Introducing Instructional Technology at Reclaim Hosting

Posted on April 5, 2022 by Reverend

It’s happening! I’ve alluded to the idea that Reclaim Hosting is exploring edtech a couple of months ago, and yesterday we officially announced the launch of our instructional technology offering. Lauren Hanks provides an excellent overview in the following video, which is then followed by the group explaining how we got here, why we’re excited, and what’s to come—a document of a momentous occasion.

So what is Reclaim Edtech? It’s a professional development and support community built specifically with Educational Technologists in mind. We will be rolling out more details and specifics over the course of April and May as we gear up for the first major event which is the Domains 101/201 Workshop on May 24th and 25th. But if you take a look at the Reclaim Hosting Events Calendar you can see we are programming up to a year out with numerous flex course and workshops that are aimed not only at educational technologists working with Domain of One’s Own and WordPress Multisite, but also for those who want to learn more about Gravity Forms, Docker containers, headless web development, and/or open source applications like OBS, Ghost, PeerTube, and Jitsi. And that’s just for starters!

image of tvs with writing "Reclaim Network"

The real gold will be in the Reclaim Networks, a Discord community wherein folks can access the various workshops and courses we run, as well as commune and share the work they are doing and connect around shared interests and beyond. We saw the power of Discord during the OERxDomains21 conference we helped organize last year as well as the subsequent Virtual Domains Workshop in June of 2021. The possibilities of bringing together educational technologists around various explorations of an assortment of technologies is quite exciting, and that was a huge reason we wanted to pursue instructional technology at Reclaim to begin with.

At the same time, one of the things we’re trying to balance is making sure we can sustain the time and energy it will require to manage this offering while also making it accessible. We want to ensure all experts running flex courses and workshops are compensated for their work. At the same time we will be dedicating Reclaim staff to not only running sessions, but also planning and programming the calendar as well as managing the community. This all takes time and resources to ensure consistent, reliable professional development, part of why paying for professional development is nothing new in higher ed. Up and until yesterday we’ve been assuming it would predominantly appeal to colleges and universities we currently work with as an additional service at a yearly subscription fee. But as more and more individual consultants and one-off edtechs reach out, we’re thinking through and individual/consultant tier to make this accessible to folks that may not have an edtech group larger than one person or institution willing and able to foot the bill.

Not only does the immediate interest suggest a need, but seeing who is interested highlights we may have to think beyond the institutions we currently support, which is doubly exciting. YEAH!

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Edtech, Reclaim Today | Tagged , | 3 Comments

bavaweekly 4-3-2022

Posted on April 4, 2022 by Reverend

I think it is fair to call this episode the bava-bi-weekly, but I knew that would be the case given I was back in the US to close up the Reclaim Hosting offices and sort through the remnants of our previous life in Fredericksburg.

It was bitter sweet given all that Fred Vegas has given me over the years, but time marches on and my life has been in Trento for a while now. That said, the arcade was absolutely glorious, and splitting time between sorting personal effects for international shipping and playing games at Reclaim Arcade made the dread of removal much more manageable.

I also got several game boards repaired and monitor chassis serviced given Fredericksburg is smack-dab in the middle of two of the best repair folks in the arcade business.

Tim was kind enough to help me with a few repairs and we even managed a local pickup of Super Off Road for the arcade—those are the things I’ll miss the most.

I did have one small reprieve Saturday morning to enjoy a hike with Tom Woodward at the North Anna Battlefield Park, yet another Civil War battlefield in that area. It was quite peaceful and relatively abandoned, it’s always a blast to catch-up with Tom and trying to imagine the scene of our hike 150 years earlier was a certain kind of fodder. It was also cool to see the beaver (and human) markings on the various tress in the woods, can you tell which was which?

Image of a large section of tree trunk removed by beavers

Beaver or human?

Image of a small section of tree trunk removed by beavers

Human or beaver?

Image of a heart carved into tree with initials

Beaver or human?

