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.

Here we go

I finished building my Q*Bert arcade cabinet almost a year ago (a log of that project is here: http://qcab.blogspot.com/). It takes a lot of work to build a cabinet from scratch, and I have no intention of either building another, ever, or buying a cabinet that only plays a single game.

Unfortunately, I forgot to rule out getting a cabinet for free. When someone at work decided to give away an original Robotron cabinet, I ended up picking it up. Since the cabinet inspection date was April 1982, this was probably made for the original release of the game.

Robotron is my favorite game (on any system) and it happens to be the best game ever made, so this was a pretty good game to get. This cabinet doesn't work at all. It won't even get power from the wall.

The restoration process will be quite a different experience from building a MAME cabinet from scratch (no duh, huh). Most of the work will be on the circuit boards and wiring inside of the machine rather than cutting plywood. Only after that's done will I take the whole cabinet apart and repaint it.