This arcade is a bit of an ugly duckling but hides some inner charm.
It started out as a Midway Baseball. Then, when Space Invaders became massively popular in a short period of time, both existing Midway cabinets and new cabinets off the production line were kitted out as Space Invaders machines.
This particular unit, they only replaced the inner marquee with a Space Invaders one, I am unsure whether they added the cardboard background and mirror, but the original backward angle monitor mount slots are still present.
After that, when Space Invaders died down, the monitor was swapped for a colour one and sadly, the middle of the Space Invaders marquee cut out and an Exed Eyes name tacked on.
When it arrived at my arcade, the tube and chassis were both blown. The tube was an old colour TV, along with a hacked colour TV chassis. And the coin door was completely missing.
I found a correct coin door for quite a reasonable price, the cat tried to assist me to fit the new one 🙂
I swapped out the tube for a spare and put in a freshly recapped NANAO chassis. Stupidly misled by the American power plug inside the cab, I didn’t check it first and soon realised that someone had changed the wiring and that the socket (even though the plug was still American) was 240V.
Magic smoke was soon emitted. You really don’t want to experience magic smoke from a large power filter cap
So I rewired the cabinet, with a new step-down transformer, and replaced the power cap with a modern equivalent, but obviously, some other damage had occurred.
This was extremely frustrating, but I persevered and next replaced the AC to DC Voltage Regulator.
This got it pretty close, but the picture would jump, and/or completely lose sync, especially as the chassis warmed up a bit. I reflowed pretty much the whole chassis, and it still did not make any difference. I ended up leaving it for quite some time, until just this last weekend, I decided to have another go at it. With it powered up, I played with the main voltage variable resistor, and it made the picture get worse in a similar way.
I finally realised that when the 240V went through, after damaging the voltage regulator, it probably scorched the variable resistor. So in the end, a bit of manual tweaking of the resistor, I then sprayed lots of PCB Cleaner into the variable resistor (with it switched off, of course), waited for that to evaporate and then turned it back on. It was a little jumping for a short while, and now it is rock solid.
So what’s next? Well, the control panel could be improved, and/or of course, proper Midway Space Invaders artwork, and a control panel would make a lot of difference. But I am in a bit of a bind, I have picked up three more cabinets in recent months (see Original Battlezone), and my arcade is quite simply out of space. I have to let something go, and I already have an original sit-down Space Invaders, so this cab is probably one I will move on to someone who wants to continue the restoration.
Happily, I have a least taken a cab that was close to ending up in land waste to a state where it has cleaned up (and much safer) wiring, its missing coin door has been re-instated, and it has a working colour monitor and matching chassis.
As an aside, I may have found the Exed Eyes PCB that lived inside from another local collector, I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, it’s not a too bad vertical shoot em up.