I was also able to experience and chronicle C.H.U.D. Sundays at Reclaim Video on this here blog, which may be the greatest development for VHS since the invention of the VCR!

My Reclaim Hosting work while traveling was hit and miss to say the least, I attended several meetings and caught up where I could, but most of the week was dedicated towards shipping out. I did get to enjoy another random moment of leisure with Meredith and Brandon at Soup & Taco II, which was delicious.

Scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey with colored time travel effects

When I returned to Italy last week I spent much of the time decompressing from the travel—the need for which has become a stark reality as I age. Work travel gets harder and harder to both prepare for and recover from, so there may be a day in the next year or so when I finally limit work travel to one or two times a year at most. I feel like I have done a lifetime’s worth of work trips over the last 10-15 years.

“And how did I decompress?” you ask. I worked on the bavacade. I came back from the US with all the pieces I needed to get every game in the home arcade working, so I set to work on a few things.

It has become clearer and clearer why a hobby like collecting and restoring these 80s video game cabinets is necessary. It provides a welcome release. That said, last week was not only productive on the bavacade-side, but also on the Reclaim Hosting side of the house. Pilot published the March edition of Reclaim Roundup, which is epic, and the edtech team spent much of last week preparing for today’s big announcement around our new instructional technology offering Reclaim EdTech, so life is good.

I’m leaving out a lot of details given it has been almost  3 weeks since my last bavaweekly, but I figured the sooner the better, even if it might be less comprehensive. And for this update I chose to focus on the arcade work given it seemed that I haven’t updated all the work I’ve done and was afraid I would start forgetting. If you are interested in the arcade work only, here is that video with a pretty thorough assessment as to the state of the bavacade:

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C.H.U.D. Sundays at Reclaim Video

Posted on March 29, 2022 by Reverend

I’m decompressing in Frankfurt Airport after an intense trip back to the ‘Burg to prepare to ship my life overseas for good, but more on that anon. What I did want to do quickly here before time and exhaustion does me in was to note the birth of a tradition at Reclaim Video that may be one of the coolest things to emerge from building a space like Reclaim Arcade. Two of the arcade’s employees, Shane and Connor, got curious about the different VHS versions of the 1984 b-movie classic C.H.U.D. that filled the shelves of Reclaim Video. Rather than killing the cat dog, their curiosity gave birth to a cannibalistic humanoid underground dwelling obsession-cum-ritual in honor of this 1980s VHS classic.

Ground Zero for the C.H.U.D. VIP Membership

C.H.U.D. VIP Membership

Since early November every Sunday at Reclaim Video is a C.H.U.D. Sunday, which means a C.H.U.D. VHS marathon from opening until close. It is a newly christened tradition that is going strong, and as you can see from the images both above and below it is accompanied by movie posters, t-shirts, and newly minted VIP membership card that I’m proud user #00.

Image of C.H.U.D.Sunday VIP Membership Card

Expiry? NEVER!!!

I’m no stranger to un-bridled C.H.U.D. love. One of my favorite grad school papers was an analysis of C.H.U.D.—along with several other NYC-based b-movies from the 80s—to examine the rhetoric of the revanchist city and the rise of gentrification that would become the norm in the 1990s. But what struck me most about C.H.U.D. Sundays was that it was born of creating of an intentional space like an 1980s video store that is not a museum, but a cultural laboratory run by cool, young kids that can and will explore the physical history of VHS that has a lot to teach us about our own moment, much like my belabored academic readings of C.H.U.D. 🙂

