Archive for September, 2011
The wall is full
Well, the wall is officially full
The wall of Pins
My roommate picked up the Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, I picked up the South Park and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
Both the South Park and Dracula will need quite a bit of work, the South Park seems to have come from the now defunct Game Works (now Game Time) and I picked up the Dracula from a guy that has been fixing Arcade/Pin’s for a long time…
The South Park works fine, but has some pretty extreme playfield wear, the ball drop from the right wire ramp is pretty extreme, wearing down into the wood. Besides that its actually pretty ok, just needs some cleaning, a new Kenny and some new plastics. Unfortunately the plastics are kind of pricey so its going to have to wait a bit…
The Dracula needed repair on the CPU board, audio board, DMD board, AND the power/driver board (aka ALL of them). But after some time with the soldering iron and my trusty Fluke 73 its come back from the dead (har har)… Playfield needs some cleaning, currently have it stripped down, cleaned, polished and waxed, just waiting some replacement bits before applying a new mylar sheet and reassembling the playfield. After that I am probably going to sell it, I bought it because it was a good deal, and while its actually a pretty great pinball I’d rather have the space open for a machine on my wish list 🙂
A Dig Dug comes, fixed, goes…
So I picked up a Dig Dug arcade machine I found one of the arcade message boards I hang out on… after a 3 hour drive I picked it up and brought it back home after another 3 hour drive. Brought it into the garage and started inspecting it, apparently Atari did not have the greatest  power supply and audio amplifier designs, although in all fairness it was the early 80’s… Anyhow, I know its unorthodox but after messing with the original Atari power supply/audio board I decided the best course of action would be to scrap the whole thing and roll my own…
It only needs 5V and a small audio amp, so I put in a small 5V open frame SMPS and built an small audio amplifier on some perfboard… end result was this…
Dig Dug is alive!
So I am not a huge arcade guy, I bought this as a gift for my mom, she loves Dig Dug and was beyond excited when I showed it to her…
Either way its always nice restoring/repairing an original machine, and there is something special about dedicated machines from the golden age of the arcade