This week I did a few minor repairs to my Frogger while I was on vacation. I had a few parts I recently purchased from Bob Roberts to install, so I took a few hours this week to get some stuff accomplished. First, I needed to install a cap kit. The monitor picture was fuzzy and lacked some clarity. I like to install cap kits for the monitor of any new game I get. It helps to improve the picture and freshen up the image. It’s also really cheap to do! Turns out that I did not buy the right kit. I picked up a kit for a 20″ Sega monitor, which is what I thought this was. Turns out the monitor is even older than the one I thought I had. I spent a couple hours listing out all the caps on the monitor, and turns out I had enough with the kit I bought, plus a few other spares, to replace all of them but five. I’ll pick those up from Bob later on. I took a few pictures and documented the caps I did replace, and sent them to Bob in case he needed them.

After installing the cap kit, I replaced the broken Degauss button inside the coin door. Bob had a full switch panel that he sent me, so I pulled off the nice volume knob and the degauss switch and installed them on the switch panel in my Frogger. They worked great!

Finally, I’ve been really bothered by how back the monitor looks inside the game because I am missing the cardboard artwork bezel. I eventually would like to pick up a new one from Arcadeshop, but until I have the money to do so I thought I would make one from a couple pieces of black posterboard. I reviewed pictures of the original Frogger bezel that I don’t have, and figured I could make one very similar. The bezel lays over the monitor, and has some support pieces underneath to hold it flat and tight to the curve of the monitor. The top of the bezel angles upward, and covers about a 7″ vertical gap against the back door of the cabinet. The real one looks really nice in photos I’ve seen, but I just want to hide the monitor and frame.
I spent a couple hours measuring and cutting posterboard, then I glued all the pieces together. I used some masking tape on the backside of all the glued joints to hold them in place while they dried, and as extra reinforcement.

Here are the results:

Completed Bezel (without the top vertical piece):

Backside showing the reinforcement:

Closeup of the reinforcement:

Before:

After:

Last week I picked up a decent Frogger upright from Craigslist. I purchased it not working. The screen did come up solid green when I first turned it on, but now it is dead.  The cabinet is a little odd, because it is not the dedicated factory woodgrain. It has a light grey laminate surface. After looking around on the inside of the cabinet, I determined that this was originally a Super Moon Cresta.

This is the serial number tag for the original Super Moon Cresta taped to the inside of the cabinet.

It looks like it was a factory conversion of the Super Moon Cresta, since the cabinet is the same as the dedicated Frogger. The PCB inside is the older 44-pin “Galaxian” style PCB. I find it odd that Sega/Gremlin/Konami used the PCB architecture of a Galaxian, which was from Namco/Bally-Midway. It looks exactly like my Pac-Man PCB, but with a different daughtercard.

The game in in decent condition. It has very nice side art. The Control Panel Overlay was peeling off, due to some poor conversion techniques. It looks as if the original control panel overlay was peeled off, then the control panel was painted black over the left over adhesive. It obviously didn’t adhere well, which caused the new overlay to peel off the paint. I pulled the overlay off easily, and will try to reapply it with some spray adhesive after I properly clean off the panel. This will be a temporary repair until I buy a new overlay. This overlay is pretty thick so it may just look fine for now. Better than bare metal.

You can see how badly this panel was prepped prior to installing the overlay…

The cardboard bezel is missing, but I can pick one up from Arcadeshop.com soon.
Inside everything looks intact. The fuses were all good. I’ll need to sweep out the inside because it has its fair share of dust inside.

Friday night I decided to see if I could figure out the board problems. First I tried all the normal stuff, like reseating all the socketed chips and cleaning off the edge connectors. Nothing. I did some research on the board and found out it was indeed identical to a Galaxian board, but with a few minor changes. The cabinet supplies this board with AC power instead of DC power like “newer” classic games. There were some excellent instructions online for converting a Galaxian PCB from AC to DC by removing the power components from the PCB. I thought I’d give this a run. I followed Paul Swan’s Instructions for this conversion. They were very easy to follow. Note that there is another site with a copy of these instructions that has the final pinouts incorrectly listed, so make sure you get the right pinouts.

Here is a shot of the board with the changes made. Much simpler!

Once I completed the changes, I hooked the board up to my JAMMA Test rig. SUCCESS!!!! Frogger fired right up!

Frogger PCB hooked up to my Jamma Test Rig. Crazy wire mess!

It’s Alive!!!

Since the PCB was working on DC voltage, I needed to add a DC power supply. Standard arcade “switching” power supplies work great and can be purchased for around $25, but I have several old Dell ATX computer power supplies lying around. I decided to use one of these instead. It takes a little more work to prepare and wire up a computer power supply, but the results will be fine! I used an older Dell ATX, so I had to find the proper wiring pinouts to make sure I got the proper wires for each voltage needed. Dell used a different pinout than standard for these old supplies, so verify pinouts if you ever decide to do one of these power supplies. I cut off the wires from the power supply I was using, and terminated them on a terminal strip. Now I have connections just like a standard power supply.
Last night I spent several hours working on the inside wiring. I rigged up the power supply and I trimmed back all the old power wiring that will no longer be used. I also replaced the edge connector on the harness because the pins were worn out. Several years ago I got a nice sampling of Molex edge connectors and crimp pins. These work great and gave me a much better connection. I didn’t have to solder the wires to the pins either since they were crimp connectors. The machine had a broken degauss switch inside the coin door, so I disconnected it and tied up the wires so I could repair that circuit later on. I also took the time to clean up the inside of the cabinet. 25+ years of dust is never nice to have in your gameroom!

Here is the wiring before I made any changes.

Here is the power supply mounted with the terminal strip ready to go.

All the changes are done, and the wiring is tied up and ready for the PCB to be installed.

So after I got all the guts put back together, I had a working Frogger. The monitor image looked a little fuzzy and didn’t fit the screen well. I’m hoping a cap kit will fix it all up!

Here’s a shot of the working game!

So that leaves me the following to fully complete this game:

• Reassemble the cabinet and rebuild the control panel.
• Make a new back door. The door that came with it was about 8″ too short for some reason.
• Buy a new Control Panel Overlay and install (will do later on if the original CPO doesn’t sit well)
• Buy a new Monitor Bezel and install.
• Strip the black paint overspray on the front grey laminate around the coin door.
• Glue some loose edges of the grey laminate back on the cabinet.
• Replace the degauss switch
• Install a Cap Kit on the monitor
• Install cabinet locks