Block Buster

Spent some time tonight re-plumbing the Tuni/Century cab. The noise filter and isolation transformer came with it, the rest is recycled from Keno and Arkanoid parts piles.

Dropped in one of the mystery monitors I picked up Wednesday night, a K7000. Works, but has some droop on one side and an occasional shake. Hopefully recapping it will get it looking perfect again.

Next step is wiring up the control panel and coin door, and running some wire up top for the marquee backlight and speakers.

The magic smoke came out (not a 4/20 post)

So this happened…

Weird, because it was a non-original flyback transformer. I guess the reproductions aren’t quite as long lived as the factory item. It stunk up the office for a few hours and put Do Run Run out of commission until I could swap the G07 chassis I just finished rebuilding in…

…But what this post is really about is a new mystery cab I picked up!

Came to me totally gutted, but set up with art for a Taito Twin Eagle conversion. First look indicates it’s been painted at least twice.

Pulling the coin door reveals its original color, white.

The inside is marked up with circular quality control inspection stamps in several spots, along with a single date code on the left under the control panel.

Control panel is swiss cheese…

This tag on the back ended up being the big clue. I thought at first that Tuni Electro Service must have been the operator that owned this cabinet, but it turns out to be an alternate brand that Century Electronics games were marketed under.

From what I’ve been able to find online, Tuni/Century marketed a set of games designed to be easily interchangeable in a standardized cabinet design. The lineup for this cabinet design included Dazzler, Cosmos, Radar Zone, Dark Warrior, Space Fortress, and 8-Ball. Unfortunately there’s no real way to determine what game this cabinet originally contained, since it was completely stripped and finding production records is extraordinarily unlikely.

Researching this one led me to a few helpful pages:

KLOV entry for Dazzler (small cabinet pic)

Radar Zone flyer with Tuni Interchangable System blurb and some cabinet pics

Century Electronics Cosmos flyer with cabinet pic

A KLOV thread with pics from someone who picked up an unconverted example of this cab

Detailed history of Century/Tuni and the CVS system

How we Do!

Spent today giving the mysterious ‘FF’ cab some love. I was initially working towards converting it to use the Mr Do! board I have but I found out the cabinet actually can’t fit a vertically mounted monitor without the back door smacking into the frame. Horizontal mount worked out, so the Do! Run Run board gets to stay.

I had to pretty heavily modify the monitor shelf even to fit it horizontally. Looking at the mounting setup again I think the original monitor was mounted in there without a frame, and the chassis was just screwed to the little shelf below where the monitor sits.

I wanted to keep the Electrohome G07 I was putting in fully intact, so I did a bit of rearranging. The PCB and cage had to come down since with the monitor frame in place there was no longer enough clearance on the side. I’m going to redo the butt splices in the video wiring later, didn’t have any heat shrink tubing on hand to do them properly today.

Also replaced the crappy one piece sealed buttons that came with the cab with the leaf switches that came in the converted Megatack cab and some less weathered buttons from a parts control panel. Installed some real control panel hold downs too since the holes for the slide latches were all messed up, feels much more solid now.

The game looks much nicer on a CRT. I’ve got it mostly dialed in but the width coil is broken on the chassis I am using so that adjustment will have to stay where it is.