bavacade Repair Log 9-24-2024

It has been a while since a full blown repair log, but that is the upside of having an all but perfect arcade 🙂 But as Chinua Achebe notes, “things fall apart.” So on with the show…

When I was back in the US last month I picked up a few boards that were in for repair with East Coast Arcade, namely Phoenix, an extra Stargate board set, Super Cobra, and a Crush Roller.*

The Phoenix board was having graphical issues that were probably related to my hacky install of the high score save kit, but Mike remedied that so all is good, and free play and high scores are back on the menu. The last thing with this game is a possible monitor swap give this tube is a bit dim, and I think the Centuri Challenger tube would work well here.

Make Trax in the bavacade getting ready for a Crush Roller board

As for the Crush Roller board, it was still upside down and inverted, so I had to swap both the horizontal and vertical yoke wires to get it to work. This meant breaking up the yoke wires, which means I do need to clean those back up. You can read more about flipping vertical and horizontal yoke wires, because it’s important not to cross the vertical and horizontal streams.

The yoke wires normally go brown, white, grey, and red to the far right, but here the white and red are flipped as are the brown and grey. Also, note that you can not swap these randomly, read this guide for more.

My spare Super Cobra board was throwing garbage after it came back from repair, but then started working when the edge connector was adjusted. The high score had two blocks instead of numbers, and the game was having sound issues. I think the high score save kit that was added years ago never really worked, and as a result the board has always been glitchy. I’m going to get rid of the high score save kit and replace the missing ROMs on the main board in locations 2C, 2E, 2F, 2H, 2J, and  2L After that I’ll try a re-cap on the main board to fix some dying sound issues, but that should at least make this board a solid backup.

The cursed spare Super Cobra board

In terms of finally getting free play and high scores working on Super Cobra, I’m going to approach this in a different way. I have a working Scramble backup board that tested fine in Super Cobra. So, I’m going to get the multi-game high score save kit for Scramble, and then just have it default to Super Cobra, and as a bonus I’ll also be able to play Amidar and Frogger on this machine.

Multi-game Scramble High Score Save Kit

The extra Stargate boards were a non-working set I acquired cheap online. I figured it’s always good to have an extra set given how many of those Williams boards are interchangeable. The widget (or interconnect) board from the extra Stargate set was having an issue. More specifically, the reverse button was not working, it would randomly turn the ship in the opposite direction whether or not I was pressing reverse. I just happened to have an extra Joust board set and that widget board is interchangeable with Stargate. YEAH!  So I swapped out the widget board from Joust and now the extra Stargate set is working perfectly. I sent the Stargate widget board in for repair, just so I’m keeping on top of the whack-a-mole that is board repair.

Williams’ widget or interchange board

Speaking of Joust, when I turned that game on last week I got a 128 Error on the digital display that you can find on the ROM board. I believe this error is essentially saying main board (1) second bank (2)  eighth chip (8). As a first test, I swapped out the ROM board with the extra I had at hand, but got the same error. So, I figured it must be the main RAM board, so I went in search for my extra main board. I found what I believed to be the right board, but I got a new error: black and yellow vertical lines on the monitor. After a bit I remembered this was similar to an issue I had with Stargate years ago, so I was wondering if this wasn’t my working Joust board after all (the downside of these Williams boards being interchangeable). I kept looking through my PCBs and found the main Joust board and that fixed it, so the issue is definitely with a RAM chip on the main board, now whether I can fix it or not is another issue. Both a win and an invite to try my hand at board work.

While I was in Joust, I also tired an FPGA board that was previously in Stargate, and that worked perfectly.

Galaxian was briefly acting up with some discoloration of the graphics, but I left that one on for a few hours this weekend and the issue did not return—to be continued?

Also last week, the Dig Dug spare board went down. There was a loud, consistent beep and when I checked the screen it was throwing garbage. I swapped in the older board I had and everything worked fine, so looks to be a board issue, but we’ll see. Only thing was I had to reset the high scores, and I did that following this forum post. Also, wheels on Dig Dug are unstable given that game is just too heavy for smaller wheels, so will be talking to Alberto about swapping those out.

Millipede side dent

Finally, while trying to move Dig Dug, the wheel issue mentioned above made me force the game and it dented the side of Millipede— which I had just refinished. I was holding off on the T-molding because some of the white paint on the sides needs to be better matched. For that procrastination I paid, but Alberto noted it was a quick fix, so we’re golden, and this time I paint and add back the T-molding right away.

The T-molding channel looking ugly on Millipede after dent

Well, I think that is enough for this repair log; I’m not sure I could handle anymore. The big takeaway for me is that if I want to avoid going crazy with this hobby, I’m going to need to learn how to fix boards. That is a goal for the next year, but we’ll see how that fares.
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*I also tried to fix a non-working Williams FPGA board, but it was dead and could not be saved–bad video. Additionally, I bought a Crush Roller bootleg board that seems to have no apparent logic in regards to the actual board–so still a mystery.