bavatuesdays

Reclaim Today explores Docsify This

Posted on July 27, 2023 by Reverend

In our most recent episode of Reclaim Today, Taylor Jadin and I talked with Paul Hibbitts about his work to create Docsify This. This tool is in many ways part of a longer trajectory of Hibbitts’s work, which I first learned of through the creative ways he was using the open source flat-file content management system Grav to build out open course templates. His work with open source, markdown-based templates broadened to include Docsify, a lightweight tool for publishing documentation. More recently, he created his own tool, Docsify This, that enables folks to take markdown from any document and convert that into a web-based HTML page without the need for a server—making the entire process as simply as copying and pasting a link. It’s not only a cool, useful tool, but the discussion frames the trajectory of Paul’s work from Grav through Docsify in terms of a journey to make the online publishing process as easy and lightweight as possible. If you’re interested in open source publishing tools that might prove useful and make someone’s life easier, this session just might be for you.

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Today | Tagged docsify, docsify-this, Grav, Paul Hibbitts, reclaim, Reclaim Today, reclaimtoday, Taylor Jadin | Leave a comment

Pledge Against Surveillance

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Reverend

Don’t worry if you missed today’s Reclaim Open session featuring Ian Linkletter speaking out against surveillance in education technology because we have all 24 minutes of this call to action recorded so you can share it far and wide:

As Ian recounts, it has been almost 3 years since his battle with Proctorio begun, and he is not backing down. He is truly a model for leading with principles and standing up to online bullies. What’s more, he is also acknowledging that there’s power in numbers and that resistance is not futile. He is asking folks to take a pledge against surveillance, and I think the occasion to remember what is happening to Ian, is an important lesson we should ever forget: it could happen to any of us!

Watch the session, sign the pledge, and remember “you gotta suss, suss, suss, suss, suss, suss/ Suss, suspect device.”

Posted in Reclaim Open | Tagged Ian Linkletter, reclaimopen, surveillance | 2 Comments

Reclaim Cloud in Europe!

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Reverend

EU Region in Reclaim Cloud

It’s official, as of today we now have an active European Union (EU) region in Reclaim Cloud, located in ~~the partynacht central of Berlin~~ Frankfurt, Germany. This has been a long-time coming and we’re thrilled to expand the geographical scope and reach of Reclaim Cloud to the European Union. Not only will this provide additional server nodes in our broader cloud cluster, but it will also help make it easier for existing clients to remain compliant with GDPR regulations.

Screenshot of a dialogue box for installing Azuracast in a EU region on Reclaim Cloud

Azuracast in the EU Region!

With each region added comes a significant investment of time and resources, so it’s very rewarding to see Reclaim Cloud grow from the initial two (US East and West) to now five regions in just under three years. It’s been a big year for Reclaim’s infrastructure to not only expand the cloud, but also shore up security while preparing for an underlying kernel migration. No rest for the weary!

Image of D.R.I.'s album "But Wait, there's more"

DRI’s “But wait…there’s more!”

“But wait….there’s more!” Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be unveiling an entirely new service for high-traffic, high-availability WordPress sites in the Cloud: Reclaim.Press. Stay tuned for more!

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Cloud, ReclaimPress | Tagged reclaim, reclaimcloud, reclaimpress | 4 Comments

UMW Blogs: a Diamond in the Rough

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Reverend

I don’t really know how to write this post. Saying goodbye is never easy, and sunsetting a duct-taped platform that gave life to thousands of voices for over 16 years is not trivial. Out of curiosity I peeked at the aggregate numbers for UMW Blogs when we first started tracking hits in 2010 (3 years after its launch in 2007) and it’s kind of mind-boggling:

UMW Blogs traffic since 2010

That’s well over 16 million users that started 20 million sessions and viewed 34 million pages that have been recorded. Not bad for a humble publishing platform for the UMW community that was born on a shared hosting account for $75 annually—let’s round-up to $90 with domain registration. In many ways UMW Blogs embodied the anarchic spirit of fast, cheap, and out-of-control technology that flew in the face of over-engineered, locked-down, and expensive systems that were increasingly third-party solutions. Not only did the existing systems provide little to no agency for the broader community, but there was seemingly less than zero interest in serving the context of an educational institution—teaching and learning was an after-thought of these systems, if at all.

