Small but sad warehouse raid

Over the past 20 or so years, I've been on many warehouse raids,  but none quite as sad as this one. Bobby, owner of St. Tammany Amusements, had proven to be a quite difficult person to set up a meeting with. This goes back to 1993 or so. Finally, almost 20 years later, he agreed to meet me at his warehouse. What I found there was really disappointing- almost 30 classics for the most part left in the elements. The games were in a barn with one side of the barn completely open to the weather. Most of the games suffered water damage as over the years during heavy rains, water flowed through the barn and soaked into the bottoms of most of the games. Some games were stored on top of a raised wooden platform, and those were miraculously OK. The Super Pac and Mario Bros. that are in the game room came from this place. Also a bad note is that the guy wants a premium for all of the destroyed cabinets, asking $150 each. No thanks!!

Spotlight on: Moon Patrol

As I began to fall in love with classic games as a kid of the 80's, Moon Patrol was one of my first 'favorites'. A local bingo hall called Jake's was where I played Moon Patrol quite regularly on Friday nights while my mom and grandmother played bingo. As a kid I could make it to point 'Z' then to point 'J' with a high score of 79,360.
 I was able to acquire one from a local amusement company, only to have it destroyed by Hurricane Katrina years ago. This one was one that I had sold to the owner of a bar room in the French Quarter back in '02. He still had it and agreed to sell it to me for around $300. It developed a logic board issue that was resolved by swapping in a working spare, and also has a new repro CPO installed.

Spotlight on : Wacko

Here's one of the games in the arcade that gets regular play, a Bally/Midway Wacko. It uses the MCR-2 hardware, similar to Tron/ Kickman/Solar Fox and a few others.
One Friday Ouida and I stopped by Dee's Amusements in Mississippi to see what they had for sale, and this Wacko was sitting outside in the parking lot. Worse yet was that it was getting ready to pour down raining. The owner, Bill, said $50 and it's yours. I quickly agreed and they brought it inside until I could swing by with my truck the next day.
As for what's been done to the game, of course the G0-7 has been recapped along with Bob Roberts G0-7 trim pot kit to make adjustments smooth. Next, the linear power supply was removed and replaced with an Arcadeshop switcher. Onto the MCR-2 board stack. All ribbon cables were replaced with new ones that I built from scratch. The sound board kept throwing a 'Sound Board Interface Error', so a working spare was swapped in. A repro CPO from Thisoldgame has been ordered and I also have a trackball rebuild kit waiting to be installed. The SSIO board has r135 removed so that sound runs in the attract mode.

Time to get caught up again

Life gets busy sometimes, and it's been a while since I last posted, but now it's time to get caught up once again on the happenings in the game room. First, to start things out, here's a picture of a custom shirt that my wife got me for Christmas. She made sure that the font onthe shirt matches the game room wall lettering font!!

Board game day today

We did play some video games today, with my wife kicking my butt on Millipede.Ouida and I also competed at Tempest, Centipede, Donkey Kong Jr., and Dig Dug.  Here's her and the kids playing some Sorry Sliders:

Other new overlays

And here's three other overlays that were replaced. Here's the panels with the new overlays installed.
Qbert:

Millipede:

and Moon Patrol:

New Asteroids Deluxe overlay

We got tired of seeing the CPO on Asteroids DeLuxe all cracked up and in poor shape, so one of my Father's Day presents from the family was an overlay for this game. Here's the process and final result:

Here's the control panel stripped and ready for the new overlay:

Finished product:

Defender - What a pain to keep running!!

This Defender was one that sat in storage for 10+ years, then brought home when the game room was built. Basically 'just' missing the power supply. Put a power supply in and it came up with a RAM error. Replaced the bad RAM and it worked for a few hours. Pretty much had issue after issue since then. Replaced the CPU to ROM ribbon cable, CPI board, 2 ROM sockets, burned misc. ROMs, fixed the sound board, swapped from 4116 to 4164 RAMs, lithium battery mod for settings retention, and for now it has been working for the past few weeks. Hopefully it's the end of problems with this one!!!

Our high score board

Maybe not the most impressive scores in the world, but it keeps things competitive between us. Picked up this black dry erase board from Hobby Lobby for $24 and the fluorescent markers were a few bucks.

Omega Race fixed again

Omega Race worked for a little while, then started rebooting over and over. It would go into self test without issue, but going into game mode would cause watchdogging of the CPU. It would do this after the game warmed up. Probing the RESET NOT signal showed that the watchdog was being cleared as it was supposed to, but I couldn't lock on to a periodic signal with my scope. However, coolant spray, which would normally pinpoint the bad IC, did not work in this case. On occasion, when entering the self test, it would indicate a bad random EPROM. I went ahead and burned a new set of EPROMs and all is somewhat working. The game plays fine, but the screen 'blooms', or enlarges, when warmed up, indicating a bad HV rectifier on the monitor. As for now, at least I get this when the game is powered on, so there is some success.