Well, since tomorrow I am going to be playing some DK with with a few other collectors that live close by, I thought I’d better warm up. Played one game this morning. I only hit 92K on the first man, then I died twice on a barrel level at 140K. My last guy I made it over 300K finally. I was getting really nervous once I hit about 250K, and my hands were shaking at 280K. Still, I hit the milestone (barely) with a score of 300,600!

Here’s the screen shot:

I was so excited to hit the score that I ran upstairs to get my camera. Once I hit the top of the stairs I remembered I didn’t enter my initials in yet. I ran down but didn’t enter them quick enough before time ran out. Crap, now I have to beat it 5 times to fix that screw-up!

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:

Here are a few pictures:

All lit up!

This year we moved the tree to a different area of the basement. Coincidentally it is now right beside the real Pac-Man. It makes for a cool photo.

Big Brother!

Jamma Conversion Test Board

The first test device I use on a regular basis is my Jamma Conversion Test Board. I wired up a short Jamma harness to a bunch of terminal strips mounted on a piece of plywood. I then take edge connectors of different lengths populated with wires that have spade connectors crimped to the ends of them. I then can hook these up to the terminal points on the jamma board, creating a make-shift jamma harness. This allows me to wire up any board that can be converted to jamma with the normal power requirements. Then I plug the harness of the board into my jamma cabinet. I used this board to test my Frogger PCB last week. It works great and is really handy to test several boards without their cabinets.

My Frogger PCB wired up to the Test Board for testing in my Jamma cabinet

Jamma Arcade Cabinet-In-A-Box

My other device is something I came up after the third or fourth time I pulled parts together to try to test a monitor. I used to test monitors by putting the monitor on a bar stool, pulling an arcade cabinet away from a wall, and hooking the monitor into the cabinet for a quick test. This was difficult and dangerous to do. It was too easy to damage something by dropping the monitor, messing up wiring, etc. I figured out that could assemble the core components of an arcade game: Power supply, isolation transformer, controls, speaker, and wiring into a box. Then all I would have to do is hook up a Jamma PCB with a good test pattern, and a monitor, and I would have a working arcade game. My first box was made out of an old wooden coin box from a poker cabinet. It was made up of pressboard and got wet one day, which ruined the wood. My currrent box is just made out of a plastic tote. It is much easier to lug around, and looks better too!

Old Arcade-in-a-box

Backside of the old Arcade-in-a-box

New rig, top view

Inside view of the new rig

Using the new rig to test out my Centipede monitor after a cap kit

Both of these devices have helped me quite a bit. They were both really easy to put together and I highly recommend building them yourself!

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

I made sure I took several pictures to show how easy it is to rebuild a trackball. Trackballs wear out badly, and this one was virtually unplayable in its condition. Here are a couple shots of the trackball and the rollers inside before replacement:

Basically these are really easy to work on. Just remove the six screws holding the shell together, and pop off the top of the shell. The ball and roller assemblies lift right out. Two of the rollers have the encoder wheel screwed into the side of them. Just remove the small screws holding those on with an allen wrench. Just be careful not to bend the encoder wheels. Those need to be perfectly flat to work the best. The repair kit I purchased from Bob includes the three rollers, and six sealed bearing assemblies. I also purchased a new white button and a new “snow white” trackball because I liked the look of it more than the offwhite ball, and my old one was really scratched up and worn.

Here are a couple comparison photos of the parts:

Then just put the trackball back together and here’s what you get:

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.

This time it was for Donkey Kong Jr. DKJr is way harder than Donkey Kong, and I really stink at it. DKJr was another game that Billy Mitchell was a long time record holder for, until he was beat last August by a guy named Ike Hall. Steve beat Ike’s record by over 100,000 points setting a score of 1,139,800 points. Steve will be attempting to beat the Donkey Kong record on June 2, 2009 at the E3 Enterainment Expo in LA. It will be broadcast live on G4 Television.

Congratulations Steve! Good luck in June trying to set the Donkey Kong record again.

Here’s a link the the Twin Galaxies announcement of the record: Twin Galaxies Announcement

This past weekend I just received some exciting news from Jeff Rothe of Coinopspace.com. COSP is going to host a live chat with Steve Wiebe. Steve is the Donkey Kong player profiled in the movie King of Kong. It is a great “documentary” about what it is like to try to challenge a long-time classic arcade game world record. I highly recommend the movie if you have not seen it! Steve is a great guy and it will be interesting to hear some of his stories about his life after making KOK.

Here’s the link to the event: Chat with Steve Wiebe

Also, make sure you sign up for an account on Coinopspace.com, even if you do not plan to attend the chat. It’s a great site that has several networking tools for classic arcade game collecting.

Here’s the promotional text from Coinopspace.com covering the event:

On April 15th 2009 Steve Wiebe will be on Coinopspace.com, participating in a live group chat even with Donkey Kong fans and general coin-op enthusiasts. Steve is the latest in a monthly series of live chat sessions that has seen the likes of Tim Skelly, Owen Rubin, Jeff Kulczycki and Brian Colin.

If you aren’t a Donkey Kong fan, and somehow have been living under a rock for the past two years, Steve Wiebe is one of the best Donkey Kong players in the world and starred in the movie King of Kong, a documentary about his quest for the top score. Steve has one of the only 1,000,000 point scores ever recorded in public, and is one heck of a nice guy to boot.
Coinopspace.com is a brand new website for arcade, pinball and console enthusiasts to connect and share stories. Coinopspace.com isn’t just a forum based website, but has every feature for sharing your collection and restoration hobby that you could possibly imagine. There are advanced customizable profiles, photo hosting, a live chat section obviously, hosted blogs, videos and so much more. In the coming months we hope to connect collectors with more arcade game and pinball creators to ask those questions about your favorite games you’ve been dying to know.

To participate in the Steve Wiebe chat you need to sign up for the website and then you can RVSP for the event at the following link:
http://www.coinopspace.com/events/creator-chat-steve-wiebe

You can view all upcoming creator chats and events on the events page at
http://www.coinopspace.com/events

Ask Steve all those questions you have after watching King of Kong, there may be no other better time!