Pretty much done / All done

The T-molding is installed, so the work is complete (for now).

Picture post!

EDIT 9/3/2009: Here's a dark pic with the new marquee and monitor installed:

It's hard to get a quality picture of a monitor.

The End Is Near

One of my last tasks was to apply the red stencil. Here is how it went:

First, the three-layer stencil is positioned on the cabinet:

Second, the back paper layer is removed, which makes the middle layer stick to the cabinet.

Third, the top paper layer is removed, which exposes the actual stencil.

Fourth, the paint is sprayed over the stencil:

Fifth, I go do some yard work while the paint gets tacky.

Sixth, I very carefully peel away the stencil:

Unfortunately, the previous JPG was saved at such a low quality that the red paint looks really bad. Well, it is actually smooth and doesn't look as ugly as in the previous picture.

Running

Yay I got to play the game! The first thing I noticed while playing is that the game has some slight slowdown when there is a lot going on. That is interesting because I've never encountered this slowdown when using the MAME or Xbox 360 version of the game. That totally affects the difficulty. I'll have to test this on another arcade machine.

The game constantly uses 150 watts. That's important to know.

The new adjusted task list is:

• Use red spray paint for the side art
• Install T-molding
• Install the new marquee when it comes in the mail
• Install the new monitor when it comes in the mail

That's right, I've got a new monitor on order. The old monitor works, but it's too blurry and distorted for me. I ended up mistaking some robots for humans, trying to save them, and dying. Oh, the blurriness has nothing to do with the moving "W" circles in the previous picture. Those are just animating circles.

There is no glass bezel available for sale now. I'll live with the old bezel for now, it's not that bad. But by looking at it up close, it's easy to notice all the scratches and chipped paint.

Weekend update

One of the big tasks for the weekend was to finish one layer of side art. I finished the blue stencil on both sides. Next weekend I'll apply the red stencil. The blue needs to be really dry before I stick the next layer on top of it.

There's just something about wet blue paint that screams out to insects: "Please land on me and die!" I had to pick off many little bugs that got stuck in the paint and then respray over the mess.

When the stencil is pulled off, two registration marks are left behind. Those are used to align the next layer.

I removed the Happ Competition sticks from the control panel and installed the Wico leaf sticks:

The game is working now. The last repair it needed was to replace a bad chip on the motherboard. I'll put up a picture of the game in action once everything is done. So, what's left?

• Apply the red side art (spray paint)
• Install T-molding around the edges
• Buy a new marquee
• Maybe buy a new bezel (tempered glass)

Then I'm done! There's not too much left before I can bring the cabinet inside the house and see what high score I can get on a real machine.

Wico sticks

The "new old stock" Wico sticks arrived today - that is good. These are what the Robotron cabinet originally had before someone replaced them with Happ Competition sticks:

• Leaf switches
• 4" handles
• Red ball top

Since I finished rebuilding the power supply, I thought I'd post a final picture of the board. Many things have been replaced, including the big yellow capacitor. It was still working OK, so I'm keeping it around just in case it becomes useful.

Actually there was one more change to the board after I took this pic. I removed the R10 resistor in order to increase the 5v power. Previously the RAM was getting 4.95v, but now it gets 5.05v.

Stumped

I replaced the voltage regulator chips on the power board and now it provides the ideal output. But the game still claims that a RAM chip is bad (1-3-1 error on the ROM board). That could be because of a bad power supply, but I'm pretty sure the power is good. And I know the RAM is good since I just replaced every chip and checked the voltage on each one.
Maybe there is a logic error on the motherboard. I don't have the tools to test each chip on the motherboard, so I am stuck. If only I had a known working motherboard...

EDIT:

I found someone sort-of-local that knows how to repair Williams games. He knew how to find the bad chip on the motherboard. After that, the game worked fine.

Lookie here!

First, the good news. The monitor works! I assumed that it would be broken, but the picture seems fine, although all I can see is the test rug pattern. That leads to the bad news.

Second, the power supply isn't given perfect voltages to the RAM chips. They are getting 4.8v and 11.8v instead of 5v and 12v. Some of the chips get the right voltages though. So now I gotta go back and debug the power supply again.

But this result is way better than I expected. I expected everything to be completely broken.

