Gauntlet II

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu May 24, 2012 10:48 pm

Oh. I didn't see Flack or Vark's post till now. So I took no photos.

A beer slid off a game and crashed, as is happens every time I host a party. Next time I really got to have a table that is perfect for holding beer out in the arcade.

But Gauntlet II performed like a champ. I hid Tempest in the spare bedroom, so nobody had to see it not work.

I am looking at that Funhouse pin tomorrow and I am going to ask The Wolf Man for the name of his arcade tech. If I can pay a dude money and get a working Tempest, I am going to do it.

by **AArdvark** » Thu May 24, 2012 7:22 pm

Bat computer signs!

"Robin, the Crystal Castles cranston stabilizer has broken loose again, see if you can lock it down."

THE
TOO MUCH ICE CREAM
AARDVARK

by **Flack** » Thu May 24, 2012 4:51 pm

Ah, that sounds like fun and I didn't do it nearly enough. Be sure to take some pictures, if you can do so without coming off too creepy. Who knows, maybe you can use them in a text adventure some day!

I started a project one time that involved making little display signs for each machine. I can't remember what size I was going to make them -- small enough to fit in the corner of each marquee, I think -- but I was just going to list the game's name, when it was made, when I bought it, and a brief summary of the game. Kind of like little KLOV summaries for each one.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu May 24, 2012 1:33 pm

Yeah, it was OK last night and this morning as well. For the first time in multiple years, people are coming over to play games tonight and I really want it to go off without having to run around fixing things.

by **Flack** » Wed May 23, 2012 11:14 pm

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Hey.... perhaps.... we do a 720 ARCADE ART PARTY???!

Game ON!

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I am so motherfucking christing fucking SICK Of having these piece of shit fucking fucks working 100% before I go to bed only to have the same exact fucking problem when I check on them a day late.r Fucking FUCK FUFJUFJFJFJFJFJF

Game OFF!

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I started Gauntlet 2 both during the Don Rogers Show last night and this morning. Sprites still look good. Don't recall it ever "lasting" 12 hours before, but there we are!

Game back ON!

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed May 23, 2012 7:17 am

I started Gauntlet 2 both during the Don Rogers Show last night and this morning. Sprites still look good. Don't recall it ever "lasting" 12 hours before, but there we are!

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue May 22, 2012 7:03 pm

Soooooooo I turn on Gauntlet and sure of fucking nough, the goddamn fucking problem is there. And I fucking KNEW that it would be.

I am so motherfucking christing fucking SICK Of having these piece of shit fucking fucks working 100% before I go to bed only to have the same exact fucking problem when I check on them a day late.r Fucking FUCK FUFJUFJFJFJFJFJF

by **Flack** » Tue May 22, 2012 4:33 pm

I'd be down for that.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue May 22, 2012 7:33 am

I know it's tempting to just apply it. And take one's time. And not fuck up.

But - man. Maybe if I did 30 of them a month that'd be the way I'd do it. Instead, spray a light dusting of Windex on the cab, place it down and smooth it out. Then put one instance of everything you own on top of it so it binds well to the wood.

Hey.... perhaps.... we do a 720 ARCADE ART PARTY???!

by **Flack** » Tue May 22, 2012 4:40 am

Ah! Awesome fix! Blue Valkyrie's midriff has been restored!

I need to read up on applying side art. I bought some NOS side art for my 720 cabinet and it's sitting in a tube in my garage on top of my 720 cabinet, not doing anyone any good.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon May 21, 2012 9:59 pm

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Honestly, if someone ever breaks in here while I'm awake, I am going to hit them with the fucking heat gun and melt their goddamn face.

I just need them to wait for a minute before the gun heats up.

I did two things with Gauntlet II tonight.

The first was that I attempted to put one of the pieces of side art on. There's fucking bubbles because I tried the dry method. Never again, under any circumstances. I didn't have any Windex around, though, so that's why I gave dry mode a shot. Fuck!

The other thing is -- OK, so I bought a brand new video cable from a guy off KLOV who made it fresh. A fresh cable. That "missing sprites" issue was still happening, and getting worse.

OK, one bad cable from the 80s I could see. But two?

I took the board out and looked at the video pins on the PCB. One looked... brownish. I held the soldering gun to it in case it was a cold solder joint.

(I never knew that fixing a cold solder bit just involved holding the soldering iron on the area and that's it. I thought you had to add solder as well. But I learned otherwise the other day.)

For the first time in a long while, when turning it on there weren't any missing sprites. I left it running and I may play a game and try to move it and try to ensure that there aren't any other problems. I'm having some guys over here before the Van Halen concert on Thursday and I want to make sure all the games work as best they can, with no cat hair on them.

by **Flack** » Fri Oct 28, 2011 1:57 pm

The previous home owner put up these dumb cork squares all over the side of one of the kitchen cabinets. The cabinet goes floor to ceiling and the cork squares are ... shit, I don't know, 12"x12"? Just a guess.

