Between The Buttons

Caught a few interesting pieces this past weekend. Loading them out of a hundred degree warehouse wasn’t a treat, but it was worth the effort.

First is what started as a dedicated Nintendo R-Type upright. Serial number is quite low, but it wasn’t exactly a common game either.

At some point it received a conversion to Golden Axe 2 that looks a lot messier than it is. The wiring was all terminated nicely so I can clip a Nintendo harness right back into place on the original connectors that were left intact. The coin door and vault were pretty messed up or absent but I’ve got spares I salvaged from some destroyed cabs at another warehouse years ago that will be a good match.

With some cleaning and the installation of a few parts it’s already looking most of the way there.

 

The second grab is another example of the purpose designed conversion kits that many manufacturers put out for the ubiquitous Pac Man and Ms Pac Man as they got on in years and stopped earning once the fever around those titles broke.

It’s a Nintendo conversion kit for the Vs. multi-game system. Similar in character to the Bally Sente conversion kit for these cabs, it takes a different approach to reconfiguring the monitor orientation and changing out the control panel.

This one clearly earned its keep as Pac Man before the transformation with almost twenty thousand plays on the clock, likely paying for itself twice over in its original incarnation.

The conversion was quite cleanly executed, though the Nintendo switching power supply has at some point been swapped for a generic model which was left hanging against the PCB cage.

Not a lot is retained of the original Midway internals. Portions of the power panel, AC wiring, and the Wells Gardner K4600 monitor are all that came along for the ride. The monitor has the maze burn you’d expect from any Pac Man game but it’s hidden pretty well by the smoked plexiglass panel that goes in front. Interestingly a standard Nintendo isolation transformer was included with the kit, though its 100V output is left unused and the Midway transformer is used to isolate power to the monitor.

A Nintendo video inverter and sound amp board is used to adapt the signal from the Vs. PCB to the output hardware in the cabinet.

Detritus in the cab says this one hung around in the Pacific Northwest, nearby one of the outposts of the Fred Meyer chain. The straw trick (“It has been brought to our attention that a flattened straw or similar object can be passed through the center opening in the upper hinge. If the object makes contact with the coin switch, it can be used to run up multiple credits.”) to getting free credits on Nintendo games must have made the rounds too, though whoever applied it didn’t realize that it only works on original Nintendo coin doors. We can also see the Vs. boardset played host to a few different titles over time, with Ice Climbers and Mach Rider in evidence.

This one will stay converted, though I’ll swap in a Dr. Mario daughterboard for the Super Mario Bros. chipset.

Damn dirty apes!

Traded one Nintendo for another over the weekend. I drove my R-Type project and a few Playchoice 10 carts (Mario Bros and Punch Out, for those keeping count) up to Tacoma, and came back with a Donkey Kong Junior and a DK3 kit.

It’s a dedicated unit that doesn’t show any signs of ever having been converted, which is great! Unfortunately it’s also a US made DK Jr cabinet, which means it has particle board sides instead of plywood. When production was added in Redmond, WA to accommodate demand for the games in the US, some aspects of the cab design and materials were changed too, and the 1/2″ plywood used for the Japanese produced cabs was abandoned. This also means that the lovely new t-molding the previous owner installed actually isn’t wide enough, since it’s intended for the thinner plywood cabinets.

It plays, mostly… Though there’s some “slight” graphical issues that cropped up after my having moved it.

Need to go in and reseat the interconnect cables between the boards and see if that helps, they’re rather notorious for causing issues in Nintendo games.

Nintendo Power

A few months back I had to pass on a pretty rare NOS Playchoice 10 kit for the Nintendo ‘Red Tent’ style Vs Dualsystem table units. Just recently what I’m pretty sure is the same kit resurfaced, without the common but expensive motherboard. Sniping that auction allowed me to acquire some very rare parts for the very reasonable sum of ~$72.

That grab prompted me to drag one of my storage bins out from the depths of the garage and re-test something I’d set aside for quite a while. It’s a complete single-monitor Playchoice 10 kit for a cabaret cabinet that I acquired something like a decade ago when Arctic Music & Vending in Anchorage closed and had its assets auctioned off.

I’d given it a try fairly recently, but thought it was a dud since I didn’t get any video. This time around I took a closer look at the monitor I was using to test it and realized one of the cables between boards on the chassis was disconnected. I reconnected it and the game came right up. Miiiiiight have felt a little dumb after that discovery.

Went through and tested the cartridges I have, and found them all in fine shape. I came to figure out I have an older production motherboard, which means the Reset button on the control panel doesn’t function with the board set to free play mode. A little research revealed that you can hold the Channel Select and Enter buttons together for a few seconds and it’ll pop you back to the channel menu like the Reset button is supposed to. Not pictured on the menu are two more copies of Punch Out, and The Goonies.

I also took the opportunity to test the Vs system board that came in my Red Tent, since the Playchoice 10 harness is close enough to the Vs one to at least boot a board on. Super Mario Bros came right up and played fine, but I wasn’t quite sure how to get to the other ‘side’ of the board with Dr. Mario.

Unfortunately testing the monitors in the Red Tent didn’t go as well. One of them is blowing a fuse at F701 on power up, and the other seems to be working except for the light show that comes out of the flyback cage when you turn it on and the flyback transformer starts arcing. So, some repairs needed there.

Also still need to dig into the R-Type upright cabinet I’ve got. It’s been sitting in a corner since I got it, supposedly it plays but I haven’t had the time to drag it out and see what’s going on with it.