This is the primordial ooze from which UMW Blogs emerged in the Summer of 2007, almost exactly 16 years ago this week. It was not the product of any one person, but rather an amalgam of actors and factors conspiring to cultivate, capture, and broadcast the “life of the mind” at a small, public liberal arts college. The willingness to provide this online space to actively promote thoughtful, compelling, and authentic reflections from across the UMW community was a radical act of faith in the open web. And, I would argue, it did just that!

I’m not pretending UMW Blogs saved lives or changed the world, it didn’t. But I would argue that this modest experiment underscored that education is at its root a set of social relations that the web, at its best, amplifies and augments in ways existing systems at the time failed to imagine. While WordPress was the technology that made these connections accessible, it was the human will to learn through connections that underlines the true value of this platform.

There are literally thousands of examples of these connections, which will live on indefinitely given it’s been meticulously archived thanks to Shannon Hauser, Lauren Hanks, and Taylor Jadin.* But one example that struck me was a random blog called pchem that had only 3 posts in the Fall of 2011, one of which was the ubiquitous “Hello World!” The second was a post describing a diagram that illustrates the intermediate phases that occur in between graphite and diamond.

I have no idea what any of this means, but the student who wrote this post was digging in quite thoughtfully, and then one day several years later—October 26, 2014, to be precise—24,000 other people found this post for some reason. It was the single biggest day of traffic ever, and it was a post written by a student to help explain a complex chart about conditions under which diamonds are forged from graphite at a given combination of temperature and pressure. The chemical process by which something so beautiful and priceless is formed from the salt of the earth is worth reflecting on as UMW Blogs is gracefully retired. A diamond in the rough, for sure.

___________________________________________

*Their amazing work to flatten thousands of sites and tens of thousands of posts to a HTML archive will provide an invaluable glimpse into higher-ed at the cross roads of the social web.

Posted in umw, UMW Blogs | Tagged dtlt, dtlt experiment, umw, umwblogs | 4 Comments

Seeing 30 Years of WWW

Posted on July 19, 2023 by Reverend

On Monday we premiered Olia Lialina‘s keynote as part of Reclaim Open’s virtual event, which has been—and will continue to be—happening throughout July. Lialina’s talk is very much a highlight given her ongoing work to preserve and curate the work of the early web with online exhibits such as One Terrabyte of Kilobyte Age, featuring homepages from the free web hosting service

In this talk Lialina works from a series of links that highlight various trajectories of the world wide web at various inflection points, namely 1993, 2003, 2013, and 2023. It refuses the idea of a clear past, present, and future of the web, resisting the tendency to simplify the web into epochs like Web 1.0, 2.0, or even the more recent neologism Web3— highlighting the ways in which these categories obfuscate and market through an attempt to simplify complexity and make the enclosure of the web more palatable, through increasingly removing agency from the user experience.

It is a real joy to watch Lialina revel in early, vernacular web design. At various points throughout this talk we are taken on a tour of the GeoCities Institute’s Archives, filled with midi soundtracks, blinking tags, and glorious GIFs that define a sense of home for the respective users. All of this feeds into the broader trajectories that Lialina traces—including the shift “From My to Me” on the web—underscoring the various ways in which the changing nature of the web is not a foregone conclusion, but rather an intentional move towards closing things down to further profit off those that would build there home in cyberspace. The move away from access and agency on the web is not inevitable, but rather part of the broader movement presently afoot to lock down the web as we know/knew it.

If you missed the talk during its premier, I whole-heartedly recommend you take an hour to watch and listen to what Lialina has to show us about WWW across time and trajectories that resist netstalgia, and firmly embrace an inhabitable web that can be reclaimed one website at a time.

