I started working on the basement again in October and have made pretty good progress. New recessed lights have been installed to replace the hideous ceiling fans that the previous owner had installed. I still need to run the wiring from the switches to the lights. Most of the insulation has been put into place. All of the wiring to the outlets is in place as well as Cat-5 cable and cable for the satellite system.

I decided to put down a sub-floor just to eliminate the feeling of being in a basement. I found a product locally which is a 24 millimeter membrane with dimples that you place on the concrete. It acts as a moisture barrier and air gap and allows the concrete to breathe. On top of the membrane, you lay normal plywood just like you would any other sub-floor. This is the product I purchased. Because of a lack of storage space, I can only work on half of the flooring at any given time. I have half complete. I’ll need to move games and a few other items around to finish the other half. Before I move the games around, I’m going to go ahead and install the drywall on the half with the sub-floor. If mother nature cooperates, I’ll hopefully be picking up a load of drywall on my way home from work tonight. Unfortunately, it’s supposed to start raining and snowing sometime today. I’ll have some updated pictures after the weekend.

On the arcade front, I really haven’t done anything but I have been stockpiling parts in hopes of resuming some projects after the basement work progresses. Here’s what I have lined up, in order of priority:

Centipede

I have all of the parts to completely restore this cabinet. Phoenix Arcade had a Thanksgiving sale on Centipede side art, so I picked up a set. I picked up a marquee from a fellow collector. Another collector was parting out a Centipede so I grabbed his speaker & light assembly to replace the one from mine that was covered in mouse excrement. Finally, I have a new trackball and control panel overlay ready to be installed. The only thing this game really needs is a new monitor tube. I’ve been looking, but no luck yet. Centipede will be getting a complete restoration similar to my Dig Dug restoration.

Donkey Kong

This one will also be getting a full restoration. I still have the new control panel & joystick that I received last Christmas. It still hasn’t been installed. I have cap kits for both the monitor and audio board to install. I have two NOS coin mechs for the coin door. All I really need for this one is the side art. I’m considering a new new monitor bezel and marquee as well.

Donkey Kong Jr

A full restoration lies ahead for this Donkey Kong cabinet, converted to Jr. I really don’t have any parts for this yet, but do have a high score save kit to install on the board. It will be getting a new coat of paint in Jr orange, new marquee, control panel, bezel and side art.

Golden Tee Conversion

This one will get the hole repaired where the bill changer used to be, as well as a few other minor cabinet repairs, and be good to go.

Missile Command

Nothing major with this one. I’ve got a multigame kit to install on the board which allows you to play both Missile Command and Super Missile Attack. It saves high scores too!

That’s all for now. Hopefully some work actually gets accomplished this year! Finally, hats off to Jeff Rothe at Rotheblog for the new, free WordPress theme. I’m diggin’ it!

When I put the new trackball mounting plate on the control panel, I discovered that the new mounting plate and old mounting plate were different sizes. The new plate had about 1/2″ of space remaining between the outer edge and the routed area it was to fit into. While the ideal solution would have been to bondo the space, I didn’t have any bondo handy but did have some Durham Rock Hard Water Putty at my disposal.

Here’s a shot of the control panel with the old button holes filled and the space around the trackball mounting plate filled and sanded:

While I think bondo would have been a better alternative, I didn’t have too much concern with using the putty as the mounting plate is bolted down and shouldn’t shift during gameplay.

Once I had the control panel prepped, I carefully measured and drilled new holes for all of the buttons, including the two new buttons not used on the 2000 Golden Tee board set that was originally in the cabinet (backspin & fly-by). I then installed the overlay that I custom designed in Adobe Illustrator and had printed by Mame Marquees:

I still need to fill the gaping hole in the front of the cabinet where a bill collector was once installed, but right now the game is functioning and playable. That will have to suffice for the time being.