A younger Homer Simpon on the run from pimps and CHUDs

This tradition of 80s curiosity very much starts with our very first Reclaim Video employee, the great Xander! Roughly 3 or 4 years ago this teenager wrote us an email asking if he could work at Reclaim Video (well before there was even an arcade) simply because he loved 80s culture. It was a space for him to explore that moment and by extension his identity in a fun, relatively authentic framework. And it was equally awesome for us to get to interact with him, talk movies, and generally hang out with a new generation of film lovers. The sickest thing about Reclaim Arcade, I am learning, is that it’s a cultural kiln that forges experience of all who partake, both employees and guests alike. Like record stores, book stores, or movie theaters of yore, the retro-arcade is an entertainment Twilight Zone where those who enter willingly embrace an alternative dimension and are changed by it, but at the same time fuel its magic and shape it—just as Shane and Connor have so beautifully done with C.H.U.D. Sundays. It underscores the thrilling possibility that commerce-driven entertainment can be truly transformative when it’s not relegated to a cookie-cutter model that is always already about efficiency and scale. It’s where the young and old employees and guests shape the experience together in an ongoing dance of thoughtful cultural studies that is half-disguised as entertainment given how joyous it all is. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Reclaim Arcade is art!

Posted in Reclaim Arcade | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

bavaweekly 3-13-2022

Posted on March 18, 2022 by Reverend

Last week’s bavaweekly was a bit delayed given how jam-packed last week was. Between heading to Vicenza to pick up a few video game cabinets and then catching up from taking Tuesday off things snowballed and I was not able to record the weekly until Sunday—5 days after originally planned. Given that, this one has a bit more packed in it that usual, and I spent much of this week blogging everything a reported on in this video, so I waited on pushing this out until I had blogged the various projects I mention, such as experimenting with WordPress Multi-Region, updating ds106radio, a talk on “What was Eduglu,” as well as some bavacade new acquistions and a couple of successful game repairs.

Link to video on bava.tv

It was also cool to see Chris Lott blogging again—did he ever stop? I shouted him out in this weekly given he attended the “What was Eduglu” session organized by the awesome Todd Conaway as part of his push to get small with Unviersity of Washington faculty and reinforce the power of focused, community driven teaching and learning. The wisdom in that approach is real!

https://fncll.org/blog/education-edtech/6×6-0-back-on-the-horse/

Epiphanies and Jim Groom’s EDUGLU

I could do a full re-cap, but I am gonna keep this write-up a bit lean given I blogged the highlights at length over the past week, so if you are glutton for punishment you can find more in the various links above. I travel to Fred Vegas tomorrow, so going to try and do another bavaweekly to catch up a bit and get try and return to a weekly schedule.

Posted in bavaweekly, video | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

ds106radio Upgrade

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Reverend

Last week Taylor let me tag along while he upgraded ds106radio’s woefully outdated version of Azuracast. Taylor and I did some prep work behind the scenes earlier in the week, and then streamed the upgrade process live which resulted in a 55 minute document of the process. I’m not sure it is Oscar worthy, but I really love these stream sessions wherein we work through tech setups, figure stuff out, and joke around as well.

The long and short of the upgrade is that you need to take a backup from the old instance. After that, install a new instance of Azuracast (which is now all within one docker container) and then copy the backup to the new Azuracast server. Lastly, restore the backup.

As it turned out for us, this backup may not include all shows recorded, so be sure to rsync over any old shows and the mother lode of Bono playlists uploaded from New Zealand to the old server while upgrading 🙂

In fact, we did another stream (royal we, all Taylor) about copying files between Docker containers (rsyncing) in order to get the recordings we missed sorted (about 75 GBs worth). The following embedded link skips the first 21 minutes wherein we talk about PeerTube’s streaming resolutions to get to the container to container rsyncing action.

