Monday was my 34th birthday. What did you get me? Probably nothing you dirty rat bastard.

We’ve been wanting to go away somewhere for a weekend, and decided to go to New Hampshire for the weekend before my birthday. The main place we wanted to checkout was Funspot. It’s the 2nd largest arcade in the country (we are #3). I’m going to take their word for it because I don’t have a ruler big enough.

My wife came home from work Friday, and we were planning on leaving right away. She told me the heat in the car decided to stop working on her drive home. There was no way we could drive all the way to NH (4 hrs ish) with no heat. We managed to rent a Dodge Caravan 2 minutes before Thrifty closed. I’m sure we were the envy of every soccer mom in town in this baby…it was freakin’ sweet!

We got there very late…a little after 1 am. Next day we headed to Funspot. The day before I had picked up our Space Invaders, and got very very lost coming home. I got tired of getting lost, so we picked up a TomTom ONE GPS across the street from our hotel at Staples.

You HAVE to get one of these. We will never get lost again. This thing is amazing. They also have a Mr. T voice you can download which I’ll probably try out very soon. “Turn left in 200 yards, sucka. I pitty the fool that doesn’t get on the highway in 300 yards, etc….” .

We entered via the “American Classic Arcade Museum”.

Of all the games I checked out there, I left wanting one more than all others – Mappy.

Mappy is incredibly cool. This game is addictive, and the cabinet design is very unique. I’m not sure why this game was a flop, but I am on the lookout for one.

You can see all the pics we took there by clicking the album link below.

My family and friends now realize that I have a serious problem with coin op games and are on the look out for me. My brother called me a week or so ago and said he knew someone that had a pinball machine sitting in the garage that they wanted to get rid of. That’s this one here:

It’s a MIBS, made in 1969 by Gottlieb. Its an electro mechanical machine – no circuit boards. Lots of bells, gears, and other fun stuff. Someone painted it brown (at least I think its brown…I’m color blind). It should look more like this:

When I got it home, it was dead. Plugged it in and nothing happened. It had a blown fuse, and some other fuses that were not the correct values. I fixed them and it came on but wouldn’t start a game. After reading through the great info at pinrepair.com, it got me playing around with the credit score wheel in the back. You can see that in the pic on the backglass, towards the right. It is there to show you how many credits are in the machine. I turned that wheel, pushed the button on the front of the game and it started up. It has some issues but can actually play a bit and make a lot of noise.

My Dad had picked up a Pinball machine and gave it to my brother. It was sitting in his storage unit for a few months. My brother is leaving it with me until he has a place for it someday. That one is Solar Ride, circa 1979 also by Gottlieb.

This one was also (and still is) dead. Some mice decided to make a home on the playfield. Damn mice. They have no respect for toys. Anyways…this one had the same issues with the fuses as MIBS. I fixed them, turned it on, and the speaker was making a very loud humming sound. I turned it way down, and could hear a coil stuck on. The coil for the left ball trap was charged and stayed that way. I’m guessing this is what burned the fuse before. The game won’t start in the condition that it’s in. I’ve heard that this could be caused by a bad transistor on the solenoid driver board so I’m going to see if I can test them all and replace the bad one if there is one. I really am just guessing as I don’t know much about these puppies.

I bought some rubber kits for both and some wax from pbresource.com. I’ll keep you updated on the progress as I go…

It’s been about 2 weeks since my last post, and I’ve been busy getting more games. Not sure where I’m going to put them.

I picked up a dead Space Invaders this past Friday for $100 that I spotted on Craigslist.

That seems to be the best source of games so far for me. I noticed that the plywood was delaminating towards the bottom of the cabinet in the photo I saw before I picked it up. I figured I could just glue it back together. I was a little too excited about this one and didn’t check it out well enough after the 2.5hr drive. When I got it home and opened it up, I noticed an invasion of a different kind was going on here. Mold. Lots and lots of mold. It smells funny, and doesn’t taste to good either (j/k ). I plugged it in and the monitor had neck glow, and some raster showed on the screen so I think it may just be a board or wiring problem. I’m not messing with this one until I can get a warm day to take it out side and clean it out. I found a site that has what look to be great repro parts for Space Invaders: http://www.thisoldgame.com/thisoldgame/new_page_2.htm

As soon as I can save up some cash I’ll order some parts from him.

I love the shape of the cabinet and the artwork. Very cool.

Since I picked up Popeye, I’ve done a little bit of work on it. The marquee light was out, and it was an odd size fixture that is supposedly very difficult to get bulbs for. I removed it and replaced it with one of these $15 lights from Home Depot:

The wiring in Nintendo cabinets was designed for 100 VAC, which is what they use in Japan instead of 120 VAC. In cabinets that were sold in the US, they used a step down transformer (more than meets the eye) to drop the 120 down to 100. They then use that 100 VAC to power the marquee light and monitor. Because I’m replacing the light (and because I’m not Japanese), I had to tap into the 120 VAC at a distribution block in the bottom of the cabinet before it goes to the transformer.

Let there be light!

As you probably saw in my last post about this, the control panel was a little beat up.

The control panel plexiglass had a big crack in the bottom left. Crack kills, so we had to fix this. I was (and still am) on the lookout for a NOS control panel overlay for this. I posted in the RGVAC newsgroup looking for one, and someone replied saying they had an original used one in decent shape. I got it cheap, and it looks a lot better than what was there. The joystick was completely shot, and one of the buttons was the wrong color. I put in an order at MikesArcade.com for a replacement joystick and buttons a few days ago. That order and the replacement CPO came in today. I printed out a new instruction card, and slapped it all together.

Hey there. I had posted over in the forums at KLOV.com asking some questions about Final Fight. Scott at HyperspaceArcade.com happened to have NOS (new old stock) side art and a control panel overlay. I ordered both from them. Here is a pic after putting on the sideart:

Control panel before:

After I stripped off the original overlay, the control panel looked like swiss cheese. I used Jasco adhesive remover to get the rest of the glue off. It was messy. It is also known to cause cancer in laboratory animals, so its a good thing I’m not one of those!

The holes that I drew arrows pointing towards are the ones that needed to be filled in. I used the method shown on this page on Brian’s site. I had to do it a bit differently though. Some of the holes that needed to be filled were too close to others, and if I put the metal only over the old holes the nuts holding the buttons on underneath would sit crooked. I decided to cover more area then I needed to with metal from the back, and drill through the holes that were staying. That would give me a good base to mount the buttons and joysticks on. If you look at the pic above, I’ve drawn the shapes of the metal backing that I needed to cut. I used a thin sheet of aluminum from Home Depot. Here it is from the back after gluing with epoxy:

I drilled the holes through the patches for the holes that weren’t being patched, and stuck some buttons through them backwards to make a nice edge for the Bondo.

Speaking of Bondo…

After sanding:

Final result after putting the control panel overlay on with 2 new player 1 & 2 buttons:

Next step for this will probably be cleaning the cabinet and touching it up a bit, and working on the coin door.

OK…I mentioned in another post that I would be picking up another game. I can mention it now because it’s safely in the arcade.

For those of you that are blind (or visually impaired like the sailor above), that game is non other than:

.
If anyone knows the deal with Popeye’s left eye, please share. Is it missing? Does he have a stray piece of spinach stuck in it? WHAT is the deal?

On a sidenote, I saw these forearm lifting straps the other day – “The Forearm Forklift“. I wonder if Popeye was a fervent user of those? That would certainly explain his enormous, disproportionately sized forearms. That company should definitely look into using Popeye in their ads.

I traded the web design of this site to get this game, so other than a lot of time it didn’t cost me any actual green stuff (money…not spinach).
Here it is in all its glory:

As you can see, it’s going to need some work. The side art is almost gone. It should look like this:

The control panel is a bit worn out, and will need a new joystick, overlay, and plexiglass.

The previous owner had a control panel overlay for it, so that’s a plus. The screen is pretty poor. It’s very faded, and scrunched together at the top. I’ll have to do a cap kit on it. I have yet to do one, and am not too good with a soldering iron yet, so we’ll see how that goes!

There was a Cracker Barrel right down the street from where we got this, so we stopped there for breakfast before doing the pickup. While browsing through the store, I found these:

If you observe closely, you’ll notice he’s closing his RIGHT eye in the figure above! I’m seriously starting to think he’s faking an eye injury to pick up chicks. Skinny, skinny chicks. Kate Moss has NOTHING on Olive Oyl.

I was goofing off in the afternoon when I should have been working yesterday. Around 3:30 I spotted a listing on Craigslist for a Final Fight game. It was listed for $20, and said it wasn’t working and probably had a loose connection. By then the listing was a little over an hour old, and I figured I probably wouldn’t catch it in time. I had tried to get similar deals quick and was beat by other buyers. I called anyway, and it was still available!

I drove 2 hours to pick this puppy up in Winchester MA. Got it home, popped the back off, and found the loose connection.

I put the board back where it should be, adjusted the voltage on the power supply and it came up. The monitor needed to be adjusted. Once I did that, it worked perfectly. Not bad for $20!

Here are some pics of it in the game room, after I put a bulb in the marquee and coin return buttons.