A year already?

Wow it's been a year already. The Plex Server has been working great, my daughter uses it occasionally when she can't find anything she wants to watch on streaming services (so not that often these days).

I have switched focus back to 3D printing. I got into 3D printing in 2012 with a Solidoodle 2. It worked well enough but indoctrinated me to the deficiencies of 3D printing. Then Solidoodle as a company failed (2015) so there was no upgrade path. My Solidoodle "broke" and I finally donated it to a maker space.

Years passed and I was anxious to see what advances have been made in the 3D printing world. In the interim the industry had a large shakeout as everyone recognized the limitations of the current technology. I started watching YouTube channels to bone up on the current state of 3D printing.

I set my sites on 2 printers, the Creality CR-10 for it's quality and huge build volume (300x300x400mm) or the Anet A8, for it's low cost and "good enough" build volume (220x220x240mm). The Creality clocks in around $370 and the Anet A8 is only $160. The Anet A8 is a DIY kit, whereas the Creality CR-10 is mostly assembled. I opted for the Anet A8 since pulling the trigger on a $160 purchase isn't a big deal.

I am so glad I bought the Anet A8! A DIY kit is just what I needed to forge a deeper understanding of FDM technology. And the Anet A8 is a good printer "out of the gate" but benefits from numerous printable "upgrades" that improve performance and use.

I'm still getting my bearings with the Anet A8, and my improvements have been limited to things I can print and a PEI sheet for the print bed ($15). I just ordered a bunch of parts to upgrade the bed and extruder power distribution, the factory state is barely adequate and perhaps dangerous. I also added a fused power switch ($8), and cleaned up X & Y belt tensioning (with big improvement in print quality).

And in homage to my love of the Raspberry Pi I've setup an Octoprint server to manage print jobs. Octoprint is an opensource (free) application that acts as a management interface for 3D printers. I added a camera (pi cam for $25) and now have timelapse videos of my print jobs. Pretty cool.

Pi Drive!

I'm still playing around with the Raspberry Pi. I stick to the '3', there isn't a big cost savings using the earlier models and there's a big performance hit. Plus all my cases and other accessories are guaranteed to fit.

My Plex media server project is coming along. I just found out yesterday that my daughter has another 20 DVDs for me to rip, but once that is done I should be in good shape. As it stands I have about 780GB of data, requiring me to abandon my plan of using an SSD (too costly) and switching to a standard laptop drive.

Standard 2.5" hard drives have SATA interfaces, and the pi natively only works with USB drives. So you need a USB-to-SATA adapter, which are pretty common as they are used in drive upgrade kits. But Western Digital recognized an opportunity and created a 2.5" drive with a USB interface called the "PiDrive". I picked up a 1TB version for about $55 (way cheaper than an SSD).

Since the USB interface is 2.0, it takes about 15 hours to copy all the data to the drive. I'm waiting for my stackable case to come in so I can construct the finished product. I've hooked everything up for testing and I can stream HD videos to my Xbox One via the Plex client (which is free!).

What I am discovering are problems in the ripping of some movies. Mostly it's the case where multiple version of the content exist on the DVD, some with annoying commentary. In these cases I have dig up the disk, re-rip it, then update the image on the drive. I've only see 3 or 4 of these issues, but I'm concerned there could be more, I have no way of knowing without previewing a large sampling of movies.

Media Serving

Wow! It's been a while. Not a lot has gone on though, so you haven't missed anything.

My asteroids arcade cabinet is still in pieces and needs a working monitor, that ain't happening any time soon.

What is happening is RetroPi. I discovered the Raspberry Pi when I was hunting for a low-cost solution to host my Plex Media server. I guess a little of the backstory is due.

I have a lot of DVDs. At first I thought it was perhaps 3-400, but now it's looking more like +500 as searching around the house keeps turning up more DVDs (and some Blu Rays!). Years ago (early 2000s) I had looked into ripping my DVDs along the lines of what I had previously done with my music library. At the time the technology and storage costs didn't make this simple (or cheap),  but a lot has changed since then.

