Project updates part 3

Last of these bulk updates, I swear!

Lots going on with the second conversion I’m doing. It’s a Centipede cocktail I got without boards or monitor, getting the 60n1 treatment. Not the best end… Not the worst either. I like to think I’m doing it justice while meeting the needs of the person who commissioned it.

A disturbing amount of lint came out of those trackballs. Like, several square inches of it. As well as a toothpick and wrapper, two bits of gum stuck to a roller, and what I’m pretty sure was a receipt at some point. Classy people, those players in the distant past. I got the trackballs performing nicely, though new bearings are probably in their future.

New control panel overlay (from Arcadeshop, amazing quality and I cannot convey how nice having the holes die cut is) for player 1 installed, along with the LCD. Was happy to be able to mount the LCD without modifying the cabinet beyond a few screw holes. I doubt this thing will ever be deconverted, but if it is it’ll be an easier job than a lot of the bullshit out there.

Got the dents (yeah, seriously) out of the player 2 control panel tonight as well, and sprayed it black again. Will get the new CPO on and reassemble later this week and then it’s back to waiting for more parts to come in.

In other news, the boardset for my Space Invaders came in finally!

I ended up having to use half of my original boardset (the audio board) and half of the donor (motherboard) in order to get a fully functional game in my cocktail cab. The end state working set is pictured above.

The donor boards evidently came from an upright. I’d heard all Space Invaders boardsets were alike and there was merely a cabinet wiring difference between the upright and cocktail versions. Given the fact that the cocktail audio board has an extra set of connections versus the upright board I think the difference is more significant than that.

Might also be a change between revisions though… The audio board I bought has older style gigantic caps on it, among other differences. More research is necessary to get that sorted out though, it seems like the Deluxe version of the game has much more info out there about it and there was not much forthcoming about the original.

Thankfully it was my motherboard that was the issue, not the audio board, so I frankensteined it and got a few rounds in tonight!

Project updates part 2

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.

Crimp, seat, repeat

The ‘Gallag’ Galaga bootleg board I was planning on dropping into my project Midway cocktail cab shit the bed at some point during handling. I got it staged for installation, partially wired up, and then found I couldn’t get a useable video signal out of it. I could get a few frames of the attract screen when it wasn’t uncontrollably rolling, but even then everything was tinted red. I thought the G07 monitor chassis might be to blame, but swapping that out with a known good one didn’t elicit any change. Time for plan B.

Earlier this month the Gorf control panels I bought came in the mail. They were cheap, match the original equipment for the cab, and are a two axis joystick with single button configuration which works for a ton of games. This past Friday I picked up a pair of 60 in 1 multi game boards locally for a pretty decent price. Finally, I had a generic JAMMA standard harness from a cut corner Dynamo cab I salvaged parts from several years back when the High Score arcade in the Dimond Center closed.

I started combining all of these bits and pieces, got stuff laid out on Friday and was able to get video from the multi board. Good sign…

I used connectors salvaged off of the super hacked up Galaxian harness that came with the Gallag bootleg board to interface the JAMMA harness cleanly with the Gorf control panels. I picked up a ton of tools and pins to use with Molex connector bodies over the past few weeks. My end goals are making everything I build from here on out very modular, and cutting out butt splice and blade connectors as much as I can.

Ended up having to special order the .084″ MLX style connectors that are common in the golden age arcade games since they’re obsolete and weren’t carried by URS electronics. I was able to get the .062″ and .096″ standard and KK stuff from them though. I’m told I’m their #2 consumer of Molex products now… That’s a little scary.

Getting things squared away. I was testing intermittently here to make sure I had my inputs wired up correctly, and noticed the colors were distorted on one side of the monitor, but only when the cabinet was closed. At first I though it was due to the speaker coil being close to the tube, or maybe the isolation transformer… Turns out though that if you drastically change the orientation of a monitor some funky stuff can happen with magnetic fields and you’ll get odd results. Fortunately, degaussing will fix it, and in this case the built in degaussing coil on the G07 was enough to solve the issue.

The finished product, more or less. I need to clean up the AC wiring a little bit still, there’s a lot of slack in there from the pigtails I built for the power switch and ventilation fan.

The cab is totally playable at this point, I’ve got it booting straight to Galaga. Might try to find either a Galaga or Gorf top glass, but that’s pretty low priority since this thing is a total Frankenstein regardless of any changes. The things I 100% need to do are get a set of the plexiglass filler pieces that go behind the control panels, and wire up lighting behind them, and a set of strike brackets for the latches that hold down the table top.

Might also try to shore up the far side of the table top from the hinge since it’s bowed a bit which allows a lot of stress to be placed on the glass on that edge. Happy with the results so far though and looking forward to getting some competition going on this one since I know Galaga strikes some nostalgic chords for a lot of people.