Restoring Tron - Lights!

It’s lives! Everything is in but the monitor, and the game plays blind. Much to my relief, nothing caught fire or exploded when I powered the machine up.

Restoring Tron - Side Art

Side art application was similar to the previous pieces, just a whole lot bigger and a little bit scarier. The inner art required a bit more work, as it’s not cut by the printer, so I had to trim it to fit around the shape of the cabinet structure. Some restorers will build paper templates for this part and then cut the artwork before placement, but I eyeballed it and carefully trimmed as I went.

Next I stripped down and cleaned up the light fixtures, painted the reflectors white, and replaced the starters. Note the yellow zipties I used with the wiring. I didn’t realize until later that they fluoresce, brightly. There’s also a shot of the new power cable and plug I wired up, as the original had exposed wires in several places. Glad I didn’t figure that out the hard way back before this project started.

I also replaced the ni-cad battery on the power supply board. These batteries were put in place to retain high scores while the cabinet was powered off, a nice feature, but the particular battery choice was shortsighted on the part of the hardware designers. After a number of years, the ni-cad batteries often go bad, and when they do, they have a tendency to take the board out with ‘em, leaking acid and corroding the pcb in the process.

Lithium battery conversion kits sell for a few bucks, and the soldering requirements are very basic (read the last two paragraphs here), so if you’ve got a Tron power supply board with its original battery, swap that thing out.

Tron Restoration - Cabinet Misc

As I’d mentioned before, the doors that came along with the cabinet were thrashed. It was time test my (lack of) woodworking ability.

Remember the Ryobi jigsaw I’d purchased before? The internet was right, it really was crap. Crestfallen, I returned the thing to Home Depot and walked out with a shiny new DeWalt, which apparently the internet doesn’t really like either. Maybe the internet just hates jigsaws in general, because it worked out fine enough for me.

Using the originals as rough templates, I cut out a new upper and lower door, followed by screen vents and holes for a key-matched set of replacement locks.

Thankfully, bondo heals all wounds.

After a bit of sanding and painting (Rustoleum satin black)…

…and on the cabinet, with new locks and freshly painted screens:

Next up, transferring the guts.

The old piece of plywood that everything was originally mounted on had seen better days, and as I had new plywood to spare, it was a simple process to cut a new piece and move everything over (after taking several photos just to be sure the right bits stayed connected to the right bits). Here’s the result, mounted in the cabinet:

More parts. This thing is getting expensive.

• From Arcade Shop, kickplate moulding and a spinner bushing
• Bally/Midway coin door plate from ThisOldGame
• Midway coin bucket from ebay
• More Rustoleum satin black oil paint
• 100 1980’s Chuck E Cheese tokens!

Tron Restoration - Shroud

Finally getting to the part of the restoration where things begin to look pretty.

First up was the shroud. The original artwork was baked on, and as the piece is plastic, I was worried about using anything particularly caustic to help remove it. Instead, I went with a heat gun and a pair of heavy gloves, slowly pulling back the old art as the adhesive melted. That was the easy part.

What remained was a whole load of gunk. I attacked it with Goof Off, an assortment of rags, and a plastic putty knife. I’d lay down a rag over an area, soak it with Goof Off, let it sit for a moment, remove the rag, and then scrape the area down with the putty knife, pulling up gobs of snot-like adhesive.

After maybe 45 minutes of that, followed by a good scrubbing with the soaked rags, I was left with this:

Applying the artwork was a fairly pleasant process. Using the leftover window film application spray (windex or water with a dash of dish soap works fine too), I’d spray an area of the shroud and lay down the art, repeating for each of the three pieces. While one could easily apply side art and a control panel overlay dry, the shroud is one area where I highly recommend a wet application. Lots of bends and thin pieces to screw up, and being able to slide around the art as needed helped a great deal.

The finished shroud:

Finished: Crisis Core

With my drive to complete the Tron restoration before the end of the summer sabbatical, I haven’t had a whole lot of game time lately to make much headway into the play list. Luckily, I’m also behind on updating my progress, so hey, fresh content! The nice thing about playing games that are already a few years old… what’s another month or two before the write-up, right?

I’ve started to keep a play journal. No, not that sort of journal, but rather a good things, bad things video game journal. Whenever I come across a design element that is particularly aggravating or enjoyable, I mark it down. With the bad things, I think about what was avoidable, and how the issue could’ve been worked around; with the good ones, I note ‘em for reference and future ah, appropriation. Sometimes I’ll draw little arrows off to the side pointing at the especially good ones.

