{"id":1029,"date":"2025-06-08T23:01:06","date_gmt":"2025-06-08T13:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/?p=1029"},"modified":"2025-06-08T23:01:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-08T13:01:06","slug":"midway-baseball-space-invaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/?p=1029","title":{"rendered":"Midway Baseball\/Space Invaders"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This arcade is a bit of an ugly duckling but hides some inner charm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I found a correct coin door for quite a reasonable price, the cat tried to assist me to fit the new one \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Magic smoke was soon emitted. You really don’t want to experience magic smoke from a large power filter cap<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This was extremely frustrating, but I persevered and next replaced the AC to DC Voltage Regulator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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<\/a>), 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1042,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arcade"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1047,"href":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029\/revisions\/1047"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/electricadventures.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}