Behold, the Orange-y Power of Q*Bert

Disclaimers

1. This post is going to be one part tutorial, and one part photo gallery. If you have a problem with that, you can bite my furry orange nose.

2. Warning! This post is a bit long, but it is SOOOO worth it.
3. The fabric looks like crap in some of the pictures, due to the flash. For some reason, it looks almost reflective when the flash hits it. It looks much nicer in person. You’ll have to trust me on that.

Read the rest of this entry…

What’s this, an arcade related post? Wow! Pretty crazy, I know….

I’ve been trying to get my games in working order for our Christmas party. For GTI Club, I’ve been struggling with a Wells Gardner U5000 (AKA steaming pile of horse crap) for awhile now and *think* I have that fixed.

The sound on my Q*Bert has been wrong for awhile now. I tried fixing this before and didn’t get anywhere with it. I didn’t think it was that bad, so I gave up for awhile.

I decided to take another crack at it. I thought that only one sound was wrong, the noise made when coily jumps off the board. I now realize that mine sounds pretty craptastic compared to how it should sound so I need to get this fixed even more now.

I figured this out by doing the sound test on Q*Bert in MAME. Here is how it should sound:

Here is how mine sounds:

Many of the sounds are missing or wrong.

There is a troubleshooting flowchart for Q*Bert sound boards here:
http://www.cademo.com/arcade/index.htm

When I last worked on this, I did quite a few things:

• Replaced the sockets for all socketed chips on the sound board, except for the SC01 speech chip at U14 (I didn’t have the right size socket for that)
• Replaced all the electrolytic capacitors on the sound board
• Fixed some issues with the header pins on the filter board
• Replaced A10 on the main board
• Replaced U16 on the sound board

For this new attempt at fixing it, I started by changing the socket for the speech chip at U14.

I didn’t have the right size socket, so I cut one in half:

That didn’t fix it, but at least I got to play with my soldering iron for awhile.

If I go by the flow chart, it looks like I should try replacing U15 next. However, I’ve read that U17 is also a common failure so I’m going to try changing that next. I don’t have any 74LS30 chips around so I just ordered a few. Maybe I’ll get lucky and that will take care of it. If not, maybe Santa’s elves will make me a new working sound board.

My Mappy Restoration is finally done!

I started writing about this on CoinOpSpace.com to enter their restoration contest. I missed the deadline for the contest, but finished the restoration thread there. You can read all about it here.

Awhile back, I scanned and redrew the bezel artwork for Moon Patrol:

It looks like this will be going to print very soon. If you want to see this happen and need one, please head over to KLOV.com and add your name to the list!

OK…first, check out my last post if you haven’t already. I’ve used Novus #2 and #1 a bit in the past but never for anything major and never on a bezel. The bezel on my Mario Bros. was scratched very badly. It had many scratches all over the place and also a fine haze in the middle. The scratches where so noticeable in the center that it actually made it harder to play the game. If I had to rate it, I’d say it was about a D at best.

I had a very hard time getting a picture of this damage, but here is one from a side angle that shows a bit:

That picture is actually not of the worst damage. The center was an absolute crap fest.

For a couple of years I’ve been looking for a replacement. I even ordered one off of eBay and unfortunately the seller didn’t describe it very well. It was cracked and had some sort of sludge all over it so it went unused. I thought I could possibly clean mine up with some Novus but was a little wary of the paint that is on the outside of the bezel. I decided to give it a shot, and it worked wonders:

You can click on those pictures above to see them larger. I spent about 45 minutes on this. I started with #3, and kept going over it several times paying special attention to the worst scratches. I kept that off the painted area. I followed that up with #2 on the entire thing including the paint (though I did it sparingly over the paint). The paint actually had some scuffs and the Novus removed them. I followed that up with #1 and unless you were looking for faults you might think it was NOS. The only real flaw you can see now is where a deep gouge was. It actually almost removed it, and softened the edges to the point where it is hardly noticeable. If you shift your position while staring at it there is a subtle distortion and that’s about it. If I doubled my time on this I think it would have looked even better.