Control panel attached

Now that I connected all the wires to the joysticks, it's time to install the control panel:

Closer up:

Sides painted

Finally the sides are painted (but without the stenciled artwork). All that means is that I can start putting everything back in the cabinet and see if the electronics work. For now I stopped after installing the coin door:

Same thing, different side

I had already painted one side, now it's time for the other. Firstly, strip off that old paint:

Once this side dries, I can put the electronics back in and try to get this baby working.

Nothing new here

Thanks to my inexperience with using oil-based paint and spray paint, I've made some mistakes. And they weren't happy accidents. These caused me to have to strip away everything I already painted and start over. It'll still take a couple days before I'm back to the point I was in the previous post.

Paint a side

This is the weekend of painting. One of many I'm sure (based on how slow oil paint dries). Here is part of the coin door sprayed with Rustoleum hammered black paint. But prior to that I stripped off the old paint.

Paint stripper was used to melt off the paint from the side of the cabinet. Then I sanded it down. Then I put a few coats of primer. The primer dries really fast. Then a single coat of gray paint was added. See:

I know this isn't a perfect match to the original silver paint. But it's good enough. When I lift the cabinet up I can compare the new and old sides to see how much I screwed up.

CPO

Hey yo the other day the control panel overlay was delivered to my door. I had to fight with my door a bit to make him hand it over. The overlay comes all rolled up so I had to flatten it. That just means put some books on it for a couple days.

Once the flattening was done, it was time to stick it to the control panel. That also means I could install the joysticks - happy day!

Those joysticks are NOT similar to the original Robotron joysticks at all. The differences are plenty:

• These use microswitches instead of leaf switches
• These are black instead of red
• These are bat tops instead of ball tops
• These are Happ instead of Wico
• These are possible to buy cheap instead of very hard to find

One day when I happen to find a pair of Wicos, I'll replace these. Obviously there weren't Wicos installed when I got the cabinet or else they'd still be there.

Coin door explosion

I almost thought for a minute that I could leave the coin door as-is, scratches and all. That was a funny minute. After reading many web pages that explained how to restore a coin door, I had to do it myself. Step 1: Rip the sucker apart:

Step 2: Coming soon because it's a weekday and I have no free time to do more than a single step.

Note: The brand spanking new control panel overlay was delivered to my door today. Pictures of that will be delivered to this web site any day now.

Damn that's some powerful solvent

Years ago I found an unwanted can of paint stripper. It almost became trash, but now it became useful. I want to repaint the front of the cabinet with acrylic paint, so I need to strip off the old oil-based paint. That stripper is some freaking powerful slime, good thing I didn't drink it by accident.

EDIT: Here is the cabinet after priming and painting the front black:

Casters

I put wheels on the bottom to make the thing easy to push around. Now it ain't so tough. Previously there were some levelers, but they were in bad shape and they wouldn't work well in a home setting. Also, the bottom got a crappy layer of black paint. It doesn't matter how bad it is.

Weekend time... weekend time...

USPS delivered the stencils for the sides of the cabinet. How nice of them. Actually it was nice of gamestencils.com to send them out quickly. This is $80+shipping for a single chance to paint the logo. No practice. Hope I don't screw it up.

Here's a current side, prior to stripping the paint off.

It lives! (maybe)

Well, the power supply lives. With a new bridge rectifier installed, the output voltages are all correct. But since the cabinet has been disassembled, I can't test anything. That'll have to wait until I paint the inside of the cabinet. Shouldn't be too long.

Game paused

I can't really work on the cabinet during the week, and I'm waiting for a bridge rectifier to arrive in the mail. Since I'm making no progress, here is a great site about someone else's Robotron restoration: http://www.biltronix.com/robotron.html

He did a much better job with the cabinet and with a web site than I'll ever do.

Once the weekend comes and I have time to work on the cabinet, the next tasks are:

• Install the bridge rectifier and hopefully have a working power supply
• Paint the inside of the cabinet either white or black
• Create a new back panel out of MDF
• Paint the back of the cabinet black
• Sand and paint the front of the cabinet black
• Attempt to strip the paint off the sides of the cabinet down to the wood
• Prime the sides of the cabinet
• Install casters on the bottom so that the cabinet can roll around

Naked control panel

From afar the control panel looked decent. Up close it looked cancerous. The only cure for this skin cancer is to peel it off and start over. Here is the "before" picture:

Here is the "after" picture. I just started peeling at a corner and the whole thing eventually came off (leaving some of the image behind, but the image has no thickness).

