Jolt Country

I fucking did it!

First off:

I then ordered it from QuarterArcade.com, and have not received any confirmation that they received my order and are getting ready to ship it.

I got it three days after I ordered it, so while I didn't get a mail confirming the order, the guys at QuarterArcade.com must have shipped it out unbelievable early on Tuesday. I am going to start a thread about my good experiences with various coin-op and nostalgia-based-gaming vendors, but let me give spoilers as to how it all turns out: QuarterArcade is AWESOME.

All right, here's how the Taito Kit installation went:


- I removed the socketed chips at U85 and U86 from my ZooKeeper video board.

- The kit has a wire that needs to be soldered to +5 on any of the nearby chips. The instructions say pin 20 of chip U83. Dumbass me didn't count the pins correctly. You are supposed to count them like this on the U85:
The instructions say that the kit takes up the entire socket for U86, but only four pins on U85 (11 through 14).

This matters, because when I went to solder the wire on a U83, which has 20 legs, I was counting from the top down.

Now, this is something that only a rank amateur would do. It was a learning process, and thank Christ I didn't destroy my PCB. And I am well aware that counting as you might think doesn't always work - I used to program in Assembly, and you start counting a byte at bit 0, right to left. More, the only way that thing could have entered pins 11-14 on U85 is if you started counting at pin 1, go down, go across, and go up.

So after having this brainwave, I sucked up the solder on what was pin 11 of U83, and put the wire on pin 20. I installed the PCB back into the cabinet and turned it on.

All the LEDs lit up, and I was all, "fuck!" Then they went off. And I was like, "maybe this worked!"

Went around to the front of the cabinet and sure enough the game came up (in the memory failure screen). I restored the factory defaults, played a game, got into the high score table, turned it off, turned it back on...

... and it worked. I am on an unbelievable high right now.

Lemme hand it to the designer of the kit: it's very elegant and simple and works great.

Oh yeah, I also said to myself, "I'll go to church on Christmas if this works" the last time I plugged the board in. I haven't been to a church in two decades, but it looks like I need to find a Methodist church to crash for next Wednesday. Do they even let you do that? You can just show up, attend mass or whatever it's called, and leave, right?

Yes, that's what churches are kinda for. They used to be unlocked all night, 24-7, for those in need, but vandalism took care of that. Masses are not a Safeway membership, you can just go, they don't even ask your zip code.

What I said before about the chip thing: breakers are numbered 1-whatever down the left side, and then whatever to whatever DOWN the right side, too. That was not an intuitive arrangement.

Here is an interesting development! The stages go as follows in Zoo Keeper:

1 - Brick
2 - Brick
3 - Platforms
4 - Brick
5 - Brick
6 - Platforms
7 - Bonus Keeper Stage (Two Levels)
8 - Brick
9 - Brick (First Appearance of the Lion)
10 - Platforms
11 - Bonus Keeper Stage (Three Levels)

... and that is as far as I had ever gone. Until tonight. Stage 12 is another brick stage, and the first to have two nets.

Er, not that I got that far. The outside border FLASHES LIKE SOME POKEMON SEIZURE SHIT. It was like this:



I lost all three lives I took to that board. I could technically get there with up to five, since you can win a keeper in each Bonus Keeper stages. But while I might have five lives going into the goddamn LSD light switch level, I will end my own life outside of the game, so the net loss is: all of them.

Here is why my gal is the BEST girlfriend in the world:

She got me a Zoo Keeper marquee from mamemarquees.com!

Pic:



It doesn't totally come across in photos, but it looks a million times better than the flaking one that originally came with the machine. I couldn't be more thrilled. Thank you, sweetie!

I'll wait until I have it set up before I post the pics of what you bought me :) Hint, aquarium. Not so much hint as giveaway, but still, I could not be more pleased. And I'm listening right now to the mp3 player you got me, also :)

Vitriola wrote:I'll wait until I have it set up before I post the pics of what you bought me :) Hint, aquarium. Not so much hint as giveaway, but still, I could not be more pleased. And I'm listening right now to the mp3 player you got me, also :)

Y'all are so cute I could just retch.

Bruce

Cute as a button!

For my own purposes, I need to write down what kind of bulb the coin door takes in the Zoo Keeper cab. It is a "1892" bulb. For some reason, they shot 14.4 volts into the coin door lamp. This means the steady diet of 5v "#47" bulbs I was feeding it were blowing their shit in an evening.