So we got all the files moved over and all is good there. The mighty ds106radio has been playing around a bit and there are a few things we need to still fix:

  • Seems like the listener IP mapping is not taking, still showing internal IP addresses. I believe this can be fixed with a container restart, but need to consult Taylor on that.
  • There is some wonkiness with metadata when using Audio Hijack at least. I did notice Brian Lamb has been able to get the metadata to come through cleanly, so this one has me a bit stumped, and I have not been able to troubleshoot it yet

A couple of minor concerns I want to address:

  • The ds106rad.io/listen URL is no longer redirecting to listen.ds106rad.io which means a few links on this blog are breaking 🙂
  • the ds106minibumper.mp3 file in /var/azuracast was mounted at one point to automatically play when the station started with the classic “Can you dig it?” -but that hasn’t worked for a long while and I am hoping to return to it here soon, but my recent attempt last week failed given the Customizing Docker Instances guides have changed quite a bit over the last two years. I documented my work back in 2020 when I initially migrated ds106radio to Azuracast, but the redirect and intro bumper setup may need a bit more tinkering to get working
Posted in ds106radio | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Second Time Around with WordPress Multi-Region

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Reverend

Last week I was boasting about “Bava Multi-Region Cause I Can”, but that didn’t last. I ran into issues with comments not syncing across database instances in the different regions. I originally blamed caching, but after checking the secondary databases the comments in the primary UK database were not being written over. This led me to reverting the site back to a stand-alone instance, which buys me some time.

I need to document a bit of what I did given I have not deleted the the multi-region environments, only stopped them for now with hopes of circling back.

First things first, getting Reclaim Cloud containers to communicate via ssh can be a pain in the ass. After setting up the multi-region instance using the one-click installer in Reclaim Cloud I needed to migrate content from the stand alone bavatuesdays to the new multi-region bava. I’m almost getting this down; the process is some version of the following.

Generate a SSH key using something like the following command (thank Chris Blankenship!):

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -a 200 -C "jim_at_reclaimhosting.com" -f ~/.ssh/bava_ssh_key

Then add the contents of the file at ~/.ssh/bava_ssh_key.pub to the ~/.ssh/authorized keys file on the “remote” server, which in this case is the multi-region primary app server. I would also recommend clearing out any other shared keys and make sure you have granted root access to both the local and remote application containers using this guide. After that,  change to root user and run the following rsync command to push files from the stand alone WordPress to the multi-region instances.

rsync --dry-run -e "ssh -i ~/.ssh/bava_ssh_key" -avzh /var/www/webroot/ROOT [email protected]:/var/www/webroot/ROOT

Notice the --dry-run command to ensure it worked without pushing or pulling files in the wrong direction. After confirming it is right I remove the --dry-run and run the command again—this time for real.

The other step is exporting and importing the database, which is accomplished using phpMyAdmin if the database is small enough, or dropping the multi-region’s database in the Primary site and importing the stand-alone database.*

The migration was actually quite seamless after I got the containers communicating, the only issue I ran into was getting my embeds to work on this new setup given the Content Security Policy through Litespeed was set quite strict. It took me some time to hunt all that down, and I’m not sure I have it set ideally yet, but I was able to find the vhconf.xml file in /var/www/conf and modify it to specify what URLs are allowed to be embedded. I imagine this is safer, but also wondering how many embeds that must have broken.

Here is the bit for the content-security-policy in virtualhost conf file that I added for frame-ancestors and frame-src:

Content-Security-Policy "frame-ancestors data:;frame-src https://bava.tv https://youtube.com https://twitter.com https://platform.twitter.com https://www.youtube.com https://bavatuesdays.com;";

That solved the issue for Youtube, Twitter and bava.tv embeds, but there are a ton of broken Vimeo and assorted other embeds for sure. When talking about my discoveries with the Reclaim team Chris mentioned it might be related to the brute force protection option I selected at install, so I’ll have to try that again and see if the settings in the Content Security Policy are set to self when that option is unchecked. The Content Security Policy was set to ‘self’ which basically forbids any embeds that are not from the site’s URL, or no third-party app embeds to prevent any possible cross-posting exploits.

I feel like I am getting closer, but a few issues remain:

  • not able to access wp-admin area from secondary sites when primary site is offline
  • comments not syncing across databases, posts seem to sync
  • content security policy too strict issue, see if it happens when brute force attack protection is turned off

So that’s it for my notes for now, going to take a few of these questions to Jelastic and re-group for round three, that’s always a charm right?

