The Broken Joystick

I saw this on ebay and it was a 2 hour drive away and was at $51 with a day left. I watched it and right before the end I sniped $78 in and won it for $66.

So, for $66, 240 miles and 4.5 hours of driving, it’s mine now. It works 95% and is in pretty good shape. The left flipper is weak, it needs a new set of rubbers all around, needs new flipper buttons (faded), it doesn’t’ keep score (always says 0), and the far right drop target is always down. I’m VERY happy with it.

OK, I’m a total idiot. I was hooking up the output of my Centipede to my test rig incorrectly – I was hooking up the RGB,GND, SYNC to SYNC, GND, BGR (image above is what you get)! Once I hooked it up right I could see the game playing. No sound or mushrooms though.

I went to bed and tied it again the next day and everything worked as it should. it had sound and mushrooms. WTF? I didn’t touch it. I’m happy it’s working but worried it will die on me again. Sigh.

I also tested the monitor from the bartop and it works great and has an awesome picture!

A while back I picked up a side of repo Qbert sideart with a flaw in it for cheap ($20 maybe?). I had the bright idea to frame it in a poster frame and use it as an arcade wall decoration in a poster frame.

Unfortunately, the paper I used as the background wrinkled and looked crappy. So, I had the bright idea to buy some yellow spray paint…

and paint the wood background to look like a qbert cabinet…



It took only a few minutes to dry and I popped in the sideart. man, it looks good (IMO)…



The lines you see in it now are just reflections in the glass. it looks great, honestly!

I picked up the restaurant booth today. It’s almost perfect. Just the right size – not too big. I could do without the brown but it will do. Gonna rearrange the arcade this weekend and make room for it.

I also played around in the arcade tonight and I got my Konami NBA Play by Play kit working! Turns out a dipswitch was flipped. Cool. Not as fun as NBA Jam, but I played a few games of it. Cool PCB setup with mini I/O boards to connect P3 and P4 and USB ports to hookup a separate cabinet (I think) and VGA output even.

I’ve been wanting a restaurant booth for the arcade for a while and it looks like I finally found one for FREE on Craigslist! He was asking $25 but said he’d give it to me. I’m going to pick it up tomorrow. It’s kind of an ugly brown but it looks like it’s in good condition. I could redo the vinyl if I wanted but may leave it. I need a table now.

I had 5 switching power supplies of unknown state. A guy at work (Scott) who also collects, tested them all for me. Three worked so he kept one and I kept two – so now I have two extra working power supplies. YAY! I may need one to fix Tapper.