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Open, reclaimopen | Tagged Olia Lialina, reclaimopen | 1 Comment

Yie-Ar Kung-Fu Art!

Posted on July 19, 2023 by Reverend

One of the things I love about the bava blog is that it contains multitudes, I’m realizing I’ve posted well over 40 times about the bavacade in the last two years, and that’s a beautiful thing! So, let’s put another brick in that wall, this time with a little Visual Thinkery graffiti! Talking about the great Bryan Mathers’ art in the same breath as the bavacade is a bit like crossing the professional and hobby streams, and I love that.

Defender Cabinet primed and ready for custom art

Anyway, last month I posted about working with Bryan to create custom art for my Yie-Ar Kung-Fu cabinet that is housed in a re-purposed Defender cabinet. And right before I started my travels last week Bryan got me his mad creations, and to no one’s surprise who knows his work, the art is absolutely gorgeous. It really brings the various opponents you fight in this 1985 kung-fu video game to life. The magic of this game is in the cast of characters you fight, as well as the two different backdrops in which you battle each of them. The first stage features a waterfall and the second a Japanese-inspired palace/temple. When we were thinking through how to use the space, I had referenced the way Sidam’s Explorer uses panels to cut the space up, and we wondered what this might look like for Yie-Ar Kung-Fu, and that’s the basis for the left and right side-art, which are showcasing the opponents you fight. Below is the left-side art featuring Star, Sword, Pole, Fan, and Nuncha.

Left-side Art for the custom Yie-Ar Kung-Fu cabinet

We’ll be using a black base to break up the panels, each of which will be printed out separately on vinyl and are custom fit to work with the Defender cabinet, pretty awesome right? The other side has five more characters, namely Feedle, Club, Buchu, Blues, and Tonfun.

Right-side art for Yie-Ar Kung-Fu custom cabinet

Freaking magic, amirite? The colors, the highlighting of each opponent, the sheer glory of the Yie-ar cast of characters decorating this soon-to-be-real custom cabinet, be still my bava heart! Now, at this point the discerning video game fan will note that there are actually 11 opponents, not the more easily divisible 10 we have above. You would be correct! Chain is missing from the side art, and Bryan’s ingenious solution to this dilemma was putting both Chain and the protagonist Oolong on the marquee fighting one another.

Image of Yie-Ar Kung custom marquee featuring Oolong fighting Chain

Yie-Ar Kung-Fu custom marquee featuring Oolong fighting Chain

So good! I don’t know what to say, I love it soooooo much! Now as good as the above is, when Bryan was talking through his art for the project, he noted that two of his favorite figures, in particular Sword and Fan, might make real compelling figures for the side art if I was looking for a less comprehensive approach:

I’m telling you, it was a hard one, cause I can immediately see the power of a single, almost 3 or 4 foot tall character on the cabinet’s side art cutting an imposing silhouette. In fact, Bryan’s suggestion might have been the preferable path given his better sense of design, but I tried to compromise a bit and decided to make the above two images flank the coin door because I want to use all of it! I hate empty space, and the bava is not a minimalist!

Yie-Ar Kung-Fu Bezel with a cast of characters

The above bezel design, which is the art surrounding the monitor, was one of the innumerable inspirations Bryan brought based on various versions of this game ported to home consoles. This one comes from an almost Mortal Kombat 2-like interface where you pick your opponent, allowing us to reinforce the idea of a “Cast of Characters” featuring all of them yet again. This time in the order you face them, and the left and right sides of the bezel highlight stages one and two respectively.

Moving down, the next challenge was the control panel overlay, and I think we decided to keep it simple, but with a really brilliant twist that Bryan came up with that I absolutely love for what will soon be obvious reasons. There is some text to play the game as well as some illustrations for how to perform various moves, which are blown up a bit in the following image:

Close-up image of the illustrations on the control panel overlay

Illustrations of how to jump, punch, and kick, highlighting the various moves

We decided to get rid of the explanatory text and keep the overall design simple:

Simplified Control panel Overlay with a special set of illustrations

But, in that tried and true tradition of patron and artist, Bryan found it within his expansive heart to draw me into the control panel overlay, so move over Oolong, here comes the bava kicking ass and taking names!

