To follow up my post on finishing up my Crystal Castles, I wanted to show how to clean up a really nasty, dirty cabinet. When I got the Crystal Castles, it was sitting in a barn and was filthy. Dirt was caked on from over 20 years of use. The control panel was especially dirty and ground in.

Here’s what I started with:

Here’s a shot of the control panel. Notice how bad the dirt was!

I tried to clean it with several cleaners and sponges. The most effective cleaner I’ve found in the past was Simple Green. It would do a good job without damaging the artwork. However, even scrubbing this cabinet a few times still only got it a little cleaned. Even soaking the control panel with Simple Green for several minutes wouldn’t break away the grime that was ground into the overlay’s texture:

The sideart even looked terrible. You’d think vinyl sideart would clean up easy, but it didn’t:

In the past I’ve read on the KLOV forums that the “Mr. Clean Magic Erasers” are a good tool for cleaning arcade game artwork. The Magic Erasers are a special foam pad that when wet supposedly do a great job taking off stubborn dirt. They work by lightly buffing out the stains with small foam pores. I decided to give them a try on my Crystal Castles since it was so dirty and dingy. The cleaning pads were originally made by Mr. Clean, but there are several generic versions in the stores now. I used Walmart’s Great Value brand on my Crystal Castles.

I started with the sideart. It took some scrubbing but I was able to really make a difference! It removed everything without damaging the artwork. It even removed some of the really large scuff marks and marks from other things that have banged against it over the years.

Here are a couple comparison shots, before and after:

As you use the erasers, they start to wear down and even break apart. I ended up using almost an entire eraser on each of the sides of the game. There is a ton of artwork on this cabinet that needs cleaned! Good thing I bought two 4-packs! Here’s a shot of one after I did a full side, and a new one right beside it:

After the sideart, I started on the marquee on top. The marquee is printed on vinyl just like the control panel. It is textured, which really ate into the erasers. I ended up using a full eraser just on the marquee. The texture really held the dirt in, but I was able to clean it up really nice. Here is a pic showing how it looked halfway through the cleaning. It was tough to clean textured vinyl!

Here is a close-up of the marquee to show how clean I was able to get it:

Now the hardest part – the Control Panel. This was obviously the most ground in from over 20 years of dirty hands playing the game! This took over two erasers to scrub out. I was able to get just about all of the dirt out of the panel. There is a little still dirt and some rust from the bolts around the trackball that I just couldn’t break free, but overall it looks great. Too bad there is a big scratch in the overlay itself. Someday I will replace it with a reproduction overlay.

Here are a couple shots of how it looked halfway through:

I even had some help with this. My daughter loves to help fix up the games with me!

After spending several hours with a couple boxes of Magic Erasers, I had a really nice looking cabinet! I finished up the cleaning job with a little C-Pop on the control panel. I bought this stuff years ago and I don’t think it’s available any longer. It’s a lot like Armor All to make the vinyl shine and protect it. I’ve used it for years and it’s great stuff! It really makes the panel shine and isn’t greasy when you’re playing the game.

I’m really happy with the results! I love when I can get a game and not have to spend hundreds of dollars getting it into good condition to add to the arcade. Check out the Crystal Castles Photo Album for more pictures of the restoration of this game.

Just wanted to drop in a quick post to announce that there is a fully-working Crystal Castles now in the gameroom. I had the board repaired after several attempts to do so myself. I also spent a ton of time cleaning up the cabinet so it can be placed in the arcade. I plan to follow-up with a post just covering how I cleaned this thing up so nice.

As I posted when I first got this game, the PCB was not working correctly. It was not drawing gems or wiping the moving background. I tried checking several of the components on the board but I am not a PCB repair expert. Good thing there is one on the KLOV forums! Craig Yarbrough (Forum ID: bit_slicer) repaired this for me a couple weeks ago and it works great. He even cleaned up some of the bad traces so well that I couldn’t even tell where they were. Craig is an Atari PCB expert. According to his forum signature he also repairs Centipede, Millipede, Missile Command, Crystal Castles, Liberator, Warlords, Atari Basketball and Atari AR-I and II power pcb’s. I highly recommend his services. Drop him a Private Message via the forums if you also need some repairs done.

Here’s a video of what it was doing before the repair:

Here are some pictures of the final game:

The glass under the Atari logo on the speaker assembly fell out long ago. It is normally held in by the speaker overlay sticker, but that cracked and fell apart. I cleaned it up best I could, and I taped it back on. Eventually I’d like to get a new speaker overlay. Reproductions were done years ago, but they are not available any longer. Going to have to really look for one someday. Hopefully another repro run will be done by then.

Here’s the latest video, this time of my son playing a quick game. Works great!

More news to come on this game. I still have to learn how to play this well. Until then, check out Mark Alpiger’s Crystal Castles Site. He is one of the record holders in the game, and is a real old-school expert player.
I should have a lot more updates over the next few weeks. All of the spring sports are wrapping up. This will give me some time to work on some other games not far from joining the arcade!