Not only is storage cheap, not only are there scads of tools that make this process easy, but there are now free tools that make serving the media easy. The one I settled on is Plex because I use an Xbox One as my "media center" and there's a Plex app for my console that makes viewing the content simple.

So the Xbone has a client, but there's a server that needs to host the content and serve it to the client. For this I pressed a retired computer into service, it's about 3500 passmarks in terms of performance so it can easily server out the video streams. In addition it happens to have a 2TB drive, and since video files are big (typically 300-700mb per DVD, 3-6gb for Blu Rays), size matters.

So Plex is basically free, at least for how I'm using it (server -> xbone). I've been ripping my DVD library for weeks and have over 700 files (I have some series that contain multiple episodes per DVD), or about 690GB of data.

I'm using Media Center Master (MCM) to add metadata and organization to the video library. Plex will do a decent job of pulling metadata based on the video image file name, but collecting this information with MCM helps a lot and removes all ambiguities. For ripping the image from the DVD, I use HandBrake, which requires libcssdvd-2.dll in order to process encrypted DVD images (virtually all DVD images are encrypted). For DVDs with more robust encryption you'll need something like AnyDVD. There's a 21 day trial, which is probably enough to digitize your content, but if you think you'll need it on an ongoing basis be prepared to spring $50 or so for a license. You will need AnyDVD (or equivalent), about 5% of the DVDs in my library, and all the Blu Rays, required it.

Ripping is a royal pain in the ass! Handbrake does a good job of selecting the most likely master video file on the DVD, but it can be occasionally wrong. Ripping episodes from a series is probably the most difficult, in some cases the episode number is very hard to replicate.

It's important that when you put the files on the media server you segregate TV episodes and Movies. This will help Plex a lot, and tools like MCM benefit as well (when scanning episodes for metadata). Keep it simple:

Media
 \__ TV Shows
\__ Movies
 \__Home Movies

Raspberry Pi 3
How the raspberry pi figures into this is that hosting all these files on a PC, that will be up 24/7 adds up, figure 100 watts of electricity and a big, noisy machine. An embedded solution will be much less expensive to run (~10 watts), run silently and take of virtually no space (a deck of cards). The challenge is finding an embedded solution with enough cpu power to serve the video, particularly if transcoding is required.

Transcoding is the process of modifying the video stream to fit characteristics of the client. This can be the result of a need to change the resolution or the encoding standard that differs from how the video was ripped and stored. Transcoding is a very cpu-intensive process, and the typical embedded computer is not up to the task.

Fortunately the Raspberry Pi 3 represents a significant compute upgrade and can handle a transcoding a single video stream. At $35 it is also a very economical solution. In addition to the pi, you'll need a power supply (micro-usb, 2.0 amps at least) and a harddrive for the video files. The harddrive has to have a USB interface, the Raspberry Pi has 4, USB 2.0 ports, no way to connect SATA or IDE drives. Also, if the drive requires a lot of power (>1.2A), you may have to power it externally. In most situations, a 1TB, 2.5" drive with a USB-to-SATA conversion cable should do the trick.

The hunt is on!

The parts came in! So now I have 2N3716 & 2N3792 replacements for the power transistors that drive the vector monitor yolk. These are the ones mounted on the case in TO-2 cases (metal).

I also had MU-07 and MU-57 on hand, and Mouser had MSP8098, it's a replacement for the TIS98 that is used throughout the deflection amplifier circuitry.

So I pulled all these transistors on one of the G05-805 monitors that I have, soldered in the new parts, checked the TO-2 packages to make sure they weren't shorted the collector to the heatsink and turned everything on. The spot killer is still lit up. I did a little sleuthing and realized there's a 2N3906 that's pretty integral to the deflection circuitry and it's the only transistor that I didn't replace, so I swapped those out as well.