_______________________________

*I wonder if my dropping all tables and importing the stand-alone WordPress database might be causing an issue with comment syncing across databases, wondering if I trashed some specific settings, etc.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , | 2 Comments

WPMS + DoOO = Awesome

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Reverend

For this month’s community chat we were joined by John Stewart of the University of Oklahoma and Noah Mitchell from Coventry University. Both Noah and John have been doing inspiring work re-imagining how to integrate their existing Domain of One’s Own platforms with new WordPress Multisite instances, which has been inspiring us at Reclaim, and others around the community, to re-think how schools might provide a more diversified set of web offerings to their community. This multi-pronged is something Lauren and I were struck by when visiting Vanderbilt University in November—particularly in relationship to Reclaim Cloud—but in many ways reinforces the idea that Domains and WordPress Multisite are complementary offerings that go hand-in-hand for any community exploring either or both. This talk covers a lot of this ground and lasts over an hour (as most of the chats do).

I have to say the community chats have been amazing. For quickly and fairly informally connecting with the broader community, as well as hearing about the cool work the various schools are doing. I really appreciate folks showing up, willingly participating, and generally making these monthly meet-ups a joy.

Posted in community chat, Domain of One's Own, reclaim, WordPress | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Streaming Jitsi through Peertube Live

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Reverend

One of the cool things Taylor Jadin discovered recently is is easy it is to stream a Jitsi web video call through PeerTube. After creating a live stream in PeerTube, you would crab the stream URL and the stream key from the Live Settings tab:

Image of Live Settings tab in PeerTube

Live Settings tab in PeerTube where you can find the stream URL and private key

After that, head over to your Jitsi meet video call and look for the settings that are accessed by the ellipsis at the bottom of the screen:

Image of Settings for starting a live stream in Jitsi

Settings for starting a live stream in Jitsi

Once you select “Start live stream” you will see a dialog box that you will paste in the stream url and stream key, that should be separate by a slash “/” -so something like the following: rtmp://your.tv:1935/live/your-private-stream-key

Image of Jitsi dialog box for stream URL and key

Jitsi dialog box for adding stream URL and key, which are separate by a slash “/”

After that you will hear a voice telling you the stream is live and you should be able to see the call streaming through PeerTube within a few seconds.

Posted in open source, PeerTube, video | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Asterock and Explorer Back in bavacade Action

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Reverend

I’ve been struggling a bit on the arcade repair front for a while now. The Sidam Explorer  (Italian Scramble bootleg) pictured above has not worked right since I got it over the Summer, and the Asterock (Italian Asteroids bootleg) went down in September or October and has been out of commission since. Add to that the board issues with Stargate and I could feel the arcade walls closing in.

Image of Asterock and Explorer arcade cabinets

Two classic Italian bootlegs back in action

The two Sidam cabinets were moved down to the basement office, and I look at them forlornly daily. That said, I’ve not been sitting idly by; both power supplies have been rebuilt as well the Explorer‘s Hanterex 9000 MTC chassis inspected, but all to no avail. This led me to the conclusion these cabinets were both having board issues, so I was prepared to take them back to the US for confirmation. Luckily I had the idea to test one of them, namely Asterock, with a working board Antonio of Arcade Story had in his warehouse. When I tried his  boards it was having the same issues, which confirmed this was not a board issue after all. So back to the drawing board. The last possible cause was the heat sync for the audio board—so Roberto and I tested this by tracing wires for the +5V, +12V, -5V and ground wires from the power supply and running them through a switching power supply and the game worked perfectly! It’s always electric in the end…

Image of the Asterock video game

Asterock back in action!

It’s like the heavens opened up!

Close-up image of the Asterock video game

Close-up of the Asteroids bootleg Asterock

This win was on Saturday, so one less board to bring to America. As I was basking in the victory of not only getting Asterock back online, but also getting the color red back in Condor last week I got to thinking the ongoing issues with the vertical sync for the monitor in Explorer may not be board related after all. After looking at the Condor edge connector schematic I noticed there were connection points for vertical and horizontal sync to the monitor. It got me thinking that chances are Explorer has the same thing, and if I can find a manual I can confirm as much and trace back those wires.