I’ve been a bit too busy lately with spring activities to post this earlier, but I bought a couple classic Atari arcade games a few weeks ago. I picked up a Centipede and a Crystal Castles! Found these on Craigslist locally. I was really surprised that they were still available three days after they were posted on CL. Usually games get snatched up after a few hours.

Here are the original Craigslist photos:

Centipede and Crystal Castles are both games that I really enjoyed in the 80′s. I was glad I had the opportunity to add these to my collection. They were both pretty beat up, and were really dirty from sitting in a barn for the last several years. They looked complete so I figured I would be able to get them going pretty quickly.

I had to make two trips to pick them up. I was glad that I only had to drive about an hour each direction to get them. I hauled them in our mini-van, so I can only take one game at a time. Once I got them home, I started testing them to see what worked and what didn’t.

Centipede:

The centipede was dead. I turned on the power and saw nothing happening. I did a quick check of the fuses and found one that was blown. Swapped it out, but still didn’t get any life from the game. I did notice that the LED on the board was lit, so I knew the game was getting power. I tested the voltage going to the board and it was correct. The monitor neck tube was not glowing, so I knew it was dead. Since I knew the Crystal Castles monitor worked, I pushed the games close together and hooked up the Centipede video cable to the Crystal Castles monitor. The game worked great!

Looking around inside the cabinet, I saw three distinct game boards mounted to the inside. If I remembered right, Centipede only used one

I plugged each of them in, and there were three games! I had fully working game boards for Centipede, Millipede, and Bulls Eye Darts! I’ll probably keep the Centipede and Millipede boards. The Bulls Eye Darts board was a converted Centipede board. It is the one with the add-on daughter card in the picture above. If anyone is interested in trading for this board, please let me know. Plugs right into a Centipede cabinet. Looks like a pretty cool dart game for a trackball cabinet.

Bulls Eye Darts (sideways on my horizontal Crystal Castles monitor)

The first thing I did to this cabinet was to spend some serious time cleaning it up. It spent several years in a barn, and was pretty beat up. The front edges of the side panels by the marquee were busted up, which looks to me like the cabinet was dropped on its face at one point in its life. I found some broken marquee glass inside, so I’m sure that’s what happened. I’ll have to repair that wood and smooth it out with some bondo to build it back out.

Most Atari cabinets were made out of 3/4″ MDF particle wood. This stuff absorbs water like a sponge. the other problem is that it also absorbs moisture from the air if in a damp environment, which leads to swelling along all of the outside edges of the side panels like you see below. I will have to sand this down, put some wood hardener on it to strengthen it up, and smooth it out with some bondo. I hate having to repair moisture damage in MDF cabinets!

After I took off the marquee, which had peeling paint, I discovered a mouse nest. It smelled horrible in the cabinet from all the mouse urine. I even found the *dead* mouse! Yuck! I tried to clean out everything, and even bleach the smell, but it didn’t really help. I decided I would bust out the horizontal board with the speaker grill to make a new one. Luckily, I had a replacement speaker and light assembly to replace the other board that was badly soaked in urine!

Mouse nest tucked in behind the marquee light.

Nasty! Notice all the swelling in the MDF. This stuff is a sponge for mouse urine!

The other part that took some work to clean was the control panel. The trackball would not even roll. I tried to clean out the trackball and lube the bearings, but the rollers were badly worn. I will rebuild this with a handy trackball rebuild kit from Bob Roberts real soon! I was able to get the rest of the parts pretty clean, and the overlay cleaned up really nice. And of course, no more mouse urine runs on the the inside of the control panel!

More nasty mouse urine!

Pretty dirty!

Much better!

All reassembled, waiting for new controller parts.

To repair the monitor, I installed a G07 repair kit I bought from Bob Roberts. It included a new flyback, which I never replaced before, and a full cap kit. After installing all the new parts, the monitor came on but it was all blue. I checked some diagnostics flowcharts I had, and swapped out a couple transistors that were supposed to fix this problem. Still nothing. I finally spent an extra hour or so looking at all the components, and I saw the the diodes on the bottom of the monitor chassis were mounted backwards. I turned them around, and the monitor worked perfectly!

WAY too much blue in the monitor’s picture!

After replacing the transistors that were supposed to fix this, still looks the same.

Finally got the blue to be normal!

The picture looks really good.

The Street Fighter 2 board that I use for testing has a really nice dot pattern to help adjust the image size and convergence.

Here’s the real game playing on it. Still have to make some size adjustments, but it looks great!

Well, I still have plenty of work to do on this thing. I have to finish replacing all the controller parts that are worn out. I need to tune in the monitor to make the picture to look as good as I can. Finally, I have to repair all the cabinet damage and replace the boards I removed. Once all that is done, I’ll finish cleaning it up and take it down into the gameroom. More to come! I’ll also start working on the Crystal Castles after this one is done, so expect a full update on that machine too.