No joy, the monitor is still dead. So at this point I have done the following:

• Cap kit
• Swap all deflection transistors (MU-07, MU-57, TIS98, 2N3906, 2N3716 and 2N3792)

So now I need to start looking at resistors and diodes, and the fact that perhaps I have damaged some of the transistors. Both the X & Y deflection circuits are behaving the same, so perhaps that's an important clue.

Coming along

I got a chance to spend a little time with the Asteroids today. Turns out I had a spare 2N3055 transistor, it was part of the Williams power supply get well kit. Since I have gotten rid of the Williams games (Defender & Stargate), I made good use of it in the Atari AR1. Now I have my Asteroids board working with the proper Audio/Regulator board, on to fixing the monitor.

I have two G05-805 (15") B/W vector monitors. I didn't think either would work but they are both failing in the same way - the spot killer is on. I suspect it's the XY drive transistors (the 2N3716 and 2N3792) but don't have any spares so it's time to place an order. I also plan to pick up a replacement for the big capacitor in the power supply, and a knob for the volume control. It would be great if I could make an extension cable so the monitor doesn't have to be so close to the motherboard, I'm working on locating the parts I need to do that (I have the monitor-end, I need the motherboard-end).

So it may be a few days before I get the parts I need to make any more progress, in the meantime I brought in the top glass for the cocktail table and I'll start cleaning things up.

It's alive! Sort of...

I had some time to work on the asteroids game. I've pulled it all apart, cleaned it up some, and assembled it on my "work bench".

You can see in the upper right corner my Zektor ZVG. I use it to drive a 19V2000 vector monitor so I can play all the vector games using VectorMAME. This is also a convenient way to test monitors out with known good signal sources.

Atari Audio Regulator 1

Notice the Audio Regulator, it's an AR2, though an Asteroids cocktail needs an AR1. The AR1 was producing the correct voltages until it was under load (connected to the other board), then the +5V supply dropped to about 1V, which isn't going to work. I remembered I had an AR2 laying around, and it's pin compatible with the AR1 (though much larger and produces more voltages from different molex connectors). This brought the board right up.

My next step was to hook up the scope and see if the Asteroids board was indeed working. After looking at the 6MHZ test point (good) and seeing good stuff on XOUT and YOUT test points, I opted to set the scopy in XY mode. I could see a very crude Asteroids display. Next step was to plug in the 19V2000, and Asteroids was alive!

Now I'm not out of the woods. I have to get the AR1 working, and the cocktail doesn't fit a 19V2000, I need to get the 15 inch monitor working. But a lot of things are working.

I think the AR1's problem is the 2N3055, that's the big power transistor on the heatsink. The LM305 is regulating voltage, it's just when load is applied that the voltage drops, so hopefully this will be a simple fix. Before I compose an order to Bob Roberts I'm going to snoop around and see what else I might need so I can make one order. For now I can use the AR2 (though sadly I don't have any sound), and the 15" monitor will now be my main electronics focus.

I should mention I have two Asteroids mother boards, and one of them is not working, so at some point I'm going to need to work on that problem as well.

Asteroids Cocktail

So I've started the restoration of the Asteroids cocktail. I purchased the cabinet with no mother board (and I didn't notice at the time but missing the Audio/Regulator board as well), with the assurance that it all worked. I had no belief it would work given a new board set, and regardless I want to strip it down, clean it up and do a proper, if not exhaustive, restoration job on it.

Above is a view of the inside of the cabinet. Now that I have boards this is "parts complete", so the work that needs to be done is to tear it all apart and then clean things up. I will need to get everything working, but I'll do that outside of the cabinet so I can have more control and access to the components. This means pulling out the power supply. I have to decide how far I'm going to go with this restoration, I'm thinking of stripping the power supply apart and refinishing the metal.

Thankfully the outside of the Asteroids cabinet is black so I won't have to search all of Christendom for matching wood grain contact paper like I had to for the Pacman restoration.

Starting from scratch!

