Jolt Country

One of the lights on one of the four coin doors went out. I opened the coin door to see what kind of bulb it was. And I saw the bulb was simply dislodged. I placed it where it needed to go, and all four bulbs lit up the coin returns. THE EASIEST FIX OF ALL-TIME.

I took the RGB cable wire out, straightened it, and placed it back onto the monitor and PCB. The red gun works in the monitor, and the sprites are not interlaced. THE EASIEST FIX OF ALL-TIME.

I am going to have to replace the entire blue joystick though, with one from the panel Flack gave me. The Gauntlet II joysticks are soldered to the wires, and this one has a big molex connector. I think I may have a corresponding female molex switch, so I'll create an interlocking system for it. Looking forward to it.

(I may still try to buy the right RGB cable.)

Anyone (but Flack) (but anyone) remember if Gauntlet I/II had a light tube behind the marquee area?

Looks like it DOES save scores! Aces?

I completely redesigned the way my games look, and I'll take photos tomorrow.

The red gun not working is a new issue. I'm glad it just ended up being that same cable.

I know the answer to the marquee question, btw. Gauntlet I/II marquees do not light up, by design. As opposed to most of my games that do not light up, because the bulbs are dead or the ballasts died. Gauntlet I and II cabinets are slightly different, but neither one has a light behind the marquee.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I am going to have to replace the entire blue joystick though, with one from the panel Flack gave me. The Gauntlet II joysticks are soldered to the wires, and this one has a big molex connector.

I had to go look it up. Molex connectors are similar to either the power or audio connectors when hooking up a CD player to a computer, or the 4-pin power connectors on PATA/IDE drives (Molex 6891). (Todays SATA drives use integrated power and data connectors.)

In the case of Motherboard-power supply connections, they tend to use a Berg connector. Both Molex and Berg connectors are named for the companies that invented them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molex_connector
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berg_connector

Flack wrote:As opposed to most of my games that do not light up, because the bulbs are dead or the ballasts died.

That's one thing they got right on today's CFL bulbs, they put the ballast in the base of the bulb as opposed to most full-size fluorescent light fixtures that have the ballast installed in the fixture. The nice thing about CFLs is that if you ever have to replace one (with the estimated 10,000 hour life span, that's the equivalent of running a lamp 10 hours a day for four years) you get a brand-new ballast with the new bulb. The disadvantage is you have to treat the breaking of a CFL bulb as a hazmat incident release of mercury vapor, however...

Tdarcos wrote:Molex connectors are similar to either the power or audio connectors when hooking up a CD player to a computer, or the 4-pin power connectors on PATA/IDE drives (Molex 6891). (Todays SATA drives use integrated power and data connectors.)

Aw yeah they are!

UPDATE! When soldering goes well, it is actually a pleasurable experience. My problem involves trying to solder wire together. I don't know the best technique. I tend to do it in a way where a small "yank" (of the wires, not my body) separates them. Indeed, this is what initially happened.

DID YOU KNOW the replacement control panel was originally a Gauntlet II? Someone put Crime Busters art over it, but it's peeling and you can see what was beneath.

DID YOU KNOW that ... wait, this is not a DYK. OK.

I replaced two leaf switches on the blue joystick. I can't hit diagonals reliably, though, even though the switches are fine. Argh! I really don't want to replace the entire joystick.

I did notice that the right-most joystick on both Gauntlet II and the replacement control panel seems to in nicest shape. I am going to bet that, by default, people tended to use that position the least, all things considered. Probably has something to do with people being right handed, but what, specifically?

I noticed that, too. Looking at the front of the machine and numbering the joysticks 1-4 from left to right, I'm guessing #2 was the most used, followed by #3, #1, and finally #4. I'm guessing it's a combination of physical comfort and the social norms of personal space.

I am the wrong guy to be asking about soldering because I am so horrible at it, but when soldering two wires together, I've had the best luck with putting the soldering iron underneath the wires, heating the wires themselves, and then putting the solder on top of the wires. The wires themselves will heat up and melt the solder, which should run down through the wires and create a good connection before cooling.

I don't know who invented soldering, but I'm pretty sure whoever it was had three hands.

I learned how to solder by installing mod chips on the original PlayStations, and my God, it was like a well-timed kamakaze mission of trying to drop melted solder on a wire that was touching the right spot all at the same time. BONZAI!!! When I bought my first PS2 mod chip, you had to solder 29 wires to the legs of the processor and I was like "F THAT" and called Jeff and made him do it. Jeff is a whiz at soldering and electronics. Jeff installed the modchip in my first Wii for me, too.

According to KLOV, Crime Fighters was sold as a Gauntlet-compatible kit, so that's probably the story there. Hard to imagine that someone at some point in time said, "Man, screw Gauntlet, let's convert it into Crime Fighters!" Stranger things have happened, of course. I'm sure you recall, my other Gauntlet II cabinet is a Rampart.

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!

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.

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

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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???!

I'd be down for that.