Move over Oolong, here comes the bava to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and you better believe he is all out of bubble gum!s

It really doesn’t get much funner than this! And while I understand the ego involved in putting yourself on the control panel of a custom video game arcade cabinet, let’s be honest here that the simple fact I’m funding custom art for an almost 40 year old video game cabinet few people have ever heard of is already far enough down the rabbit hole that I figured the bava illustrations would be the least of my offenses against propriety—not to mention that I LOVE IT!

Sometimes life is good. And the final piece, given I already mentioned the coin door decorations, is the space directly beneath the coin door, which will feature the Japanese palace/temple that is the backdrop for all the fights in stage two. It’s really a striking background, and we wanted to find a way to feature it, so in my quest to eradicate all empty space, we’re filling up the front part of the cabinet beneath the coin door with it.

Image of an illustrated interpretation of the background art for Yie-Ar Kung-Fu from Stage 2 of that game

So, the art is in, and per usual Bryan came through in technicolor! Now I have to paint the cabinet black while I shop around for a printer who will create high resolution versions of of the side art, coin door art, and lower front panel art. I imagine these will all be some version of vinyl, but I’ll see what my options are. Also, for the marquee and bezel I want to see if I can get those printed on top of some heavy duty glass, rather than plastic, but I guess we will see what’s possible. Nonetheless, we’re getting pretty close to reality for a project that seemed a mere dream a couple of months ago, how sick is that?! So, so sick, so sick!

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade | Tagged bavacade, bavarcade, Bryan Mathers, Yie Ar Kung-Fu | 2 Comments

Making Trax in the bavacade

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Reverend

I’ve been traveling in both Rome, Italy and New Orleans, Louisianna over the last week—I like my summer destinations hot!—so I’ve been a bit remiss on the dear old bava blog. But today is a travel day back to Italy, so I’ll try to cram in some posts over the next couple of days. There are a couple of updates on the bavacade, which this and the following post will cover, and then some reflections on WPCampus and the grand old UMW Blogs. So lock it in!

At this point the bavacade is well over two years old. I got my first game delivered in April of 2021, Cheyenne, and as of now there are 30 games total in Italy—there are a few more strewn around the US that I hope to collect one day soon. I’ve been working in earnest since September 2022 on cleaning up the 15 games shipped over from the US, and that has been coming along quite well. “Cleaning up” often equates to some structural work on the cabinets to deal with water damage and the like, as well as putting these unruly pieces of furniture on wheels to make moving them around easier. What’s more, on occasion I get the opportunity to do some touch up work on the paint, which I have come to really enjoy. It’s rewarding work overall, I feel like we’re preserving a small piece of the past, although to be fair most of the structural work is left to Alberto, who is a professional and does an amazing job salvaging some of the rougher cabinets.

So the most recent refurbishing has been for Make Trax, the Williams branding of Crush Roller, which was made by Kural. It was a Pac-man inspired maze game where you’re a paint brush being chased by drops of paint, it’s pretty bizarre. At a certain points various animals and objects break on the scene and leave tracks on the freshly painted maze that you need to clean up. It was an early love for me when I played it in the Pool Hall on Grand Avenue in Baldwin, and one of the cabinets I knew I’d eventually get. I actually played the original Crush Roller, not Make Trax, but in many ways the Make Trax cabinet color scheme and aesthetic is more to my liking, and the gameplay is absolutely identical.

The cabinet was in pretty good shape overall, just some slight chipping along the edges, which would be easy to patch. The real issue was the control panel overlay that was cracking quite significantly. It’s not the worst I’d seen, but this is the bavacade, there are high standards!

