Great Guns!

Posting mostly just to get these pictures up before I forget… This is a piece I picked up several weeks ago and haven’t really had a chance to go through yet.

It’s a 1983 Stern Seeburg Great Guns. I hadn’t heard of it either, but figured I’d check it out when I saw it offered up free for the first taker.

It’s a carnival style shooter with a variety of themed levels to blast through. From warlocks, to dinosaurs, to creepy, creepy clowns, you can shoot it all.

The hefty rifles are fixed to cast iron ball joint bases. Underneath, a set of attached gears turn large potentiometers to determine where the player is aiming. A kicker solenoid mounted under each rifle provides ‘recoil’.

Originally the game also had a feature to return the player’s quarter if they performed well enough. This was unpopular enough with operators that most games had the mechanism removed, including mine.

The formidable rack of PCBs is intact, but I don’t have any idea if it’s working or not. I’m told it was when it was initially put into storage years ago, but time is rarely kind.

Days Of Future Passed

A few weeks ago I found a copy of a June 1989 report from the Portland Development Commission titled Moving Into The Fourth Decade. It’s a brief document, but full of glossy full page photos and renderings of various parts of Portland. One of the renderings was particularly interesting; a vision for redevelopment of the slice of inner NE that includes the Oregon Convention Center, Memorial Coliseum, and Rose Garden Arena.

Neat, huh? The caption says this is a vision for what the area will look like by 2005. Lets have a look at the current satellite imagery from this angle.

Not quite as impressive. Most of the blocks apparently pegged for high density development were never realized, and the many pedestrian paths and plazas envisioned between the gleaming towers remain ordinary surface streets.

One item called out in the caption, “…to attract a headquarters hotel…” (more info on this project is on the PDC web site), may be coming to fruition as the project appears to be clearing legal hurdles.

The hotel would occupy the block immediately east of the Convention Center. In the 1989 rendering a blocky cream colored tower topped with a clay tile roofed penthouse occupies this spot.

The modern concept for the development eschews the 80s look for the sort of sharp-angled edifice of metal, wood, and glass currently en vogue.

Invaders Must Die

Found something I’ve been after for a lonnnnnnng time today…

It was rather serendipitous and I’m really excited about it! My parents had one of these Space Invaders cocktail table machines in their living room when I was a little kid and I was always sad they got rid of it. It’s been something I’ve been hunting off and on even before I leapt back into the hobby for real.

Seems likely that it’s been in the area since new, and probably not swapped between locations too much. The cabinet is immaculate and doesn’t have any water damage, smashed corners, or other signs of hard use. A tag on the coin door identifies it as having been operated at some point by the still existent company Amusement Unlimited out of Eugene.

It’s my first black and white game, definitely a bit different than what I’m used to working on. Right now the monitor works perfectly, and it doesn’t look too daunting to keep that way. Not a lot going on compared to the chassis for a color raster monitor.

Sadly the board has issues. Right now all I get is this little cluster of partial characters.

Again though, this thing looks dead simple compared to the newer stuff. Parts are nice and spread out on the PCBs too, so should be easy to work on. Based on my research so far I’m thinking there may be an issue with some of the RAM chips on the boards.