Prior to shipping the board, I had already replaced several components. While inspecting the board, I discovered that one of the EPROMS was missing a leg. Instead of repairing it, I decided to order a new pre-programmed set. Stephan from Hobby Roms quickly sent a new set out to me, although shipping from him takes a bit longer as he is located in Canada and the package had to clear customs. Just to be on the safe side, I also ordered a new 6502 processor and a pokey chip. These were obtained from Mike’s Arcade.

I was a little nervous testing out the repaired board. If the game didn’t work, it meant more troubleshooting, more replacement parts and more money. Fortunately for me, I was greeted with a perfectly working Missile Command machine:

I’m going to do very little to this game. The bottom left hand corner of the cabinet has a little damage which will get repaired. I’ll probably put some new t-molding on it, clean it up well and that will be it. Special thanks once again to Arcade Solution for the timely repair! I highly recommend Andre’s services if you are looking for relatively affordable board repairs.

If you’re looking for more cool information, atarigames.com has a great collection of official Atari documents and memos available for download. To download the original three page Missile Command proposal document, click here. Wondering how much it cost to build each Missile Command upright? Click here for an official cost sheet.

Speaking of the control panel, I finished the vectorization on it and placed an order with Mame Marquees to have it reproduced. It is probably going to be a couple of weeks before I receive it. Everything lined up well on my last test print.

I spent a bit of time with Missile Command swapping out all of the EPROMS, the 6502 CPU and the pokey (a custom sound chip) and still get the same results after powering it on. There are two RAM chips that have quite a bit of corrosion, my guess is they are the culprit. Unfortunately, my soldering abilities aren’t good enough to solder in new RAM sockets so the board is being mailed out today for repair. The turn around is going to be around two weeks.

Hopefully, I can get some pictures of the painted All American Football cabinet in the next day or two and post a “visual” update for everyone.

The cabinet has a serial number of 13473. There are two coin door counters, one for each side. The left hand coin counter shows 34,493 plays while the right shows 14,398. Keep in mind that these are not always accurate. The cabinet currently only has one of four leg levelers on it, so if it looks crooked in the pictures, there is nothing physically wrong with the cabinet.

The lower left corner has some small damage but not near as much as the Dig Dug corner. Fortunately, if I decide to fix it and butcher the side art, reproduction side art is widely available for Missile Command cabinets. The coin door has a pretty cool “License On File” tag which will probably remain. The control panel is in great shape. There are three areas that have chipped away but touch up paint was applied and looks pretty good.

I was only able to spend about 5 minutes looking at the machine last night. The biggest challenge with this game is not going to be the cosmetic repairs, but getting it functional again. I tried to throw it into test mode last night with no luck. The screen just flashes a white/gray screen and a garbled tone is heard.

All of the pictures can be viewed by clicking on the “read the rest of this entry” link below. The photos are also located in the photo gallery.

Now the bad news, the game in it’s present state is not working. Other than plugging the machine in, I haven’t run any tests on it. All I get is a flashing screen of multiple colors. I haven’t even thrown the game into test mode yet to see what it reports back. Hopefully tonight I’ll get a chance to dig a bit deeper and try to figure out the cause.

The image to the left is not my machine, but is a stock image from the Killer List of Video Games, where you can read some of the history of the Missile Command game. I should be able to get a few photographs of my cabinet later tonight. As usual, all images will be posted to the photo gallery and a dedicated category will be set up to track all of the progress on this machine.

I’ll post an update tomorrow.