This bezel was so bad, if I got a replacement I would probably have tossed it. Now its about an A-. Novus kicks serious ass. Go buy some.

Hey there! I’ve been using Google Sketchup to figure out a new layout for our arcade. I’m hooked on it. You can checkout more about this in my post on CoinOpSpace.com.

Here’s a couple of models I made with it so far, make sure you spin them around!

Awhile back, I bought an antique payphone on eBay, which looks similar to this one:

This phone is a bit too old fashioned to look good in our arcade. I’ve been planning on putting it upstairs in our hallway. It’s been sitting in the corner up there for 2 or 3 years now so I figured I should get around to mounting it. I don’t have keys, but managed to get into the top box and have a plan for mounting it. I’m making my own enclosure for it, which I modeled in sketchup:

Here’s a 3D view:

and an exploded view:

The plan is to make a custom TELEPHONE sign for the top, and have it light up. I’ll post more pics as I put it together.

Hey there. This is going to be short, because I’m tired. I got up around 5AM to drive to NH and pickup these two:

It was pouring out most of the day today, but my brother helped get these with me in his van so they didn’t get wet.

The Super Pac-Man works, and is in pretty decent shape. It’s not shiny and new by any means, but these hardly ever are. The bottom saw some water at some point and is a little swollen, but the sides at the bottom don’t have any water damage. I may put a new bottom in it at some point but its not too bad as is. The monitor has a great picture on it, so I may not bother with a cap kit. I’ll probably just clean this one up and try to find a spot for it in the house. I am severely out of space, but keep finding more somehow.

The Donkey Kong is a bit beat up. It doesn’t look too bad at first glance, but the kickplate has come away from the sides of the cabinet and is leaning in. The piece above that and under the control panel is also coming off. At some point, someone put a load of screws all over the place to try to keep it together and most of them have ripped free. I’ll need to restore the cabinet at some point. The game boots up and plays somewhat OK. The monitor is pretty screwy, so I’ll need to start with a cap kit and see if that fixes it.

I had all the repro art, and other parts to build a DK. I planned on taking my 2nd Popeye that is hiding in the corner of the garage and convert it into a Donkey Kong at some point. Now with this other Nintendo cabinet, I haven’t decided what I’ll do. I may fix this one up and sell it, or might use it to convert to a DK Jr. Decisions, decisions.

I made some more progress on Q*Bert in the past couple of days. First, I got the knocker working. Here’s the original knocker assembly:

The coil was dead, as well as the fuse. I put in a new coil:

I put in a new fuse, and tested the transistor that powers the knocker to make sure it was OK. It’s knocking as it should now. Gotta love those knockers.

Here’s a pic of how the control panel was:

I swapped out the joystick for one that matched better, put in new buttons, and a new overlay:

While working on this, I had to find a way to keep the cats from climbing inside the cabinet. Homer Simpson worked nicely:

I am now a supreme noser. To recap, here’s the last graphics issue I was trying to fix:

Notice the Q*Bert logo in the top left, and the screwed up sprites. Here it is working:

There seems to be a sound issue that only occurs when you make Coily jump off the board after you. You can here it twice in the video above. If anyone knows what would cause that, please let me know.

The graphics problem ended up being a bad jumper on the main board, JP13:

Before finding this, I figured I should go through all the boards in the game to make sure there were no issues. I started with the filter board, which had some major issues. One of the header pins burned up, and left a crater in the board:

Both pins on the right were affected, and consequently some rocket scientist soldered the two wires that connect to those pins right to the back of the board:

I removed that set of header pins:

and replaced them with a new set:

Around back, you can see the remnants of the wires they soldered directly to the board:

The pin to the right of the fried one actually still had its solder pad and trace in tact, so I only needed to solder in one jumper directly to the header pin:

I resoldered all the other header pins on the board. I then pulled the main PCB, and changed all the sockets. I did the same for the sound board, and replaced all the caps on it. That’s where I’m at now. I just got a replacement coil for the knocker. With any luck, maybe I’ll get that going tonight.