Wyer Arcade Services

I'm finally back in town from the trip back home to KC. This trip reminded me of all the reasons I live in the south. Of course, we came back to 40-degree weather, but it's still the south... During the week I was out of town, I received a call from the prospective buyer for my Pac -Man cocktail. He's still interested, and wanted to know when I was going to have it ready. I told him that it should be ready by mid-December. In light of this fact, Sunday I decided that I should probably get back to restoring that cocktail. That, and I'm waiting on parts to come in before I can button up the Addam's Family. Unfortunately, I didn't win the auction for the G07 boards (they went for something like $75 with shipping), so I was stuck with a dilemma: figure out why the G07 was causing the 1.5A fuse to blow, or swap the monitor. Considering the fact that the burn-in on the G07 was abysmal, I decided that a swap was going to be the best bet. In light of what I lear...

We're gearing up for a trip back home to visit the family for Thanksgiving, so not much is going to happen next week on any of the machines. This did make for a good excuse to work from home today. While I was sitting on con calls, I decided to start working on that (Ms.) Pac -Man. Earlier in the week, I had gotten the bright idea of pulling a Wells Gardner K4600 monitor from a Defender off the shelf and testing with the Pac . The perceptive reader may note that Ms. Pac / Pac -Man is a vertical game and Defender is a horizontal game. Well, the Electrohome monitor that's in the game appears to be of horizontal orientation, so I thought I would be OK (more on that momentarily). The first challenge I ran into was the fact that the interface board used in the 4601 from the Defender is designed to run off separate X and Y sync signals (positive). Pac -Man uses a negative composite signal. After a bit of thought, I ran down the the garage and pulled the video interface board ...

This has been a busy weekend. All of the rest of the parts for TAF came in on Thursday night. Spent the better part of Friday, Saturday and Sunday reassembling, soldering, screwing, banging and sticking stuff back together. Unfortunately, I was lacking two crucial parts to complete the job... Apparently, Williams in their never-ending quest to cut costs made the decision to just do some light tack-welding on a couple of ball eject assemblies. Well, TAF has a chronic problem with these welds breaking. I gave them to a buddy of mine to fix, and got them back today, so I hope to get them installed tonight and get to troubleshooting the electronics. Once I get that done, I just have some clean-up to do, wax the exterior of the game and post it for sale. Oh, a couple of crucial details I missed: while I was assembling the Jet Bumpers, I managed to twist off one of the threaded rods, so I'm going to have to order one of those (freaking $5.50 part!), and I also discovered that the b...

Got home last night and found that my Marco parts for The Addams Family arrived. Most of the stuff I need is coming from PBR , but it was a bit like Christmas. The biggest item was a new main ramp (clear). I was surprised to discover that it also included the light sockets already installed. I had fully expected to have to move them from the old ramp. On further inspection, the reason became clear, though. The sockets on the stock ramp are smoked plastic. They would have looked a little strange on the new ramp. In addition to the ramp, I received the new flipper bats (three standard with Williams logo) and the 2" bat for Thing. For some reason, you apparently can't get it with a logo. Also included was the new cabinet speaker (the one in the box was blown out), an outhole protector and a few other miscellaneous parts. On the Pac -Man front, I picked up a set of fuses on my way home, and popped in a new 1.5A slo - blo . Of course, I powered the machine back on and i...

Well, I'm at a standstill while I wait for the parts to come in for The Addams Family, so last night, I pulled my Pac-Man cocktail out of the garage and moved it upstairs to start working on it. In light of the fact that I have a buyer for it, that seemed like a sensible thing to do... When I picked this up at auction, it was sold as non-working, so the first thing I did was to plug the sucker in and see what exactly wasn't working. After a fair amount of searching, I finally tracked down the power switch (cleverly hidden) and toggled it. Nothing. Checked the safety switch. Nothing. Pulled out the voltmeter and started checking to see if wall power was making it to the insides of the machine, and couldn't find any beyond the power cord. At this point, I figured it was time to pull the schematics up and see how it was wired. Strangely, the cocktails are wired completely differently than the uprights. After digging a bit, I determined that the 1.5A Slo-Blo fuse was bl...

Well, I'm new to blogging, but I've gotten lots of good information from other folks' blogs, and it seems like a good medium to track work that has been done. In that vein, I'm going to try to keep track of work I've done (or am doing) on the various machines I have in stock, parts I've received for repair, etc. Since this is a new business that I'm doing in my spare time, I don't have a huge inventory of machines. Right now, I have the following: Williams Black Knight - Currently non-functional due to EAROM failure during burn-in of a driver board. Waiting for my next Digi-Key order so I can pick up some sockets and replace the bad chip. Really irritating, because I've now lost my all-time high score of 1.6MM Williams Jungle Lord - Picked this up off of eBay from a great guy in Florida who is moving to the west coast. Just finished cleaning and reworking the playfield. Ready to work on the electronics, but stalled due to the need to work on ...