I have no idea why they didn't tap into an existing +5 stream for the coin door lights. I mean, I am sure they have a reason, I just can't fathom it.

1892 bulbs are out there, just not at the arcade distributor everyone uses (The Real Bob Roberts). He's got like every other bulb in the world, though.

Simon says just move the 14V wire to the 5V tap and keep the #47 lamps. Of course this is not 100% OEM so it may not be what you want.



THE
MODIFICATIONS
ARE GOOD
AARDVARK

Oh yes, an update! I grabbed some 12 volt lamps and plugged one in. Hasn't killed it yet. I hope it's close enough?

Also, I think I may paint the sides orange. The real Zoo Keeper in a dedicated cab looked like this:



Mine is a converted Qix, and just has the gray-and-black Taito logo on it. On one hand, that's why it was only $500. On the other hand, it'd be nice to paint it.

There is a guy working on stencils for the lion art you see above, but it is a painstaking process. I might just paint the thing "Zoo Keeper orange" in the meantime, so I'd be ready and honestly, it wouldn't look any worse than the bog-ass boring TAITO gray shit on the side that it currently has.

For the record, the stencils for Zoo Keeper ARE out.

They are also $175.

I want them very badly! I would love it if my Zoo Keeper were orange, instead of the generic Taito-gray it is now. Guess I ought to start saving up for it.

Current high score? Still that 700,000 gem you put up whilst I was watching?

Yeah, I haven't been able to top it.

Tried to make a run at your Frogger score last night, by the way. Let's just say I shouldn't be ordering any hi-score patches for my KNAPSACK any time soon.

You can really get high score patches for video games?

My friend could flip the Asteroids counter pretty much at will. This was back in the days when he washed dishes at his uncle's restaurant and they had the game in the bar. I'd get a patch for him in a minute if I thought it would mean anything to him. He also did that to another game at Putt-Putt in Greece, but I'll be gosh darned if I can remember what it was.
All I remember is us having to wait some twenty odd minutes for the game to kill off all his extra lives. He had the score almost all 9s and didn't want it to roll over so he could get in the top slot. We guarded the machine against all comers until the game was over.

THE
NOT DEXTEROUS
AARDVARK

AArdvark wrote:You can really get high score patches for video games?

... No =(

Not any more.

Activision used to give them if you got good scores on their Atari 2600 games. It involved taking a photo of the TV screen, shooting photos to fill the roll, sending it out and then hoping that your photo of your TV was legible.

My friend could flip the Asteroids counter pretty much at will. This was back in the days when he washed dishes at his uncle's restaurant and they had the game in the bar.

Note! Asteroids, by default, flipped at 99,990. Pinback has two high scores on mine at 150,000+, since I put in the high score kit. His initials were... RYE

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:His initials were... RYE

Of course they were.

Bruce

Havin' a shitty week, so I tried retail therapying up with the Zoo Keeper kick plate vinyl repro!



I am going to kick the living shit out of my kick plate door.

I applied the kick plate art a couple days ago. I really like it when people post step-by-step instructions on how they did a simple arcade task. I only remembered to take four photos, though.

First, here's what I got from gamestencils.com:



I opened the cylinder and set the art down on my drafting table:



I didn't want to mess around with the art - I removed every nut, bolt and screw from the front of the game, practically shitting myself when I got towards the end, hoping the entire front wouldn't fall off.

I sanded down the front of the cab as well, to give me a nice, clean, flat surface on which to apply the art. I ended up moving the coin door through the hole and placing it on top:



Annnnnnnd then finally, I applied it. It really does look substantially better. I don't have enough space downstairs to have lots of games with their side art facing, but kick plate art is always visible. Zoo Keeper is now dead-center when one walks down the stairs.



So yes, I am thrilled. The kick plate art is gorgeous, and that shade of orange really stands out.

I contacted the vector arist & printer, prok, over at the Killer List of Video Games site, and long story short, my pic is up on his site for the kick plate art.

http://www.gamestencils.com/index.php?c ... how_detail

Of the 20 proudest moments of my life, Zoo Keeper is involved in like four of them. And this is one of them!

For good reason, it looks great man!
Better than the museum piece, and that says a lot. Good work.