My wife said to not pull them down because it would look worse than having them there, so I immediately walked in and pulled them down. That's how I roll. So behind the cork squares and little tiny square adhesives. And not one or two but like 50,000 of them. I tried peeling them off, but no. They're ... adhesivey. I used a gallon of Goo-Gone and spent four hours scraping on the wood with an old plastic credit card and got a few of them off.

I'm thinking about trying the heat gun to remove them but every time I look for instructions all I find are warnings about not setting things on fire. I swear, every web page that mentions a heat gun makes it sound like the thing's a freakin' flame thrower. Isn't it just a hotter hair dryer?

Screw it, I'mma try it tonight.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Oct 27, 2011 11:25 pm

Honestly, if someone ever breaks in here while I'm awake, I am going to hit them with the fucking heat gun and melt their goddamn face.

by **Flack** » Mon Oct 10, 2011 12:18 am

Oh, and also ... I bought a heat gun this week. I've only needed one like four times over the past 15 years, and at least two of those times were just so I could have loaned it to someone else, but last week I found out they were $20 at the local tool store so I was like ... you know what, I'm going to make that investment.

by **Flack** » Mon Oct 10, 2011 12:16 am

That chunk of black paint missing from the front? Yeah, I did that. When I bought the game the coin doors were flapping in the wind, so to prevent that I stuck a piece of duck tape across the front. When I ripped it off ... off came the paint. Whoops.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sun Oct 09, 2011 11:41 pm

Yeah, those rich pricks can suck a dick. I had five bucks to last me an entire parent/teacher conference day.

UPDATE! I asked, on KLOV, if anyone had a Gauntlet RGB cable for sale. A poster there sent me a private message and said he could make a new one. He was well-versed with Gauntlet terminology, so I agreed. He finished it this morning and is going to mail it out tomorrow.

I think my next move is to use the heat gun to take some of the stickers off the front of the cab, and then sand down the front of the cab and apply black paint to it. Oh, and write the promised blog post and include photographs.

I'll tell you why I like this game: I can get in and out in under two minutes. I press the coin-up button, I choose a station and character, and I hopefully get to level 5 before I die. If I want to add an extra life I can do that. If not, no sweat. Unlike, say, Pac-Man, where I am going to be playing for 15 minutes only to fall short of Ben's high score on fast Pac.

by **Flack** » Sun Oct 09, 2011 5:41 am

We must be psychically linked or something, Jonsey. Last night, I burned the shit out of my thumb on a hot light bulb. Weird.

As for that side art ... I've seen the pictures and read about the reproduction efforts for the "tall" side art, but I have never seen the tall side art out in the wild before. I guess they say it was originally released in limited numbers or something, but I've never run across one. I think the tall side art looks pretty cool, but the short side art looks "right" to me.

Hey, whadda-ya-know. I just checked the game flyer out and it looks like it has the tall side art on the side -- check it out!

Good deal on getting the leaf switches moved over. Sounds like you are making some good headway on the machine!

I had a few marathon sessions of Gauntlet back in the day, but nothing like those guys were talking about in those posts. When Gauntlet came out I was in 7th grade. I was lucky to come up with a couple of quarters to play games. Bank rolling $5 or $10 on a single game was above my pay grade ...

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sun Oct 09, 2011 12:38 am

It looks like Gauntlet II saves high scores by score *per* quarter. Interesting. I reset the table (I assume no score was yours on there, Flack!) and couldn't understand why I wasn't making the table.

Also, this is an interesting post about Gauntlet:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... ode=source

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sat Oct 08, 2011 8:38 pm

UPDATE! There was just too much space between the leaf switches, which is why diagonals didn't work for the blue and yellow players.

I took 8 leaf switches from the other control panel and soldered them to the wiring of the current Gauntlet II panel. On the last one I burned the hell out of my thumb with the soldering iron, so the house smelled like BBQed human flesh for a bit there.

(We dislike that smell because of evolution, right? People who were into it ate humans, and since there ARE lots of humans, we evolved to not like the smell of burned human flesh.)

Diagonals work. I'm still going crazy because the wire handling the spites occasionally gets bumped and I have to bump it back, but that's fine.

I am going to reset the high score table next.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sat Oct 08, 2011 6:37 pm

Three hands is a good way to put it. Miraculously, I did not brush my leg with the soldering iron I had draped over the control panel. I moved the iron so it was draped over the Spy Hunter control panel. The iron is also a kitty magnet, and while they are all bad boys, they don't deserve to be scalded that way.

I was reading up on side art. I think I will have Gauntlet II forever. I think it will always have to be at the end of a row, because of the four-player thing. It makes sense for it to have side art. (I put side art on Marble Madness, did a shitty job, and now have it crammed next to games on both sides. A mistake all around.)

Apparently Gauntlet and Gauntlet II have the SAME side art. I didn't know that.

Arcade Overlays sells just the side art (in other words, not the control panel art) for $73. They list it as "Gauntlet" side art. They have a Gauntlet II pack for like $200. Unless there's evidence to the contrary, both Gauntlets sharing the same art is great.

But what is this I found next?

http://www.coinopspace.com/forum/topics ... rt-project

Here's how I thought all Gauntlet art looked:

So what is the deal with the "tall" side art? A mystery!

Gauntlet II

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