A couple of years ago I found an original Make Trax control panel overlay and ordered it given it needed to be cleaned up, and while some reproductions are well done, most are not and if you can get an original—which is hard—do it! Anyway, Alberto was already putting it on wheel’s and doing the minor damage patches, so I asked if he could remove the old overlay (which is a pain in the ass process), and add the new-old overlay. He did, and it came out beautifully!

Alberto is awesome! The one tricky part for me was disassembling and re-assembling the joystick to remove it from the control panel. I’d done this once before with Venture, and that one was far more straightforward. Anyway, I disassemble it, realizing it was held together by two e-clips and four springs:

I figured out how to disassemble and re-assemble the joystick without breaking anything thanks to this video on YouTube, but other than that it was a pretty standard strip down and rebuild, especially since Alberto does all the hard work. I mixed some orange paint to do the minor touch up, and used a matte black paint for the front panel, back doors, and the wheel housing Alberto added.

I did struggle a bit with the board putting out some graphical issues and having to consult the joystick video to see where I had gone wrong in the first re-assembly, but both issues were quickly resolved by cleaning the edge connector and flipping the actuator for the joystick assembly around. Also, on the marquee there is what seems like an old school sticker for the TNT Amusements shop that is still quite active and does all kinds of informative arcade-related videos.

I have no idea if this game was actually refurbished by TNT Amusements, or if the marquee was off another game, but I do like that touch. Anyway, with this game’s done now I have more than half the games in the collection on wheels, and I would say almost every machine is now in near-mint condition. There may be two or three that need a bit of work (one of which is a custom job I’ll be blogging about next), but at this point they’re minor clean-ups that will add wheels, much like Make Trax. That means the bavacade is probably ready to add some more games at this point 🙂

Anyway, here is a shot of Make Trax in all of it’s refurbished glory!

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade, video games | Tagged alberto, bavacade, bavarcade, Crush Roller, Make Trax, pac-man | Leave a comment

The G07 Kid

Posted on July 3, 2023 by Reverend

I spent much of this weekend digging in on some Electrohome G07 monitor chassis repair. I have a bunch of games in the bavacade that use this monitor chassis to power the glorious CRT tubes for these 1980s miracles.

Image of G07 chassis with yoke connector

All told I have at least 7 cabinets that have a G07 chassis. There may be more, but I’m not sure what chassis all my cocktails are using given I never checked, and there are four total: Rally-X, Pleaides, Galaxian, and Moon Cresta.* Along with the Wells Gardner K4600 (at least 6 cabinets have this chassis) the G07 is the most common in the bavacade. That means part of making this hobby sustainable is figuring out how to work on these models given chassis repairs are a big part of keeping games online. I’ve slowly been getting better, but I remain very much an amateur. But even hacks like me have their moments, and this week was one of them. I got two of the three non-working G07s running again, leaving me with just one non-working chassis that I can use as a donor chassis for parts given all the games with G07s are now fully operational. YES!

More detailed image of a G07 chassis

Trusting the process means a lot of troubleshooting, and this weekend I was pretty happy to have committed a bit more and pushing myself to do more extensive diagnostic testing of the various components for things like resistance readings, diode readings, checking if transistors are good, voltage test points, etc. All of this was Greek to me just a couple of years ago, so starting to get my head around this basic troubleshooting before replacing anything is long overdue and pretty rewarding.

The multimeter has proven to be the most indispensable tool of them all

I already talked about the first successful G07 repair this week in my “bavacade Repair log from 6-29-2023,” noting “I was able to repair the Condor G07 chassis that was dead by doing a cap kit, swapping out a new B+ filter cap as well as a horizontal width coil.” The cap kit was done almost a year ago, but I never got it working. Turns out the recent replacement of the B+ filter cap is what brought it back to life. The horizontal width coil was broken, so I soldered a newer one off one of the other two non-working G07 chassis, figuring better to replace the broken one while the board was out. When I re-installed the chassis in Condor it worked, but there was a slight undulation that was annoying me. So, as a test, I tried it in Robotron and the waviness was gone and it worked perfectly, so that’s where it lives right now.

