see the display, and it's a nice immersive perspective.  I removed the plastic bezel and cleaned it inside an out, each window had to be carefully removed and cleaned.  During this time I also notice that one of the two speakers at the top of the cabinet were missing.  The manual says its a 5 inch, 8 ohm speaker.  I found a pair of replacements at parts-express.com.  I decided to order the shielded speakers, as in the past I've encountered problems between the magnets in the speakers and the crt display.  At this point I also replaced the black light and the fluorescent marquee light, and both starters.  

From research I had done online, I knew that the internal parts of the controllers would need replaced.  Fortunately there are aftermarket reproductions of the centering bellows.  These you can order from Wizzesworkshop.  I had actually been dreading what I would find when the time came to disassembling the controllers.  Sure enough the old bellows were tore and needed replaced, but the rest of the bits were in pretty good shape.  During the life of the game, someone had replaced the fire button, but since it's pretty much the same as the start buttons from other Atari games from that era, I happened to have one on hand.  One item that was missing was the silver centering ring for the button.  Also one of the controller handles was busted and had been held back together with long bolts that passed through both sides.  I found a site that provides NOS parts (ArcadeFixIt.com) so I ordered the missing ring and both replacements for the broken halves of the right side controller.  I dropped the plastic parts in a tub of Mr. Clean to soak for a few days.  

When the parts arrived I got busy re-assembling the controllers with the new centering bezels.  I also re-wired the fire button and fished the wires down through the handle.  With the new button and centering ring the controller was looking great again.  The two handle pieces were in excellent shape and I used the old allan head screws to hold it all together.  

I removed the coin door and soaked the coin slots and return bezels in soapy water.  These had been masked over with duct tape at some point and that needed removed.  I also took this time to respray the worn surface of the coin doors with satin black Rustoleum.  For the lower speaker grill, I masked off the surrounding cabinet and gave it a very light spray of the same satin black.

For the front step of this game, someone had done a nice job of installing green indoor outdoor carpet.  This actually didn't look terrible, but I wanted something closer to original.  I found some thin runner carpeting at Lowe's which they say by the foot.  I purchased about 3 feet and it was more than enough to cover the step.  It didn't look perfect but I think it is a nice improvement.

I cut a new backdoor and added a small vent similar to other Atari vector cabinets I've owned.  I then added a new lock to the new back door and another with matching keys to the front coin door.

At this point as a final cosmetic touch, I decided to install new t-molding.  I had found about 40 feet of it in the attic, which I must've ordered for a previous project and never gotten around to using it.  So I replaced the t-molding, and with that I stood back and decided the cabinet was finally looking pretty good, or well enough.