It finally happened, the herd has been thinned. I posted in various forums that I was giving my collection away. The state of the hobby is such that I received very few takers, and only one that said he'd come straight away and take all that I would give him. Jim Melcher (see www.melchman.net) was eager to help me out and showed up at the appointed time with 3 helpers. They made quick work of the loading up the games and assorted spare parts. Here's what they got:

• Defender
• Stargate
• Lunar Lander
• Breakout
• Space Invaders
• Battlezone
• Missile Command (cocktail)
• Space Duel (cocktail)

In addition I threw in (all for free!) a G05-802 vector monitor and a color XY monitor. Jim also took the Fluke raster TV pattern generator off my hands. I also had two Lunar Lander mother boards (working!) that Jim got to haul away. And I even gave them some of my home brew beer. I better get accolades in his blog. I'll keep in touch with Jim and see how he progresses getting the games fixed.

There are only two games I kept, a working Pacman cocktail (which I restored), and a non-working Asteroids cocktail. So with only two games in the herd, and one of them fully restored I can focus all my attention on Asteroids.

Back from a long hiatus!

I just realized it's been over a year since I posted anything. Things got busy at work and I became engrossed in my latest hobby - making home brew beer. Now that this hobby has about run it's course (I'm still brewing), I need to get back to working on some games.

The problem is that I've gotten in over my head. I have 9 games in various states of repair, and I really can't get to all of them. Right now only one game works well, the Defender that I restored. The Stargate is a close second, but there's something minor wrong. I don't count the Pacman game as I gave that to my daughter, but it's still working fine.

So what about the rest? Well Missile Command stopped working and needs attention. The Space Invaders is a mess, mostly because of the cabinet. Battlezone is in pieces, there was a display issue (or an issue with the vector generator driving the display) but the rest of the game is fine. Breakout is in disrepair, with pieces all over the garage. My pride and joy, Lunar Lander, needs some TLC, and finally, the Asteroids cocktail table is not working at all and needs a lot of work.

I made a simple decision, I need to thin the herd, I'll cut back to the Asteroids cocktail and the Lunar Lander (I just can't bare to part with that game), which means here's a good opportunity to pick up games, on the cheap, from a distressed seller. Let me know if you are interested, I'm in the Norther NJ area.

Getting back into the game

It’s been hard, I haven’t really touched an arcade game since summer of 2010. I have an Asteroids cocktail that I want to restore, it’s a complete wreck. The monitor is shot, the CRT tube is of no use. Fortunately I ordered a 15” b/w CRT from Richards Electronics that I have sitting in a box, waiting for me to resurrect the display.

Of course getting a vector CRT display working again is no picnic. Without an existing game that works to drive it, what is one to do? The answer is using a Zektor ZVG, I can drive test patterns to any vector display. Since I have the appropriate harness (I use the Zektor ordinarily to drive a 19” b/w vector display), I now have something to generate known good signals to test against.

The ZVG (Zektor Vector Generator) is an amazing device. To think that someone would create a product that can drive 30 year old vector display technology using modern computers is amazing. While the ZVG is no longer manufactured, if you were lucky enough to get your hands on one you are blessed. My ZVG allows me to play old vector games using VectorMAME, a version of MAME specially modified to drive the ZVG. Since I have a 19V200 (a 19” b/w vector monitor that was used in the Atari vector games), and the necessary cables and power supply – I can play the old vector games on a real vector monitor! Now I just need to make a cabinet for the system.

I drive my ZVG using a micro-ATX board (about 5” x 5”) and boot to DOS from a flash card. No moving parts, highly reliable, and modern electronics (except the monitor).

Buying old arcade games

A friend of mine from college told his sister that I restored/repaired old arcade games. She was interested in getting a Tempest or a Donkey Kong game. So the question is "What is the best advice for these people?".

I told my friend that first you need to be a commited hobbyist to have one of these games, they break down often. A game manufactured in 1982 is just not meant to last 30 years, so they are always breaking down. Another thing is cost. Tempest is one of the "hot" games, and a working Tempest can cost $1500 or more, a broken one can cost $700. And a broken Tempest can present a host of problems in getting parts, particularly for the color XY monitor.