This means I needed to repair one of the other two chassis for Condor, and then I was golden. The two G07 chassis I had both blew the F901 fuses (2.25 AMP @ 250V ) next to the B+ capacitor, which is the biggest capacitor on the board. After discharging the B+ filter,† I replaced the fuses, which needed to be soldered in, and then tested the G07 that came from Pole Position (I defaulted to this one because I had desoldered the horizontal width coil from the other chassis for the first fix). Initially I thought the Pole Position chassis had an issue with the flyback and/or the horizontal output transistor (HOT) given the symptoms when it originally occurred a few weeks back. But after re-soldering the fuse and re-installing in Robotron to confirm as much, there was a total vertical collapse of the heart 🙂

Image of montiro with horizontal line through middle in a Robotron cabinet

G07 chassis with vertical collapse

That’s a new one, but I’ve read about it on forum posts innumerable times. I figured I’d have to deal with it sooner or later, so I embraced the challenge to broaden my experience—learning is painful! OK, so the first thing I did was look at some of the basic troubleshooting for this, and from what I read it is possibly linked to a few different things, such as an open circuit somewhere, which requires testing each resistor in the 400 series circuit to ensure there are no infinite (OL) ohm readings. It’s also been linked to the x401 and/or X402 trasnsitors, so you wanna check the values there. I’ve read a few cases where the IC501 chip was bad and needs to be replaced, but that seems less likely. That said, the following G07 repair video did have that issue, and it does a great job walking you through common troubleshooting as well as demonstrating how to test the transistors, which was very helpful:

I tested the transistors, and they were both reading at .570, which seems normal. I then tested all the 400 series resistors and some were lower than the specs, but none were open, so not sure they are the issue. I also compared the results on a working G07 and they were fairly similar, here are the results I got for this chassis:

FR401: 69 Ohm
R401: 99 Ohm
R402: 18K Ohm
R403: 3.3K Ohm
R404: 4K Ohm
R405: 12K Ohm
R406: Vertical linearity trim pot
R407: 4.2K Ohm
R408: vertical Height trim pot
R409: 51 Ohm
R410: 6.4 Ohm
R411: 13K Ohm
R412: 13.5K Ohm
R413: 580 Ohm
R414: 3.1K Ohm
R415: 2.6K Ohm
R416: 8K Ohm
R417: 67 Ohm
R418: 1.3K Ohm
R419: 1.9K Ohm
R420: 6.6 Ohm
R421: 5.5K Ohm
R423: 2.4 K Ohm

Some of the readings are low, particularly for R404, R411, R412, R416, R417,R421, and R423, but I got similar low values for another chassis that works just fine, so I “resisted” replacing any resistors just yet given I didn’t find any open circuits, just issues with value range (assuming a low resistor value would not cause the total collapse, but I’m not positive on this). The next test would be the IC501 chip, but I was not entirely sure how to test this chip, still a blindspot for me, and I don’t have a spare regardless, so I let that sit.

There could also be an issue with soldering joints at the yoke connectors on the board but the solder was fine, but still might reflow those. Beyond that, I tested the resistors for R406 and R408 which adjust the vertical height and linearity, and they adjusting values accordingly, so I was hitting a brick wall. I even checked the diodes in the 400 circuit, but all seemed good.

The dark splotch on the flyback is where it burst and started leaking

At this point I decided to step away from the Pole Position chassis, and turn to the other one that wasn’t working. First thing was desolder the horizontal width coil from the chassis I just abandoned and solder it to this one. I already added the new F901 fuse, so with the width coil added and the fuse in I tested it out. The last time it had not powered on at all, whereas this time it powered on and immediately there was smoke coming out of the flyback. It had blown. This, oddly, was very reassuring because at least I knew exactly where the issue was, and I also had an extra flyback that worked. So, I replaced the flyback and tested the game again and voilà this time it worked perfectly, whew! All the work on the other one with no results but a lot of learning, and this one was a simple replacement part swap, I’ll take it every time.

