With a game evening coming up soon, the Space Station had some issues that needed to be dealt with.  First of all the ball wouldn’t get up from the through into the ball launcher and secondly the “Stop & Go” droptarget in front of the ramp wouldn’t well – drop.

Take of the drop target assembly.  It all works and its there but this one really would not go down.  I never use any lubricant in a pinball machine, but this is an exception.  A bit of teflon spray on where the drop target slides down and bazinga.  It drops immediately now after just the slightest touch.  The opto still needs some cleaning as it does not recognize a drop in 5% of the cases but this is a major improvement nonetheless

With the droptarget removed, I could also replace that single 555 lamp that was still to be replaced.  This one sits under the “stop & score” insert so that’s shiny now as well.

The ramp on this game is busted, as is the accompanying flap.  This was already operator fixed in the past but the screw didn’t copy anymore.  So here’s a small expansion to that single screw.  Yes it’s a hack but untill reproduction ramps are made, this will have to do.

And as a final touch.. New balls please !

Well, that PCB had to go back into that No Fear to bring the display back to life…  That was no problem but *MAN* did that game need a cleaning.

Sadly no pictures from the display or the after cleaning state but just to give you an idea on what it was…

Trust me, in the end it looked a lot better and played faster  too :p

With the High Voltage board repaired, there was one thing left to do : test it before it goes back into the No Fear.  5 minutes away is a nicely restored Addams Family that holds the same type of board so in it went.

Screw in the board, connect the cables, power on the game and BOING !

Very nice crisp display as a result.  Now to drive back to Leuven and reconnect the PCB into its original No Fear home.

A few days before Christmas I got a call from a guy whose Taxi I repaired over a year ago, informing me that he now has a No Fear but that the display is “bad”.  Basically this could be anything but with some measurements and a few calls for doublechecking it became clear that the High Voltage section of the display board had gone poof.  Repair kits exist online so these components rapidly arrived by mail and the board could be revised with all new shiny components in the high voltage section.

The “before” picure. The negative voltages both matched at about –120v.  Only R8 measured out of scope but just replace everything, as most likely other components have toasted as well.

Getting the PDF manual its best to print out the page showing the display board and marking the components that need to be replaced and use the parts list as a guideline for what goes where once you open up the goodie bag of shiny new components

All parts layed out and taped to a piece of paper.  Basically work our way thru – easy parts first, well after we got the board emptied out.

An hour of desoldering later.  An “empty” PCB.  This will get a bit of a cleaning before the new components go on, taking away the years of Pinball Dust that have accumulated

New components installed.  Not much more to say.

And here are the old components and cut wires from the new ones.  This is for mister trashcan, unless someone would want an old burnt-out transistor – nope I didn’t think so.

Getting closer to the end of the year also means counting what is left.  One of those things to count are the retro pins that are available at the trade shows.  Seems that I’ve sold out of Space Invaders, Atari logos and 8 bit logos.  Mario’s, Mushrooms and Neo Geo is getting low as well.

So what to do ? Well, get new ones I guess…

The Gent Hackerspace – Whitespace – celebrated it’s 100th “meeting” last friday.  In the back room of the space is this lovely – but of so effing huge -  Neo Geo cabinet.  It holds an equally massive 6 slot motherboard but needed some tweaking on the config side.  I quickly set the system to free play (no longer pushing the test button inside the coindoor), allowed game swapping without credits and stopped the auto-start timer that I always find to be utterly annoying.

Played some Puzzle Bobble, Aero Fighters 2 and Magical Drop 2.  Nice cabinet but standing up does tend to get painfull in the lower back and arms after about half an hour.  Shame I don’t have the room for a cabinet such as this one.  It’s *really* nice.

The translite on the Space Station was kind of faded.  It’s hard to see on the picture but the yellow is not even close to the same “thickness” on the fitted one when compared to this NOS translite you can still buy on the interwebs.

And if you’re guessing, the NOS part is at the back the old at the front.

The SuperGuns available in the web store have one slight drawback.  They are incompatible with multislot MVS carts.  This because, according to the JAMMA standardization unused pins should be connected to ground.  And on an MVS they are not.  There for a multislot MVS *will* boot with the SuperGun but the games will not start/be playable.

Now I had a few hundreds of MVS carts to test and as I didn’t feel like swapping out the single MVS cart from the not-so-easy loading single slot motherboard – which *does* work fine with the Supergun by the way – I created my little in-between adaptor from a re-used JAMMA connector and a fingerboard.  The micro switch on the picture will act as a game-select button once everything is connected up.  On the picture we’re about halfway completion of the adaptor as you’ll see that the bottom side visible here isn’t connected yet.

I’m having various issues with this arcade cabinet here.  A JAMMA-converted Sega Virtua Soccer 2 cabinet and the screen had been going thru wobbles and stuff for some time and now ended on a horizontal line in the middle – and that was it.

Obvious thing here would be a recap kit.  The screen was getting kind of dull so was going to have it done anyway but that did not seem to resolve the single-horizontal-line problem.

So checking the potmeters that set the screen width, brightness and those other analog controls this single potentiometer suddenly measured “zero” all across the range.  Far from its 50K value that it should have.

And its task ? Horizontal Size.  Gah…

It might not be a root cause (yet), but it certainly is a wee bit of a smoking gun.  The 50K Pot has been desoldered, now to put in a new one…

During the last week or so I was able to find a batch of fully working Neo Geo motherboards in various places. The good news is that there now is a fresh stock of single slots MVS motherboards available and for those of you who are not into the 150-in-1 multigame carts, there are a few dual- and quad-slots available as well – get those while you can.

Interested ? Check the shop !

Single Slot MVS Motherboards
Dual Slot MVS Motherboards
Quad Slot MVS Motherboards