Ay caramba!

Posted on 2013-12-14 by Ken

Brought to fruition a deal that’s been on the back burner for a couple months now. The same guy I got the Hydra and Golden Axe conversions from a while back had a Simpsons that he offered me in trade for some work on a few pinball machines. We shook on it and I ordered the parts, which arrived and then spent weeks on my workbench. The games were out in Salem and life did its thing and cut off any opportunity to take a trip down there…

Eventually things eased up, and I made arrangements for the 7th. This date neatly coincided with Portland’s annual Snowpocalypse, so I pushed the date forward yet another week. Booked an E-350 from Zipcar and finally made the trip for real this afternoon.

After several hours spent troubleshooting and doing some repairs to a Lethal Weapon 3 and rebuilding the flippers of a Tee’d Off, I made off into the foggy night with my prize. Bezel and monitor glass aren’t pictured but I got those too.

These four player Konami cabinets are fucking huge, and Heavy. I made things easier for myself by pulling the monitor for the move but it was still a chore.

While futzing around with that I found some identifying labels…

I’m not sure what this was originally… Based on the color coming through the painted sides from some shredded old side art I’m thinking originally Sunset Riders, but the official Konami sticker says Simpsons. Either way, doesn’t make too much of a difference. They both use the same cabinet, sharing the platform with a sea of beat ’em ups from the era.

Cabinet is very clean inside and the wiring all looks original. Will be nice not to have to clean up a half dozen conversions worth of hackery for once. Definitely gotta recover the control panel, or swap on a cleaner one. It’ll also neat a paint job at the very least for the sides, and maybe new art if I can avoid cringing whenever I look at the price for reproduction printings. All in all still a fine deal though, the game board alone would have been worth the time I spent.

Grim and Frostbitten Centipede of the Pacific Northwest

Posted on 2013-12-10 by Ken

It got Real Cold here, slowing everything down except the accumulation of heating bills and consumption of alcohol. On the less frosty days I’ve been spending a little time in the garage finishing up the Centipede cocktail cab.

Picked up another piece of mat board and made a surround for the LCD. Finish isn’t as nice as the one for the Gun Fight cab but it’s also not nearly as visible once the top is down and the smoked plexi is in place.

Also got the new CPOs on the player 2 side, and wired up both trackballs. I had to swap out the original optical encoder boards with some Happ style ones since the Atari originals apparently don’t play nice with the 60n1 boards. Also had to swap the signal wires on one board for each trackball in order to get proper operation. Without doing so one axis would always end up backwards regardless of how the 60n1 was configured.

Found this too. Hadn’t noticed the old op tag on the player 2 side. Eldorado Products of Gardena, CA seems to have been actively doing business at least up until 1991, but seems to gone defunct before the Internet really took off since the company’s web presence is solely comprised of Yellow Pages scam and directory aggregator spam sites that seem to have picked up its old contact information crawling an old industry mailing list.

Project updates part 2

Posted on 2013-12-02 by Ken

Also converted my ex-Bosconian cabinet from Krazy Bowl to Capcom Bowling with some parts provided by another local collector. Pretty much the same game play but orders of magnitude less obnoxious.

Took some baby steps towards making it look nicer too…

On the recommendation of one of the local collectors’ mailing lists I tried Motsenbocker’s Instant Latex Based Paint Remover.

It did a decent job… Still took a lot of brute force to get the stuff off, but it loosened the paint and left what was underneath intact. I ended up giving up on doing it by hand by the end and putting some scotch brite on a palm sander.

I think I’ll use this stuff to get the paint up off the side art on another cab, but not for a whole side again. I’ve got a jug of 3M Safest Stripper waiting for the other side of the Bosconian, so we’ll see how it compares soon.

Also finished conversion of the gutted Gun Fight cabinet I picked up a while back and delivered it to its new owner.

It has a handful of imperfections I’m not happy with, but they’re things only I would notice.

The custom monitor surround in progress… It turned out looking incredible.

It was a lot of work though. I pressed my Mario Bros. into service as an impromptu brake for the mat board I used to create it.

Spent a couple days at the office under strenuous quality control testing.

Raster Burn

Tag Archives: arcade

Ay caramba!

Grim and Frostbitten Centipede of the Pacific Northwest

Project updates part 2