I need another width coil and a working flyback, but once I have them I might even take another shot at the last non-working G07, but given no games are effected I can finally move on to the last chassis repair I need to do, the K4600 for the Centuri Challenger, so until then!

_____________________________________

*I’ve yet to dismantle a cocktail cabinet, but that task will probably be coming soon given some work needed on my Pleiades cocktail cabinet, I don’t trust the adjustable metal legs on that game and want to get them properly lubricated and adjust with the write screws.

† Capacitors are designed to hold a charge, and when you blow the F901 fuse that charge has nowhere to go, which makes these big capacitor dangerous to the touch. Whenever removing this board do not grab it from underneath before discharging the G07 cap. You can do this by using an insulated screw driver that is connected to a ground via an alligator clip to ensure the charge has somewhere to go. To ground it, make sure the screw driver touches the + and – posts, read more on this on the KLOV forums here.

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade, video games | Tagged bavacade, bavarcade, Challenger, condor, G07, pole positon, Robotron | 2 Comments

Ian Linkletter’s Call to Action at Reclaim Open

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Reverend

Image of Ian Linkletter We’re honored to have edtech’s patron saint of resisting student surveillance, Ian Linkletter, join us on July 24th at 12 PM Eastern (9 AM Pacific) to discuss the crucial role of ethical edtech in our current moment. As many of you already know, Ian’s experience battling Proctorio’s SLAPP lawsuit has provided him a uniquely personal perspective on the tremendous costs and dangers of ceding control of higher education’s mission to greedy, unscrupulous vendors. His cause is that of anyone who believes education is not only a fundamental right, but provides the basic toolkit for every citizen to battle tyranny. Join us at https://watch.reclaimed.tech/reclaim-open for Ian’s call to action advocating for ethical edtech in the work we do.

Posted in Reclaim Open | Tagged edtech, Ian Linkletter, reclaimopen | Leave a comment

bavacade Repair Log 6-29-2023

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Reverend

This is just a quick update to document some of the work happening recently in the bavacade. It has a been a bit of catch as catch can given how busy the last month has been with the Reclaim open conference the and coming virtual event in July. That said, I’ve been sneaking in work here and there in the mornings, and as usual it adds up. I already blogged about the Yie-Ar Kung-fu custom cabinet project, and will be a summer long endeavor, but it’s very exciting. I also documented some of my work a couple of week’s ago testing various parts I bought in the US in the “Arcade Therapy” post, so things are definitely moving along.

Arcade Therapy

More recently I have been testing some spare boards I have, namely a spare Make Trax board as well as spare Super Cobra board. This was also part of my attempt to start organizing all my parts and spares in the basement and get some semblance of order. I find testing and labeling when things worked saves me a ton of time, and some of the metadata on the boxes noted that these boards were questions marks. Also, I was looking to test a Crush Roller board in Make Trax I was sure I’d bought and brought to Italy over, but turns out I am either delusional or simply left it in Fredericksburg. Either way, because I’m obsessed I bought another Crush Roller board I found for a decent price in Germany along with a spare Moon Cresta board. The latter board is for the cocktail cabinet in Zach Davis is minding for me in Portland, Oregon, and I want to install and test the high score save kit on this one before shipping it back once I am in New Orleans next month.

The mint Moon Cresta Cocktail machine in residence at Cast Iron Coding’s HQ

Anyway, back to the spare Make Trax and Super Cobra boards. The Make Trax spare works, but the sound is noisy. It’s as if the sound pot is not working correctly and there it is too loud and scratchy, so will need to track that down a new potentiometer (pot) and see if tracing the audio gives me any insight. This board will be the first real PCB work (besides my botched Stargate repair attempts) I’ve attempted in earnest, and I’m hopeful it’s the start of some basic board work.

