This week I just decided that I will be attending the International Video Game Hall of Fame “Big Bang” event next month. The IVGHOF is a new organization based in Ottumwa, Iowa. The goal of the IVGHOF is to house a museum of every arcade game ever made, and a Hall of Fame of gamers of all eras. Why Ottumwa? Ottumwa was once the home of Twin Galaxies arcade, the famous arcade run by Walter Day. Walter had the idea of holding the “Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard” of arcade high scores back in the peak of classic arcade gaming. The Twin Galaxies arcade is no longer around, a victim of the arcade video game crash in the mid ’80s, but Twin Galaxies is still going strong as an online record book. The history of Twin Galaxies and Walter Day is very interesting and I recommend watching “Chasing Ghosts” or “The King of Kong” to learn more about it. Because of Ottumwa’s unique role in Video Game history, they have been proclaimed as the “Video Game Capital of the World”.

The famous Life Magazine photo of the top arcade game players taken in Ottumwa, 1982

The IVGHOF kicked off last summer with a large event featuring several gaming celebrities, tournaments, and presentations. This year they are again holding a big event that should bring video game personalities and fans from around the country to Ottumwa for a four day celebration. I didn’t have a chance to go last year, but this year I am excited to have the chance to go.

I’ve been working with Walter Day, who is helping organize the event, to bring my Joust machine to the celebration. It will be used for various events, and hopefully there will be some world-class players getting some time on playing it. I’d love to see Steve Sanders take back his World Record on my machine, but we’ll see if he’s up to the challenge!

I’m really excited to experience this piece of classic arcade gaming history and to get a chance to meet some of the arcade greats like Sanders, Billy Mitchell, and maybe Steve Wiebe. Wiebe is scheduled to be inducted in the HOF, so I hope he’s there.

You can read more about the Big Bang event, and the IVGHOF at the official site: IVGHOF.com. There is a list of all of this year’s inductees on the site as well.

For a great documentary of the history of Twin Galaxies, try to see the movie Chasing Ghosts. It never made it to DVD, but it has been shown on Showtime and may again be broadcast.

Check out Twin Galaxies Website to see records of almost all arcade games. There are several scores for MAME emulated arcade games, and consoles both old and new.

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!

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: