Archive for May, 2013


Asteroids Free Play part 1

Filed Under: electronics, games, retro
May.22, 2013

asteroids

I knew it wouldn’t be long until another weird arcade issue surfaced.  This is one that has been troubling me since I worked on this machine.  The Airlock picked up a non-functioning Asteroids for fairly cheap a short while back.  Round one of fixing led James (with not much help from me) to bad ram chips.  Once he popped those in, the machine seemed to work until a week later when it didn’t.

During that entire week, the machine was left on freeplay as are most of the newest games when they first come into The Airlock while they are still in the functional testing phase.  The game died and so I took the board home and laid a mile of solder on it to fix all the questionable joints.  I also cleaned up and reseated a bunch of shaky looking roms in nasty wiper sockets.

When I popped the board back it, after a little bit of finagling, it fired right up… in German.  Not a problem, we tweaked up the dip switches and it was good to go.  We didn’t notice the latest problem until we tried to switch it off of freeplay mode.  Flipping the switch made the screen change to “1 coin, 1 play”.  Problem is that when you put in a coin, then play a game, after the game is over, both start lights are flashing as if there are credits on the machine.  Because there are.

We’ve had other bigger priorities to deal with so this was back burnered but I was out there tonight and by pure fluke, my dad called me.  I tend to pace around when I talk on the phone so I paced and walked by Asteroids and hit several of the buttons.  No one had played the game today because The Airlock was closed for a private party who was there only for Battletech.  After I hit the buttons, I noticed that the credit lights were now flashing.  Very curious.

I expect that the problem is that something is cross-wired in the coin door/control harness.  For instance, something may not be grounded properly or what someone thought was a ground is actually another control line and they have tied it together.  Kelly suspects that there is probably a short circuit on the logic board itself.  Maybe I got too carried away with fixing those solder joints?  Who knows.  When we figure it out, I’ll post our discoveries.

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Craigslist Psychology

Filed Under: games
May.21, 2013

Simpsons-Arcade

I hate Craigslist.

I hate having my time repeatedly wasted by flaky people and “professional” negotiators.  People who say they are on their way to pick something up, but they’re not.  People who email you interested in an item and then flake when you say “let’s meet” and my favorite…  people who say “Sure, I’ll sell it to you, let’s meet in the morning” and then when you go to follow up they say “ah, sorry dude, someone came by last night and bought it”.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on Craigslist.  I’ve gotten some great deals on there.  I’ve often purchased pro audio equipment on Craigslist and ended up selling it for double or triple the amount I paid months or years later.  If I tried to make a career of that, I would surely drive myself crazy but for recouping hobby money to spend on other hobbies, it’s been great.

None of this is really what I’ve chosen to zero on at the moment though.

Lately I’ve been looking on Craigslist for arcade games.  As much as I would love to find an environment Discs of Tron for $500 in Kirkland, it hasn’t happened yet.  That being said, I have seen other interesting things.  There is an odd phenomenon that I have noticed and the easiest way to explain it is via example.

There is a mint looking 4 player Simpsons arcade machine on Craigslist right now.  The seller wants $650 for it and it’s in Bellevue.  There is no point in me linking you to the ad because it will be long gone by the time you read this.  Whatever the case, a friend of mine offered the guy $550 via email and got no response at all.

There is also a wanted ad on Craigslist “looking to buy a 4 player Simpson’s arcade cabinet. Must be in good condition. Reasonable price. Thank you.”  That person is in Redmond which is geographically next to Bellevue.

These guys sound like a perfect match up but there are so many things that could be at play here…

Simpsons arcade machine seller:

  • Maybe he’s firm on the price an isn’t responding to “lowball” offers.
  • Maybe the ad is fake and is designed to screw with hungry and pathetic arcade collectors.
  • The wanted ad may have been there before the seller posted the game for sale and he may not have looked.
  • Perhaps he listed the machine on Craigslist and left town or hasn’t checked his email since he listed it.

Guy who placed the wanted ad:

  • Maybe this guy isn’t willing to pay $1 over $300 (unrealistic expectations)
  • Maybe he didn’t look on Craigslist before posting his wanted ad although this is extremely unlikely.
  • Maybe the game listed for sale was not listed at the time this wanted ad was placed.
  • Perhaps this guy saw the game when it was first listed on Craigslist for a higher price and felt it wasn’t even worth attempting to negotiate the price since it was so far from what he was willing to pay.
  • Perhaps he’s a flake and tried to buy the machine listed on Craigslist currently without following through.
  • Perhaps the wanted ad guy does not like the for sale ad guy and is just trying to screw with him for some form of revenge.
  • Maybe this is just part of an odd social experiment.

On Craigslist, sometimes it’s easy to lose perspective.  For instance, you can look on there and find “the deal of the century” and all of the sudden you decide that you are only willing to pay THAT price for another copy of the same thing.  This can skew your view of value drastically.  Remember that even though it’s on the Internet with a price tag on it, it’s not necessarily for sale or obtainable by you (or maybe anyone).

As far as the two gentlemen with ads on Craigslist…  I’ll leave you with a simple question, would the wanted ad exist on Craigslist at all if the for sale ad wasn’t already posted on there?  I have seen this situation many, many times before on things like cars, bicycles, houses, etc, etc.  My thought is that the person who suddenly covets this item didn’t know they wanted or needed the item before seeing the “for sale” listing on Craigslist.  Once the seed is planted though and they decide that the original item that sparked their interest does not meet their needs, then they set out on a quest to obtain this item.

What does the guy who placed the wanted ad expect though?!?  Is someone susposed to come out of the woodwork with a NICER copy for LESS money and deliver it to him?

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Freeze Spray vs Donkey Kong

Filed Under: electronics, repair
May.20, 2013

I’ve been spending a lot of my free time lately helping the guys over at The Airlock bring some of their newly acquired arcade games back up to good working order. The majority of the time, monitors are the problem area with these games.

One of the latest ones I fixed was Donkey Kong. It’s an original dedicated Nintendo cabinet from the early 80’s. One of the better looking design schemes out there. In the cabinet is the original Sanyo EZ 20 monitor mounted up on it’s side which is important to note for later…

This monitor had a weird problem. It lost all ability to hold the picture horizontally which appeared as vertical static since the monitor is mounted sideways. The weird thing though was that when you first turned it on, it was fine but then if you rebooted it, this condition existed. Sometimes it went into this condition after many hours of play though as well.p

With monitors, my usual starting point is caps. The electrolytic capacitors in this monitor appeared to be 30+ year old originals. CRT monitors are notoriously hard on caps. These games were only designed to last 2-3 years at the most since in the golden era of arcade, it was unfathomable that anyone would care about a game past that point.

Back to Donkey Kong though. Of course I started with the caps. I figured I had fixed it when I fired it back up to a perfectly clear picture. I turned it off to finish reassembling the monitor and when we turned it on to retest, we found our familiar squiggles.

Kelly, one of the guys at The Airlock, thought this may be a logic board problem in the video circuitry since it was a problem we were unfamiliar with in our experience of fixing monitors. After 20 feet of solder later and many questionable joints fixed on the logic board the problem still remained however.

Enter the freeze spray

Since the problem appeared only after the game warmed up, I figured that we may have a chance to pinpoint the faulty component with the old freeze trick. I grabbed a can of r134a that is on hand there and the little red straw and started blasting while someone watched the screen for me. It didn’t take long since the screen went back to a perfect picture practically on my first spray.

I power cycled the system and luckily the problem immediately reoccurred. We repeated this process, each time being more precise with the can of spray until we finally pinpointed the problem component, a 1/4w 1k resistor. Swapping that out fixed the problem and it’s been rock-solid ever since.

It was interesting to me that a resistor became heat sensitive. I was originally expecting it to be a solder joint, a cap(but they were all replaced) or a heat-sensitive IC perhaps.

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