A friend of mine ('Striker') recently offered me cocktail arcade machine without a game board inside in exchange for fixing another cocktail cabinet machine. This is something I have wanted for years and never got around to building. The complete cabinet was a Godsend.
After a steep learning curve and a trip with the screen to the local tv repair guy, thanks Horst, I was able to get Striker's machine going and then bought the parts for mine.
The cabinet is a Taito of about 1982 vintage. It has 2 player positions and an original 20" monitor that can be rotated to horizontal or vertical depending on the game board.
I had to pick the 2 round locks (like laptop cable locks) to open the lid and the coin bin lock. This was actually quite fun. It was surprisingly easy after watching a few YouTube videos on the subject. I found the grand sum of $2 in twenty cent pieces.
After a lot of inspection, googling for schematics and some advice from the Aussiearcade forums I started the rejuvenation, including removing old chewing gum.
I cleaned up the mains power supply and removed the redundant wiring.
I removed the switch mode supply as it was faulty.
The connector on the original cable harness was quite unusual and could not be reused.
I now have 60 classic games to play. I love it, the kids love it, even my wife likes to play it.
The favorite at the moment is Pinball.
Each player position only had one 'fire' button so I moved both buttons to one side, and added 2 new buttons to the other. The new buttons work fine but don't fit quite right. I would like to keep the exterior original so I am looking for some 2 original and quite rare Taito buttons the same as this one pictured.
No comments:
Post a Comment