Donkey Kong isn't much better. I've been looking for a non-working cocktail version for about a year now. My price threshold is "$250", and that assumes it's "parts complete" and in reasonably good shape. I haven't seen anything for less than $350, and even as high as $600. So much for the recession keeping prices low.

While Donkey Kong isn't as hard to keep running as Tempest, it's no picnic. If you want to keep it authentic then you'll always have something coming loose or needing re-seating. When I restored a PacMan for my daughter, I upgraded the power connectors and switches. So now I have a NEMA IEC connector (like the back of a computer), which definitely isn't authentic. I also added a fan to help things run cool and replaced the internal power wiring (once again for safety).

I recommended to my friend that they consider going with a pre-built MAME cabinet. The downside is cost and authenticity. The upside is it's modern, fixable by the average computer geek and runs hundreds if not thousands of games. You can find used versions of MAME systems for the $1500 range (maybe less if you look around for a distressed seller), and new ones in the $2300 range and up. But they will work and play all the popular games.

Owning old arcade games, especially systems from the 70's and 80's, is a hobby and takes real dedication in both time and money to keep them working. Totally restoring a game is expensive, the restoration of the PacMan game cost about $700, and that is just parts. Getting into this hobby is not for the faint of heart.

I'm back!

Okay I'm back. It's been a while. Another hobby took precedence, Home Brew beer. I recommend it to anyone who wants to have really good tasting beer that is a lot of fun to make. And when I say "really good tasting" I mean better than virtually anything you can buy, and cheaper to boot!

Asteroids - cocktail
My next project won't be Battlezone or Missile Command, but rather to get the Asteroids cocktail that I purchased a while ago up and working. I have two 15" B&W Vector monitors that don't work, one from the Asteroids game and one I purchased quite a while ago. I just picked up a 15" CRT so I can replace the burned out tube in one of the monitors. My goal is to get the monitor working with my Zektor ZVG and then proceed to fix the game.

The cabinet is in pretty good shape (I'll post pictures later). There's a power supply and all the other hardware but the motherboard is missing. Fortunately I have a spare, and working, motherboard, so I'm off to a good start. I should be able to get the system playing blind rather easily, but I'm sure the monitor will be a real bear.

I have stopped purchasing new games, I've fallen behind in fixing the games I have and keeping them working. So until they are all working and setup no new games!

Stargate fixed!

I got lucky this weekend and was able to get the Stargate game working. After I pulled the game boards out of the cabinet I verified that the mode of failure was the same, nothing on the screen, no sound, and bizarre display on the 7-segment display that posts error messages.

The values being posted kind of looked like '1..3..1..' which is a RAM failure. Since I happened to have an extra set of 4116's I swapped them all (one back at a time) and nothing changed. I then read on on these types of failures and the CMOS RAM was a suspect. So I cut out the 5114, put in a 18-pin socket and stuffed a 2114 in it's place. That would be functional but it wouldn't allow for battery backup, but I didn't have a 5114 laying about. Of course this didn't change anything.

I then found some Stargate troubleshooting documents, one in particular stood out (here), and the emphasis was to check the power first before doing any other work. The first step is to check that the regulated voltages coming off the power board are proper, the second step is to verify that the voltages at key points throughout the system are proper.

Sure enough there was no +12 (regulated) coming out. With my scope I could see I had good voltage at the test point, but the connector going off-board had only about 1.92v. I pulled the small daughter card and could read a good voltage without the connector, leading to me to suspect something was pulling down the +12. Once I reconnected everything I got a good reading on the +12v going off board, and Stargate booted! The important lesson here is that one should always check the voltages first.

At some point I'd like to do a "get well kit" on the power board, but everything is working and this isn't a priority.