Explorer game board schematic-notice the  composite/horizontal and vertical sync connections at 17A and 17B at the edge connector on the left, these were reversed which caused my ongoing issues

I searched high and low and found the above image of the Explorer game board schematic  on a UK game forum, only to realize soon after I had the entire manual in the bottom of the cabinet 🙂 You can find a full version of the manual in Italian at this link: Sidam Explorer Manual. Anyway, after tracing the voltage wires in Asterock I had the confidence to try as much with Explorer and I traced all the way back to an area between the board and monitor where the wires were cut and reconnected and it turns out that vertical and composite wires were mistakenly switched. This was the reason the screen would not hold. Not a board issue at all, rather a faulty wiring issue that was easily fixed by switching the vertical and horizontal/composite connectors.

Image of a the connection between a board and a monitor for a Hanterex

Diagram of the connection between a board and a monitor for a Hanterex MTC 9000

The above digram might provide a better sense of what happened. The Vertical sync (VS)  and horizontal sync (HS) wires were swapped after the wiring harness from the game board to the monitor had been cut. The colors—black for ground, gray for composite, and blue/orange for vertical— did not match what was going into the monitor, and that was the clue I needed. I have heard about folks splicing and re-wiring randomly that leads to  all sorts of confusion, and this was my first experience diagnosing that and fixing it. It felt amazing!

Image of working Sidam Explorer video game

Sidam Explorer with no more vertical sync issues

So, this past weekend was an awesome one for bavacade. I only have one game down at the moment, Stargate, and getting that board fixed shortly, as well as future proofing my Williams games with some JROK action. It’s a good day in the bavacade, just in time for the mother load shipment from America 🙂

Posted in bavacade, video games | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Robotron, Bagman, and Condor Join the bavacade

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Reverend
Image of the front of Robotron

A full frontal of Robotron: 2084

The bavaweekly was delayed a bit last week because I was busy adding a few more games to the home arcade, the post title says it all! I’ve been pretty restrained the last few months, but that couldn’t last. I’ve been looking for a nice Robotron cabinet in the US for a while now, and as with most things the prices are getting ridiculous. I saw a beautiful Robotron cabinet at Arcade Story in Vicenza last year when I picked up Scramble, so I decided to take the plunge—and was hoping for a better deal if I bought in bulk 🙂

Robotron 2084 sideart redone

This Robotron cabinet’s side art was re-stenciled, and it looks like new

I am taking the Robotron boards back to the US this weekend (along with the Stargate boards—that’s another post) to get the once over, and I already got a couple of Williams switching power supplies, as well as Jamma adapters for Robotron, Stargate, and Joust that allow you to use a FPGA Williams multi-board (also known as a JROK) for several classic Williams games. At the end of the day the original Williams board sets are complex and expensive to fix (and even more expensive to get a spare), and after seeing Tim convert Q*Bert at Reclaim Arcade—which was regularly having board issues that got costly—I became a believer.  The games will still have all the original hardware, but for regular use swapping the boards and original power supply for a JROK board and switching power supply will allow me to move on with my life 🙂 Stargate and Robotron are the first two candidates, and when I get another two multi-game Williams JROK kits I’ll convert Joust and Defender as well.

Image of a Stern Bagman arcade cabinet

Stern Bagman arcade cabinet

While seeing what Arcade Story had beyond the Robotron I came across a Bagman cabinet from 1982 that was also in really good shape (save for some slight water damage at the bottom and it was missing the original bezel). Bagman is actually a game I played only once or twice, but I am intrigued by the cabinet art and design and it would be yet another Stern game in the collection—that makes 4. I decided to get it and I plan on seeing if I can have the original bezel art reproduced on the new glass and also have someone here clean up the slight water damage and this thing will be mint. And as you can see from the image above the monitor is super crisp (all 3 games I got have G07 CBO monitors, which is a bonus),  and the marquee absolutely pops!

