I was getting tired of the old Wordpress theme I was using, especially the light text on the black background. Hopefully you’ll like this new one. I got it here.

I changed the header up a bit, made the background darker, and changed the post format to make it a little wider. It’s now 1:44AM and I’m off to bed. Cya. zzzzzzzzzz

Hey there. Happy Friday the 13th! A black cat crossed my path several times today. Her name is Twinkle, and she is a demon spawned in the very depths of the netherworld.

Just seeing her picture should be sufficient enough to make your day today very unlucky. If she could only see you in person, she would surely use your face as a scratching post, because that’s her way of saying hello.

I don’t have much arcade news to report. I’m waiting for some memory to come in from China to fix my Moon Patrol PCB. It’s probably on a raft right now.

Because I know you are incredibly bored waiting for me to fix some more games, here is a pretty cool video I found of David Blaine to entertain you.

I found this on Digg.com. For those of you that haven’t seen it:

This is the funniest commercial I’ve seen in a long time…couldn’t stop laughing last night.

Happy Easter Eve! In just a few hours, the Easter bunny should be sliding down your chimney with lots of eggs for all the good girls and boys. Don’t forget to leave him a glass of milk and some carrot cake.

[INSERT CLEVER EASTER TO ARCADE SEQUE HERE]

When I got my free Moon Patrol project cabinet awhile back, I also got a game board for it for $20. I wasn’t sure if it worked, but the guy I got it from thought it did, if I rememer correctly. I’ve been wondering if it did for a long time. Because I’m not even close to being ready to actually hook it up in the cabinet (still need to finish repairing and painting it), I decided to try the board in my JAMMA cabinet. For those that aren’t arcade geeks, JAMMA is the wiring standard used by most games since around 1986 (I think). Moon Patrol was made in 1982, and is not compatible with JAMMA. I ordered a JAMMA adaptor starter kit from Bob Roberts.

I’ve never made a JAMMA adaptor before. It took me a long time to solder this sucker up last night…at least a couple of hours but I lost track of time. It was a thing of beauty, and probably would have brought a tear to your eye if you saw it up close.

The moment of truth came and I hooked it up. No video, audio, or any of the general coolness associated with Moon Patrol. After staring at the adaptor, the board, and the harness (isn’t that a C.S. Lewis novel?!), I finally realized that I totally screwed it up. The pins on Moon Patrol were pretty much a mirror image of what I had on the adaptor. I had to desolder every wire and start over. After finishing it today, here is the end result, showing both sides:

The first attempt was a bit neater, but at least this one is right. I hooked it up today, and found that the board was definitely not working 100%. It came up, but at least 50% of the characters in the phrases on screen were incorrect. For example, this should say PUSH BUTTON, 1 OR 2 PLAYERS:

It almost looks like it’s in a different language…maybe the one they speak on the moon. This screen should say BEGINNER COURSE GO!:

Note that you can see the tank in the image, but it is a bit garbled up with other flipped images. This screen actually came out pretty dark in the photo, but you could play the game for a few seconds at a time and most of the landscape and colors looked correct. It kept resetting in the middle of the game and acting all crazy like.

I did the typical things on this…made sure the voltage was OK, reseated all the socketed chips, etc…That didn’t do anything. I put it in test mode, and got a screen filled with garbage (kind of like my office area):

According to the manual, the first test is for the RAM. It should read something like “RAM OK…” or “RAM NG…”, followed by the RAM location. Now, if you take your time and look at the phrases in the other images, there is a method to the character madness. Each letter that is screwed up is actually 5 positions ahead of what it should be numerically. For example, BACIJJAR should be BEGINNER. The B is OK. If you count 5 spots from A (including A), you get an E. 5 from C is G. The I is OK. 5 from J is N, etc…

So, even though the screen reads “RAI JC”, I know it should say either “RAM OK” or “RAM NG”. I used the method above to determine that it actually reads “RAM NG”. So…I have bad RAM somewhere. Bad, bad, naugthy RAM. The memory location should come next, but I can’t make sense out of it. According to the manual, there are only 2 RAM chips, so I’m going to replace them both. I just ordered some on eBay, super cheap. They were $1 each. Most places have them for $3 or $4. I wanted to have extra for future use, so I bought 15. The only downside is they are coming from China and will take 7 to 10 business days to get here.

I’ll post again with the results of swapping the RAM. If you are familiar with this Moon Patrol problem as seen in the screenshots, please let me know. I’m really just guessing at this point.

There isn’t much new to report regarding our arcade projects, so let’s start this post with a monkey playing pac-man:

In non monkey related news….I ordered a ton of capacitors, IC sockets, and TTL chips (mmmmm….chips) from eBay. I’m tired of not having parts when I need to fix something, and figured it would be a good idea to stock up on common parts. I also got everything dirt cheap, which is always good.

When I got Breakout, I was told that the monitor kept blowing fuses. I changed all the capacitors on the chassis, and the Horizontal Output Transistor, hooked it all back up, and turned it on without the game board hooked up. The monitor powered up and the neck of the tube glowed, and no fuses blew, which is good cuz that would really blow. So, I *think* I fixed the monitor. I hooked up the game board, and couldn’t get it to show any video or make any sounds, so I’ve got more work to do. I’m pretty clueless with a lot of this stuff…my lack of knowledge tends to make this a slow process, but I’ll get it going eventually.

I also tried to figure out what was causing the score problem on Demolition Derby (see the posts in the “Demolition Derby” category). I tested all the ICs in the circuit that controls the scoring using a method described by Randy Fromm, and couldn’t find any bad ones. There were 4 capacitors on the board that looked pretty worn out, so I replaced them. I fired it back up, and it didn’t fix the problem. It did however, kill the sound in the game. So now I have 2 problems to fix instead of one. There is a giant orange 4400mfd capacitor on the board that looks pretty spent too. I ordered a replacement for that from Mouser.com.