Now that Stargate is working I have to choose my next game to fix, Battlezone or Missile Command. Battlezone is such a physically large game that the current plan is to disassemble it to get it from the garage into my basement work area. Another project I have is to get a 15v2000 (15" black&white vector) working. This has been sitting on the shelf for the last 10 years (!!) and really needs to get fixed - though I don't have a game to hook up to it. My original plan was to use this with my Zektor ZVG in bar cabinet, but I'm kind of hooked on a 19" screen for the ZVG.

Wrapping up Defender

Since I purchased the Stargate game, the priority has been to get Defender done. I decided not to refinish the cabinet at this time, but electronically the Defender game is done. I ordered some feet from Happs Controls (leveler feet) to replace the worn ones on the game, and now Defender is back to being upright.

My preliminary testing of the Stargate game indicates the monitor is fine, so the problem (the game just shows a blank screen, no sound) is with the game boards. Looking at the power supply the LEDs are all lit, so it appears that the power supply is good as well (I’ll put a probe on it to make sure).

So now Defender is back in it's cabinet and playable. I need to tighten up the joystick, it's a bit sloppy, but otherwise the game is in good condition.

I have pulled all the electronics out of Stargate. Tomorrow I'll hook them back up and start the process of figuring out what is wrong. I've ordered a battery backup kit (the lithium battery one that Bob Roberts sells), and some RAMs just in case.

Stargate

I have my Defender game working 100% but I've been playing around with the cabinet. By chance I saw a Stargate game (non-working of course) come on eBay at a decent price (okay, $250) that was local, so I put in my bid and waited 10 minutes to see if I won it (I told you it was by chance). So now I'm the new owner of a non-working Stargate game.

I went to Linden NJ (about 30 minutes away) to pick up the game early Christmas Eve morning with one of my daughters. The game was in the shape it was advertised so no complaints there. We hauled it home in the Suburban (it's really good having a Suburban when you need to move video games).

So the Stargate is in the basement right next to the Defender. My priority now is to get Defender put back together, I'll deal with the restoration of the cabinet later. Since Stargate uses the same monitor as the Defender (a GO7-CBO), I was able to swap monitors to see if the Stargate monitor was working. The good news is that the Stargate monitor is good but it does need a cap kit. So the problems are deeper (I suspected that since there was no sound during the POST) and will require some work.

So I just ordered a standard set of supplies when dealing with a Williams game, first a GO7-CBO cap kit and a "get well kit" for the linear power supply. Yes, the Stargate still has it's original power supply - no switching, and I'm going to keep it that way if at all possible (by the way the supply LEDs are all lit, so the supply probably isn't the problem). I also ordered a set of RAMs, the 4116's seem to go out quite commonly with these boards.

The cabinet of the Stargate isn't too bad. Like most cabs there are big holes from where lock bars were installed to secure the coin box. I have to rework the power cord. My plan is to use an IEC power entry module like I did for the Ms Pacman.

High Score for Defender

I did some more work on the Defender game today. My first priority was to get the high score kit installed. This is another item I purchased from Bob Roberts (www.therealbobroberts.net) that replaces the three AA battery holder that comes stock on a Defender board.

Invariably having AA batteries on a board causes all kinds of problems when the batteries leak. For some boards the damage is extensive and renders the board unusable, but for mine the damange was rather minor. But the battery back didn't work as the terminals of the battery holder were corroded.

The solution is to remove the AA battery holder an replace with a CR2032 lithium holder & battery. This is relatively minor surgery. Now my Defender keeps it's s/w configuration settings and high scores. I've read some postings on the net that claim the lithium battery will be drained pretty quickly. I don't know why this would be the case. the CMOS 5101 RAM has a standby current of about 5 uA, this is probably not a whole lot more than the self-discharge rate of the lithium battery. Looking at the schematic I can't see where else there might be a current loss. I figure the battery will keep high scores for about the same amount of time as the shelf life of the CR2032, which is probably 10-15 years.

The speaker for the Defender is ripped and I have to figure out what to do, re-cone this speaker, send it out for re-coning, or just get a replacement. I can get a new speaker for about $21, but re-coning will cost at least $40. But then again a re-coned speaker is more "original".