Image of the Bagman arcade cabinet marquee lit up

Bagman arcade cabinet marquee all lit up

I am also intrigued by the dimensions and design of this cabinet, it is fairly narrow at 22 inches, but also deep and has a strange design in the back a single support but mostly negative space. I haven’t seen one like it:

Image of Bagman cabinet design

Strange design of the back top of Bagman cabinet

The final addition completed a trinity of Italian bootlegs of US video games that I am quite excited about. Last Summer I picked up Sidam’s Explorer (a Scramble bootleg) and soon after Sidam’s Asterock (an Atari Asteroids bootleg). The last piece of the puzzle (at least for now) was a Sidam Condor, which is a bootleg of Centuri’s Phoenix—an all-time favorite of mine. So, this near extinct Condor now has a new nest in the bavacade 🙂

Image of a Sidam Condor arcade cabinet

Sidam Condor arcade cabinet

There is a bit of clean-up to do on the back of the cabinet where it was damaged, but other than that the actual cabinet is in excellent shape—much like the other two Sidam cabinets in the collection. I really do love these cabinets, they are a tiny bit smaller than their US counterparts, but the art is awesome and the whole idea of 80s Italian bootlegging of American video game culture fascinates me to no end.

Close-up Image of a Sidam Condor arcade cabinet

Color a bit off and F in Fuel got off

One of the things I read about Condor is that it was the first video game to have a fuel gauge. I’m not entirely sure that’s true given Rally-X had a fuel gauge and that was released in 1980, not 1981—so don’t believe everything you read. That said, adding a fuel gauge to Phoenix made an already difficult game 1000x harder, which is pretty crazy. One of the things I did as soon as I got this game is try out the extra board I had bought a few months back (I guess I knew I was getting this game eventually) only to find it was throwing garbage:

Image of Condor game board throwing garbage

Condor game board throwing garbage

While re-connecting the old game board the edge connector that plugs into the game (pictured below) had one of the wires come off, although I did not realize this at the time.

Image of Condor edge-connector to game board

Condor edge-connector to game board

When the original board was replaced there was no red color:

Image of Condor screen with no red color

Condor attract screen with no red color

I played with the monitor colors a bit, but nothing worked. While re-seating the board I noticed one of the wires from the edge-connector harness had come off—the harness is a mess and needs to be re-done entirely. So, I went online looking for the Sidam Condor Manual (they are so useful!) and once I found it I tried studying the schematic for the edge-connector to see if there is a wire that connects the red color from the board to the monitor, and there was!

Image of Condor edge-connector schematic

Condor edge-connector schematic

At 16A you see “video rosso” followed by “RO” which indicates the color of the wire. So a red wire at 16A is what sends the boards creation of red graphics to the monitor, and that was just the wire that had disconnected. So I soldered it back on, and the red was back in the game and I was freaking pumped! Every arcade fix is like Christmas morning. I say all this because it would be the basis of another fix over the weekend that I am still basking in the joy of, but more on that in the next post.

It was great to visit Arcade Story (Italy’s import/export mecca for golden age arcade games from the US), secure a few games for the bavacade, and spend some time with Miles, bavacade’s designated game mover. In fact, you can see him above enjoying the classic laser disc game Space Ace which, interestingly enough, is a joint venture between Atari and Sidam to release Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair in Italy a couple of years after Atari sued Sidam for bootlegging Asterock.

Image of Atari's Red Baron video game from 1980

Atari’s Red Baron video game from 1980

There was also a mint Warlords cabinet that is something to behold, and a Red Baron that I had never seen before, but after playing it can honestly say it is Battlezone, but better.

And with that, the bavacade slouches towards Bethlehem!

Posted in bavarcade, video games | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments