Well, since I’ve had a few extra days off from work, I’ve had a little time to work on some scores. New Year’s Eve, before I left to go to a friends for the evening, I hit a new milestone in my Tron gameplay. I passed the 200,000 point mark. My new high score is [...]

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I was never very good at Tron. I could usually make it to the third level before it blew me away. Ever since I restored my current machine, I’ve made a more serious attempt at actually becoming good at this game. Well, I hit a milestone tonight with a score of 119,750. It was pretty [...]

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Since I pretty much burned myself out on Donkey Kong over the last few months, I spent some good quality time studying Tron. My scores are starting to become respectable. Tron is one of those games that definitely has patterns that will help get through certain levels. However, you still need to master some basic [...]

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I took this week off from work, and one of my goals was to get the Tron painted and put back together.  The first thing I needed to do was to do some further wood putty repair to the cabinet.  Tried the “Rock Hard Wood Putty” but it was too powdery when I sanded it, [...]

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Time to start on the cabinet.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I already stripped all the parts off of this cabinet, except the wiring harness.  So basically I have a big ugly wood box.  It’s not in terrible shape, just pretty much normal wear for a 25 year old video game.  There are [...]

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Decided that I didn’t like the look of the coin door. It was hacked up a bit for a credit switch, and it was scratched up. I then took the parts into work and media blasted them while on my lunch break.  Turned out really good! I then tried to paint the coin door with [...]

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Started working on the Tron cabinet today. I needed to disassemble it so I could paint it. Taking this thing apart will also make it much easier to clean thoroughly. This cabinet is probably the most complicated cabinet I’ve ever worked on. I took a few pictures along the way: Here is the art that [...]

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Now that I have the game working, it’s time to get the cabinet restored so I can take it down into the gameroom. I decided to start with the control panel since it was the easiest thing to take off and work on. I’ll tackle the rest of the cabinet later! Overall the control panel [...]

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Just wanted to drop a quick note that I finally got my Tron working 100%. Took many weeks of PCB, Power Supply, and Controls troubleshooting. From my last update, I had the game boards working completely, but my spinner optical encoder board was not working properly. The game characters turned clockwise no matter which direction [...]

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Been working on the Tron for the past week or so. Pulled the board out and resoldered all of the connections. That didn’t work. Then, I checked voltages at each of the chips. That didn’t give me any clues where the problem was. For a problem like this, I love posting to the KLOV forums. [...]

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