I started filling the in the dents and holes in the cabinet. I'm staying away from any work that will commit me to totally refinishing the cabinet as I haven't decided if I want to go that far, the side art isn't in bad shape, but there are spots where it's been painted over in a poor attempt to hide scratches.

Defender lives

I got the bridge rectifier from Bob and installed it. The +5 came up immediately. I completed connecting all the components on my work table and fired up the game. No sound, but I got a "rug pattern" on the GO7 monitor. Since this game used to work I suspected that when the power supply went on the fritz it took something with it.

The most likely suspect were the 4116 DRAMs. These were a pretty standard part "back in the day". What's annoying about these parts is they require 3 voltages to operation, a +5, -5 and +12v supply. I also recall (from back when I had a TRS-80 that used these same memory chips) that these chips were finicky regarding how the power is supplied. My guess was when the +5 went out it took the RAM chips down too.

Luckily you can still get these chips, so I ordered a complete set (24, for 48K of RAM) from Bob Roberts. They came in today. I pulled all the old chips and put in the new. I turned the system on and Defender came up.

I'm not playing the game yet I still have a couple of issues to address. I need a new speaker, the one in the game has a rather large tear, though it still sounds good. The bigger problem is I need to fix the battery backup on the game. This is a common problem, when batteries leak their acid tends to corrode the board and eventually the battery holder and traces are eaten away. That's the case for my board so I have some work ahead of me to clean this up.

Battery backup for a Defender game is important, it's not just about the high score. Defender and other Williams games use software configuration. In other words the configuration of the machine is stored in memory (RAM), and if that memory isn't backed up by battery it will "lose" the configuration and the game will be unplayable until it's re-configured. This is a major pain in the ass to perform every time you want to play a game.

So the solution is to either fix the battery holder (AA type batteries), replace with a Bob Roberts replacement (Lithium battery) or try to find the SimTek replacement that swaps out the 5101 with an NVRAM - the no battery solution.

For now I need to move on to the cap kit for the GO7 and make decisions about how far I want to take restoration of the cabinet.

On to Defender!

The Ms Pacman is doing very well in its new home (my eldest daughter's bedroom). There was an issue where the colors of the monitor were off, but re-routing the internal power lines cleared up the issue.

My son and I moved the Defender game into the house. I then proceeded to pull all the guts out of the cabinet (it's an upright) and lay them out on a table. I have confirmed there's an issue with the power supply, it appears the 35A bridge rectifier (BR1) is shot so I've ordered a replacement (& some other parts) from Bob Roberts.

The GO7 monitor is filthy so I've spent some time trying to clean it up. I think I need to hault it out to the garage so I can use my air compressor to clean it up.

Yesterday I used a sponge and some soapy water and cleaned the now empty cabinet inside & out. There's some repair work needed on the cabinet, the previous owner had installed a standard light switch (the kind you have in your home) and cut a rather large hole in the cabinet. After these repairs are done I'm considering purchasing a set of stencils (www.gamestencils.com) and repainting the exterior.

The priority is the electronics. With the parts I ordered from Bob I should be able to get the power supply working. Once the game is operational, I'll re-cap the GO7. Then I can move on to the aesthetics of the game.

Ms Pacman Complete!

Finally, the "restoration" of the Ms Pacman game is complete and the game has been moved up to my daughter's room. I learned a lot of things in fixing up this game (such as there's no such thing as a "cheap" game when you are restoring).

Notice the 1/2 player buttons above the coin door. These are not "Pacman" authentic but were part of the cabinet as I received it. I opted to leave these buttons in place and keep them functional.

You can see in the picture that there are holes for the speakers. Once again not "Pacman" authentic, but this is how the cabinet was originally configured.

There's one thing that I did that was "wrong". Player one is to the right of the coin door, not the left as it should be in a true Pacman game. I'm also missing lights behind the control panels, another item that wasn't present in the game as I received it. I needed to get this game done so I could move onto other projects, and I can always circle back and includes lights when I have the time.

I had one major set back right before I finished everything. Upon closing up the game for the last time the neck board of the GO7 monitor was cracked. This is another indicator that this cocktail cabinet was not originally a Pacman, the neck board had left scratches on the back of the coin box frame.

This really bummed me out, I figured the neck board was shot and I had to find a replacement. Looking on eBay I saw some board sets for around $90. I opted to see if I could repair the neck board since I had nothing to lose.

Fortunately the neck board is single-sided, so I identified the breaks the traces and soldered up bridges using solid #22 wiring. This worked very well and I restored the monitor back to operation. You can see the result to the left.

While I had the system open I figured I'd address the edge connector issue. I had purchased an edge connector repair kit from Bob Roberts but since my connectors were in pretty good shape I was hesitant to modify the board. During one of the repair sessions the trace for the +7AC tore up (I'm sure it was in bad shape), so now I had no choice. Now I have solid connections as well as a newly rewired edge connector.

Now the only issue with the monitor is that the fan and transformers are unshielded so there's a slight wave. This "wiggle" isn't present when I have the game open, so I'm guessing it's due to the proximity (inches) of the components (transformer & fan) to the monitor. I don't have a lot of options in repositioning internal parts, so I'm going to live with this issue for the mean time.

The game is set to free play and the volume is at a tolerable level. So far the internal temperature seems to be in a good range and the fan, while noisy, isn't annoying. The monitor could still use a good tuning just to get the colors and sizing right, but it's playable.

Now I have to decide which game to fix next, I have a couple of options:

Defender - there's something wrong with the power supply, hopefully this would be quicky.

Battlezone - this game plays blind. I like vectors and I'd really like to get this one up and running.

Missile Command - used to work but now the screen is just showing test patterns. This game also needs some work on the trackballs, they aren't playing too well.

Space Invaders - no sound and the cabinet has water damage.

Defender is the game I have the most fun playing so I'm going to start work on getting this game back into shape. Hopefully it won't take long.

I have to get more games working. I have a self imposed limit of having only 2 non-working games, otherwise I can't acquire any new games. Space Invaders technically works, but with Defender on the fritz I have more than two (Battlezone & Missile Command) that don't work, so no more acquisitions.

For now Ms Pacman is in my eldest daughter's room. I have to admit it looks pretty good considering this was my first "restoration". This was not cheap, I'll post a complete break down of parts, but basically the sunk cost into this game is about $800. There were opportunities to reduce costs but the majority of the expensive items were related to creating an "authentic" PacMan/Ms Pacman game - purchasing overlays & underlays.

New harness

After some research I figured the most likely cause of the screen problems the Ms Pacman was experiencing. These are known as "hum bars" and generally can be traced back to poor power/grounding. The easiest solution is to replace all the fuse holder blocks to clean up connections. The second solution is to replace the edge connections.

I swapped out the fuse blocks and the problem remained, so I moved on to the more difficult task of rewiring the edge connector. Once again with another order to "The Real Bob Roberts" and I had two options in hand. One was a "hum bar fixup kit" that provided a new 22/44 pin molex connector. The second option was a completely new wiring harness.

The parts arrived 2 days later and started with the easier of the two fixes, swapping the molex edge connector. One by one I removed wires from the old edge connector and connected them to the new edge connector. For the power connectors I beefed up the wiring (to 18ga) and soldered the connectors to ensure a better connection. I cleaned up areas of the wiring where the previous owner had cut into wires to get access to ground.

This did the trick, the hum bars are gone. Based on my dialog with Bob, the harness my game has is not a standard Pacman/Midway harness, it's pretty clear someone retrofitted a Pacman upright into this cocktail cabinet.

So I'm almost ready to button up the game. I added a fan (there's a mounting for one, it had been removed) and rewired the A/C internals as noted in my earlier blog. My next task is to neatly install the wiring and install the new cocktail table glass with the new underlay. I'll include some pictures in a future post.