In the previous picture, you can see the metal plates where the joysticks were mounted. The joysticks do not attach to the plates. They are only there so that the dust washer can be floating underneath the top of the control panel. When I removed the metal plates, there was quite a lot of dust trapped in the cavity. So much that it probably limited the joystick's movement. Too bad there is no way to clean out that dust without destroying the control panel overlay. The dust washer works better when it is mounted on top of the control panel, but I guess that was problematic in the old arcades (would people bend them?).

I ordered a new control panel overlay. Good thing they're still being made.

Cabinet mutilation

I gave the cabinet a shot of pain killer and started ripping its insides out. Since it was dead anyway, I wasted the pain killer.

I left some stuff in the cabinet because I don't intend to give it an internal paint job.

The guts are on display:

Pop a cap in that monitor

Thanks to this stupid thing called a "weekend" I can't place necessary orders for the power supply's bridge rectifier. Instead I had to risk my life removing the monitor's circuit board so that I could replace its capacitors. There are lots of warnings about getting shocked with 20,000 volts and flying backwards through a brick wall, so I had to be extra careful when discharging the monitor. But nothing impressive happened, this monitor is old enough where there was no charge left. I could've dischared it by licking the anode.

Here is the monitor's circuit board after removing it:

I didn't test the monitor after installing all the new blue capacitors. Since the monitor is out of the cabinet, I'll take this chance to remove everything from the cabinet to prepare it for sanding and painting. Pictures of that will come in the next post.

Capacitated

I got the packages of capacitors and some other goodies in the mail. Since the 12 volt output from the power board was all pooped up, I wanted to replace the capacitors before investigating any further. This seemed to work for a lot of people.

It didn't work for me. But at least I know that all of the capacitors are good (except for the big banana, which didn't get replaced).

There are six test points on the board to check for voltage. After the capacitor replacement, all of the test points were just right except for one - which ended up being 5v instead of 12v. Why!? I have no idea. But it's the point between the bridge rectifier and the banana capacitor. Maybe by replacing those two items, all will be good. In the picture below, the two thingies in question are labeled with question marks:

Since it's the weekend, I need to wait until Monday to order the two new pieces. They are special enough where they cannot be found at any store. I know, I tried.

Picture Post

While I was standing completely still waiting for capacitors to arrive in the mail, I was thinking that I didn't post any pictures of the insides of the cabinet. Staring close at the power board or the small city doesn't help visualize how they are arranged inside of the cabinet. So this is a picture post.

Let's sing the Picture Posts theme song:

Picture Posts
Picture Posts
It's time to get your Picture Posts
It's time to get your crayons and your soldering irons...

And now the closing song:

You can play with Picture Posts
Fill your day with Picture Posts
'till Bill Cosby does another Picture Post with you!

Waiting for power

After installing a new power cord, the output from the small city was sort-of nearly good. A 12V output was either 10V or 20V. Or a 5V output was 9V. The 120V output to the monitor was actually 130V. Does that matter? I'll eventually find out.

I always thought the old saying was "Fun first, safety second." No need for details, but the incident involved sparks, blowing up a tool, and not wearing safety glasses. Now I think that safety comes first and a half.

The bottom right part of the power board takes in power from the small city and does some magic that I don't understand and passes out DC voltages to the other boards in the cabinet (you can see three groups of output wires). The actual DC output that I'm getting is closer to completely wrong than nearly right. Here is the power board:

All of the capacitors (technical name: round thingies) are going to get replaced, except for the big banana capacitor. Hopefully by replacing them, the DC output will be closer to almost right than mostly wrong. The order for capacitors has been placed so now all I can do is wait. There are probably other things I could be doing, but I'd rather just stand completely still for days and just wait.

Dust and bugs and power

The cabinet needed a major cleaning. Twenty-seven years of dust and spiders doesn't make for a fun time working inside the cabinet.

After I vacuumed out all the bugs, I plugged the machine in and turned it on to see what would happen. Besides a humming sound, absolutely nothing happened. The voltages coming out of the power converter were all wrong, so the investigations had to start at the power plug. The cord goes into the bottom of the cabinet and is connected to this small city:

I measured the voltages coming from the wall and found out that the ground wire was broken somewhere. I wanted to replace the power cord anyway. So, I removed the small city and soldered on a new cord.

Next step: Hook the small city back up and see what happens.