Stargate Yellow Screen of Death

If it goes well, the second project will be Super Cobra, which has an issue with the high score save kit. There are weird special characters in the high score save (HSS) kit and free play is not working. When I substituted the original roms—this board has several ROMs removed given they are programmed on the HSS kit—and Z80 chip from the working board the special characters went away. That said, there was then a strange rebooting issue with the game that did not happen with HSS kit in, so I’m going to buy new chips and burn the Super Cobra roms (a first for me). After that, I’ll try to track down the random rebooting issue, which is definitely an issue I can isolate to that board, should be fun!

Image of the screen of Super Cobra with weird special characters

Shot of Super Cobra with weird special characters in high score

As far as other work, I am making headway on monitor chassis repair. I had the spare Hanterex Polo in Cheyenne sent in for diagnosis given the original is stuck in the US on what’s shaping up to be an almost a 6-month wait, which I’m not thrilled about. I’ll keep pushing on the US repair, but in the meantime if the spare board is fixed here in Italy I can finally get this game back online. If that happens, then I’m just one G07 chassis and one K4600 chassis away from having everything running. I was able to repair the Condor G07 chassis that was dead by doing a cap kit, swapping out a new B+ filter cap as well as a horizontal width coil, and the chassis is working pretty well, but there’s a slight undulating wave that Tommaso tells me is good enough, but it’s annoying me, so I do think I need to replace all the adjustment pots, especially for vertical linearity and vertical hold.

In fact, I was certain I bought spare G07 pots, but I can’t find them for the life of me (part of the quest for order undertaken this week), so I’ve been parting out one of my extra, non-working G07 chassis. I’m also waiting on some 1.25 AMP fuses that should come today to try and get the chassis that came out of Pole Position working again. I think this chassis has either a bad flyback or a bad voltage regulator given there has been a recent cap kit done already. I might also need to swap the B+ filter cap. If that works, it will be put in Robotron, which leaves only the K4600 chassis for Challenger (I put Challenger‘s 4600 into Venture to get that game up and running) to repair. I’m not sure what is up there cause I swapped flyback and there was a recent cap kit, so a bit perplexed, but hopefully we some poking around and testing that will be the final piece of the puzzle. This is where the chorus sings, “Hope springs eternal in the bava heart.”

Cracks in the Make Trax control panel overlay

Cracks in the Make Trax control panel overlay

Finally, I have the Make Trax cabinet totally stripped and with Alberto to add wheels because every game will be on wheels sooner than later in the bavacade. The cabinet, overall, is close to mint save the control panel overlay which cracking. When Tim and I were getting Reclaim Arcade up and running I came across an original control panel overlay for this game and snagged it, it was one of the things that came over with the container so I asked Alberto iof he could remove the old one and add this one, and as he says to everything, “No problem!” He’s the best! He removed the old one, which by all accounts from Tim is a totally nightmare, and got it sanded and cleaned up.

Sanded Make Trax control panel ready for the like-new original overlay

After that, he put on the new overlay and it looks like new! So good. Sometimes those things I bought that I thought “Will I use this” are now almost all in use, and that makes me happy.

Alberto’s work on these cabinets continues to blow my mind, this control panel is, indeed, like new thanks to his craftsmanship

I think the next game to go on wheels will be Elevator Action, so will start taking that one apart, and that will mean 16 of the 30 games in the bavacade will be on wheels, and that means I am have crossed the half-way mark, which is encouraging progress! It also means I will have stripped almost every game down to just the cabinet if I manage to get wells on all of them. That’s pretty awesome.

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade, video games | Tagged Challenger, Cheyenne, condor, Crush Roller, G07, K4600, Make Trax, moon cresta, Robotron, Stargate, super cobra, Venture | 2 Comments

Reclaim Today explores Docsify This

Pledge Against Surveillance

Reclaim Cloud in Europe!

UMW Blogs: a Diamond in the Rough

Seeing 30 Years of WWW

Yie-Ar Kung-Fu Art!

Making Trax in the bavacade

The G07 Kid

Ian Linkletter’s Call to Action at Reclaim Open

bavacade Repair Log 6-29-2023

Watch the bava blog trailer!

about

I am Jim Groom

Recent comments

Recent Posts

browse the bavarchive

Contributors

some favorites