I then mounted the Golden Tee 2005 PCB, hard drive and power supply into the cabinet and hooked up only the monitor and speakers for the time being.  I fired the game up and spent about 20 minutes adjusting the size and position of the image as well as the brightness and contrast settings.  I had a pretty decent image on the screen but noticed that it kept pulsing from light to dark.  I suspected a bad adjustment pot so I began to try and track down which one was bad.  While I was working on this, I inadvertently stepped on the power cord and the game powered off.

I quickly realized that the power cord on the machine was bad, so I decided to unplug it and replace it.  As I was trying to unplug the cord, I put my hand on top of the metal power supply and was shocked.  Not shocked at what I found, but literally shocked.  Not a jolting shock, more like someone had stuck 1000 pins into my hand all at the same time. Damn, that’s always a fun way to discover that the cabinet is not properly grounded.  Obviously, the power cord was causing the game to short but it  also had no ground pin.  Why I hadn’t noticed this before is beyond me but a quick switch of the power cord with a cord that had a grounding pin solved both the “shock” issue and the unstable monitor issue.

I didn’t have a camera handy, so I took a quick video of the working game with my cell phone.  Wait, I had a camera, I just decided to take a video instead of a picture?  It WAS late by this time.  The strobing effect you see is not present on the actual monitor, it’s a product of the crappy camera in my cell phone.  This is also my first attempt at posting a video, so it might work, it might not.

[See post to watch Flash video]

There is still plenty to do on this cabinet.  I need to apply the overlay to the control panel; cut new holes for all of the buttons and hook them up; install the track ball; and wire up the coin door just to name a few.  The cabinet also needs some cosmetic work but I want to make sure everything is going to work properly before I spend too much time on that aspect.  Stay tuned…

The cabinet was complete when I picked it up.  It had an old Golden Tee Fore control panel overlay on it that had seen better days.  I removed the control panel overlay and the control panel itself is not pictured in any of the pictures.  It is in my workshop where I am filling some holes and prepping it for the additional buttons necessary in a Golden Tee 2005 cabinet.  I created a new overlay from scratch, also detailed in my last post.

The cabinet, cosmetically is in decent shape.  There is a big hole in the front portion where a bill acceptor used to be and a broken piece of wood that has been semi-repaired on the top, near the marquee.  My odds of finding an affordable bill acceptor are slim to none, so I’ll probably place a piece of scrap wood over the hole and fill it with bondo.  If that doesn’t work, I can always throw another coin door on that side of the cabinet, although I probably wouldn’t wire it up.  The broken piece of wood held together with brackets and what appears to be epoxy can be repaired with a form and some Bondo.

Eventually, I will take the Golden Tee 2000 board out of this cabinet and put my working Golden Tee 2005 board and hard drive in.  Those parts are currently being stripped from the All American Football cabinet.  There is plenty of room inside the cabinet to mount additional boards so I will eventually add a jamma switcher and World Class Bowling at a minimum.  Right now, I can easily swap between the Golden Tee 2005 board, Golden Tee 2002, Golden Tee 2000 and World Class Bowling although it will be a manual switch-out of the boards.  With a jamma switcher, you can press a certain button combination and automatically switch between the boards.

I have a brand new Happs 3″ trackball that will also be put into the machine.  The trackball pictured below is working, so I will keep it around as a spare.  Hopefully the mounting holes line up. The marquee is going in the garbage. I have a Golden Tee 2002 marquee that I will use as a replacement.

The short term plan is to get the Golden Tee 2005 board and hard drive into this machine, run some additional wiring, apply the control panel overlay  and get it up and running.  The long term plan is to repair the damaged areas which will probably require a repainting of the entire cabinet.  I have too many other projects right now to worry too much about the cosmetic appearance of this one.  Just wait until you see the Centipede cabinet!

Yesterday, I picked up a non-working Centipede.  This one is in very rough shape and needs a lot of cosmetic repair.  It’s going to get a full restoration eventually, similar to Dig Dug.  I’d like to get the game working first before committing a lot of time to the restoration.  Pictures will be forthcoming.

I also made an offer last week on a non-working Operation Wolf.  I just got a call that they accepted the offer.  I will probably pick it up sometime this weekend.  Again, pictures will be forthcoming.  In summary, I owe you pictures of three new cabinets.  Stay tuned.

There were a couple of things I didn’t like about the cabinet, but nothing that was a deal killer.  There was an area which had been removed from the front of the cabinet, more than likely for a bill acceptor.  The bill acceptor was removed long ago, so all the remained was a large hole.  The top piece had a corner that had been broken off and was re-attached with some brackets.  This was nothing that a little bondo and wood couldn’t fix.  The game was not working at all, but I figured that for $20 it was worth it if I could at least salvage the monitor.

I picked up the machine and besides the damage mentioned above, cosmetically all it really needed was a good cleaning.  I then proceeded with some basic troubleshooting to see what in the cabinet worked or didn’t work.  I started with some voltage readings at the power supply and had 120 volts coming into the cabinet.  I then moved to the +5v terminal on the power supply and found that I only had about 4.1 volts.  This is usually too low to power anything in the cabinet.  Most power supplies have an adjustment knob on them for adjusting the voltages, but turning this knob did nothing to repair the low voltage.  I swapped in a spare power supply I had around, adjusted the voltage to 5.1 and the entire cabinet came to life.

So, for the low price of $20, I had a working Golden Tee 2000 board set, a somewhat banged up cabinet and a working 25″ standard resolution monitor.  Not bad!  As I was cleaning the cabinet out, I found 2 beer bottle caps, 1 ping pong ball and $2.50 in quarters.  So, in reality I only paid $17.50 for the cabinet.

Once I found that the cabinet only needed a power supply, it made my decision that much easier.  The Golden Tee components would all be going into the cabinet.  The control panel was pretty beat up on the cabinet and my initial thought was to take the original Golden Tee overlay that I had and place it on the cabinet.  After taking some measurements, I realized that the left and right button holes on the overlay hung about 1/2″ over the edge, which wasn’t going to work.  Here’s a shot of the overlay I planned to use for those that are interested:

I then looked at some other options, like the control panel overlay sticker that was available, along with a decal set to label the trackball and button functions. I had concern that the stickers would eventually peel up, so I decided to design my own overlay. It’s a take off of the original with a few of my own twists (click for a full sized image):

This overlay is made to fit exactly on the existing control panel.  After several trial runs, I can tell you that the blue background prints darker than it looks.  The overlay is currently in the process of being printed on adhesive backed polycarbinate laminate.  Once I receive it, I will transfer my Golden Tee 2005 boards into the cabinet and start on the cosmetic repairs.  I should have pictures of the cabinet in the next few days.  Now, I need to decide what I’m going to do with the All American Football cabinet once again.

Stay tuned!

After the basic shape of the base was cut, it was time to figure out how to mount the trackball.  The Golden Tee operation manual that I have has a template for cutting the trackball but it was over-scaled by about 1/4″ and was of no use.  Using the trackball hole that I traced, I reached back to my high school math days and determined the center point of the hole and thus the center of the trackball.  It was easy after that to lay everything out from the center point.  The mounting plate needed to be recessed in the base about 1/8″ so the control panel overlay will sit flush over it.  I used my router and a straight bit to cut out the material.  I then realized the the buttons were not going to extend all of the way through the control panel, so I routed material away from each button hole so I could fasten the nut.  I threw a coat of black paint on it to keep the wood from showing through the control panel overlay.  I’m not a master craftsman and have a very limited set of tools so it’s not pretty, but nobody is every going to see it anyway:

You can see the routed area for the mounting plate in the first picture and the area around the buttons in the second.  No, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time sanding the areas to make them look perfect.  Once the control panel overlay is on and the panel is mounted to the cabinet, those areas won’t be seen at all.  Next, I drilled four holes for bolts of the track ball mounting plate and attached it to the base with nuts and washers:

You can see how the plate sits flush with the top of the base.  I then attached the trackball to the mounting plate and installed the buttons:

Finally, it was time to attach the control panel overlay. I temporarily attached it with about 4 screws. The screws I had are too small so I won’t secure it completely until I have the proper size:

The control panel base itself is pretty ugly and looks like an amateur carpenter built it. With the overlay installed, it looks pretty good and I’m happy with the results. The next problem to tackle: when I center the overlay on the cabinet, the left camera button sits right on top of the cabinet edge.  The easy solution is to hack away a bit of the cabinet and build a new base around the control panel but I’m going to have to weigh my options as I want to keep the cabinet as close to original as possible. I’ll be honest, at this point I’d prefer someone offer me an empty, original Golden Tee cabinet but that’s not likely to happen and my 19″ monitor wouldn’t look quite right in one.

Here’s a shot of the monitor in vertical orientation, as required by All American Football:

We’ll get a little monitor nomenclature out of the way to avoid confusion. The monitor is self explanatory, the frame is the metal part holding the monitor in place and the chassis is the PCB sitting under the monitor. What I needed to do was keep the frame and chassis in their present orientation inside the cabinet and modify them so the monitor could be rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise.

If you look closely at the picture above, you can see two rails on the outside of the frame (the bolt holes are just barely visible) that extend vertically the entire length of the frame.  Here’s a shot of the frame side removed, with a better picture of that rail:

In the picture, you can see where the monitor was originally bolted to the frame. There’s a spring loaded square bolt clip with bolt toward the top, left of the frame side. There’s also one at the bottom but I didn’t center the image very well, so it’s not visible. I swapped both frame rails to the opposite side that they were originally on so the bolt holes point towards the monitor.

The problem at this point was the curvature of the monitor. Because the frame rails were straight and the monitor curved, I couldn’t get the bolt holes to the corresponding bolt hole on the monitor. I needed to cut a section out of the rail, keeping the top and bottom bolt holes, but removing the middle so it would align properly. Enter the grinder with a metal cutting disc and my vise:

I cut two slots in each rail…you can see where one of the slots is going to be cut in the first picture of the rail. There’s a black line drawn. There’s also one on the other end, washed out by the flash. These cuts were made on both frame sides. The then put each side into my vise and bent the piece back and forth until the center section worked free:

Yeah, I know, my work bench is a mess! I then mounted the newly cut sides to the monitor. The only problem now the a gap between the chassis frame pan and the frame sides. I simply filled each gap with a piece of scrap MDF board, securing it with screws. Here’s a couple shots of the monitor back in the cabinet:

The monitor is now mounted horizontally in the cabinet, perfectly centered both left to right and top to bottom. It looks like I forget a screw in the chassis pan, as it’s not level. I’ll have to correct that tonight. I’m pretty pleased with the results and the monitor can easily be reverted back to a vertical mount if needed. Next up…the control panel.

The game now passes the initialization screen (thanks to a new hard drive) and works great. I still need to wire up the speakers, the service switch and find a way to mount the monitor horizontally in the cabinet. I had a plan for the monitor and started working on it last night. About 10 minutes in, I realized that may plan was not going to work. Back to the drawing board. That will be my main task for this weekend. Stay tuned.

The first step was removal of the All American Football boards from the cabinet.  What I found underneath the board surprised me a bit, a huge round hole, which was previously concealed by the metal panel the boards were mounted to.  This hole would ultimately alter my plans for mounting the Golden Tee boards in the position I wanted but it wasn’t a real big deal.

After the boards were removed I began taking out the wiring that was no longer needed.  Fortunately, the wiring for the coin door lights, marquee light and monitor was already hooked up and could remain in the cabinet.  The wiring to the coin door, excluding the lights, speaker, service switch and volume control was stripped from the cabinet.  I then removed all of the joystick wiring and button wiring from the control panel.  Because the old control panel had 8 buttons and 6 joysticks, this was the bulk of the wiring.  I took extra care to keep the All American Football wiring harness intact so I could always revert the cabinet back if desired.

With all of the All American Football components out of the way, it was time to start the actual conversion of this cabinet to Golden Tee.  Because of the discovered hole, I had to find a spot to mount the Golden Tee board that would ensure it was securely mounted.  Once I did this, I realized that I was not going to be able to mount the hard drive where I initially planned.  The hard drive got mounted to the side of the cabinet.  I then found a spot on the cabinet base to mount the computer power supply.  The computer power supply was to be used to supply power to the hard drive and additional power to the board, as the wiring harness alone won’t provide the necessary power.  Here are a few shots of board, hard drive and computer power supply mounted in the cabinet:

Just for clarification, in the first picture from right to left, the hard drive (mounted to the cabinet side), the Golden Tee board and the switching power supply. The second picture is a shot of the computer power supply mounted in the base of the cabinet (and yes, the bottom needs to be vacuumed out). I will refer to the two power supplies as the switching power supply and computer power supply to avoid confusion, although it will soon become irrelevant.

Once all of the component were mounted it was time to start wiring!  I hooked the jamma wiring harness to the Golden Tee board and ran the power wires to the switching power supply and hooked them to the corresponding terminal, either +5VDC, +12VDC or ground with spade connectors.  I then ran the video green, red, blue, sync and ground wires up to the monitor.  This is where I ran into my first minor problem.  I did not have the connectors needed to run the new wiring directly to the monitor so I needed to connect the new wires to the existing wires.  I snipped each wire toward the bottom of the cabinet and created a butt joint between the old wire and new wire securing it with heat shrink tubing.  I can tell you that the heat shrink tubing created a far better butt joint than I could via crimping.

The only thing left was to apply the needed power to the hard drive and additional power to the board.  I ran molex connectors from the computer power supply to the two required spots on the board and another to the hard drive.  I plugged the computer power supply into the wall and discovered that it didn’t work…it was dead.  Now, someone is going to pipe in and tell me that the computer power supply is an ATX power supply and will only work when plugged into an ATX motherboard.  True, but you can also get them to work by shorting the PS/ON pin with ground.  I verified that the computer power supply was dead by plugging it into a working ATX computer.  This was my biggest challenge as I didn’t have a spare computer power supply handy.

I started researching the power requirements for a Golden Tee green board as my switching power supply had plenty of power.  While reading the manual, I discovered that a specialized connector was available that would allow the Golden Tee green board to run directly off the switching power supply and provide the necessary power to the board and hard drive.  When I looked at the connector, I realized it was simply a molex splitter with bare wires on one end that allowed for it to be wired directly to the switching power supply.  I had my solution.  I cut the molex connectors that I needed from the non-working computer power supply and ran to my local computer store and picked up 3 14″ molex extenders.  I knew that the red wire on the molex plug was +12VDC, the yellow +5VDC and the black wires ground.  I wired all three molex connectors to spade terminals and connected the wires to the appropriate terminal on the switching power supply.  Here are a few shots of the wiring:

The wiring is a bit of a mess right now as it’s a mix of the new jamma wiring and some of the old All American Football wiring that I haven’t yet removed from the cabinet.  All of the wiring that is tied together and attached to the cabinet is new wiring.  The stray wires you see running across the board set, etc. still needs to be removed.

So, with the monitor hooked up to the PCB and the necessary power supplied, it was time to fire up the game and see the results.  Over confident in my abilities, the first time I powered the game up, I didn’t even look at the monitor.  I looked at the back of the machine to make sure I didn’t spot any sparks or smoke!  Everything looked good and I noticed that the IDE activity light on the board indicating hard drive activity was flashing.  Lo and behold it was booting.  It first checks the hard drives for consistency then proceeds to an initialization screen:

The monitor is still mounted vertically in the cabinet, which is a job for another day. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t proceed past the initialization screen. I’m going to guess, at least I hope, it’s due to the fact that no controls, test switches, etc. are wired to the PCB yet. That’s the progress so far. The next step will be creating the new control panel, or at least a temporary panel so I can hook up the controls and try to get the game past the initialization screen. Stay tuned!