So, play list update.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII

Through and through, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is unapologetic fan service. With a story as melodramatic and convoluted as any in the Final Fantasy series and an appearance by pretty much anyone who was anyone in VII, hardcore fans of the original game will find plenty of references and tenuous links to go nuts over. While I’m no Final Fantasy superfan, I’d just finished VII a few weeks before, so characters, events, and relationships were all still fresh in my mind. Thankfully, the continuous stream of callbacks to the original were most often amusing, although rarely insightful.

In his review of the game, Simon Parkin found fault with the idea that, unlike Cloud in Final Fantasy VII, Zack is a voiced character. I disagree. In the original game, the player views Zack as someone else, a nonplayer, a relatively unknown member of Soldier whose identify Cloud takes on. Crisis Core tells his story, but by then he’s already been established as that someone else, a character with a history – not an empty vessel to be filled by the player – so his distinct voice and personality played, for me, a fiction-supporting role rather than being suspension-snapping baggage.

Overall, I really enjoyed the gameplay. Combat was a nice merging of action and Final Fantasy RPG, the materia system had enough depth to allow for a variety of play styles, and the control scheme was rarely frustrating. My absolute favorite part of the game, however, was the mission system, and I’d often drop in for a few missions when I didn’t have enough time to progress in the, ah, real game.

Final thoughts? Solid game, plays well to its intended platform and audience. A must-play for the fans, worth a look for everyone else.

Final grade: A-

Plus/Minus:
+ Pick up and play mission system is great fun, and is especially well-suited for a portable title.
- DMV wheel! Tedious and slow after the first half-dozen fights. I would’ve liked a mechanism to speed through the reel rotations.
- Strange hotspot-based random battle system. All this resulted in was my continuously hugging of the walls to avoid unnecessary combat.

Watched Advent Children a couple days after finishing Crisis Core. Not as good as I’d hoped, and a poor way to top things off. Square does best when they deliver their story little pieces at a time, I suppose. I also picked a cheap copy of Dirge, so I may take that up shortly just to knock out the series completely (well, everything but the cell phone game).

link love 08-29-08

All Tron and link love, the new driph.com. Let’s see what we’ve got for you today…

Brandon digs up a whole bunch of old video game patents.

The new Surface Tension arcade table. Excellent WAF on this one. More background on the BYOAC forums.

Dearest GameStop Girl…

Kill a few hours with Steve Fulton’s extensive history of Atari: 1971-1977, and 1978-1981.

And finally, Duelling Computer Spaces - A Stellar Barn Find. Here’s the epic original KLOV thread.

Tron Restoration - Primed

Bondo dust gets everywhere. Wear a mask when sanding it, and work in a well-ventilated area. Also, buy or borrow an electric sander; sanding isn’t fun in the first place, and doing everything by hand would take forever. You really don’t need a whole lot of power tools to restore a cabinet, but a sander is one of ‘em.

Here’s the cabinet with finished wood repairs and a coat of primer. I filled in a handful of holes and repaired the corners, working in layers until I got the shape and fill I desired. I was pretty proud of my bondo work, corners turned out fine and the holes were untraceable after the first coat of paint. Not too bad for my first time using the stuff.

Here’s the note I wrote to myself as a reminder to drill out the four coin box bracket holes I’d just filled in and painted over. Sigh.

Restoring Tron - Repairing

First, a couple more Tron restoration links: Peter Hirschberg’s gallery, and another from BYOAC.

Lots of cabinet repair progress this week. While most of the woodwork is in decent shape, the back was pretty shot (lots of water runoff) and the floor had seen better days. Time to repair what I could, and replace whatever couldn’t be repaired.

The back doors are trashed, many orders worse than the rest of the cabinet. I’m guessing that the previous owners each swapped out door sets for their other Trons, leaving the worst of the lot for mine. I’ll be building new doors in a later episode.

And speaking of rebuilding new doors, I broke down and bought a Ryobi jigsaw. While I don’t loathe the thing as much as the Home Depot reviewers do, it does have some issues. The jigsaw feels rugged enough, but the actual construction could use some improvement. On first use, the laser sight was misaligned and blade angle wouldn’t stay positioned; breaking down the bottom base and aligning and tightening everything helped, but I still have problems cutting a perfect line. I figured it was my lack of skill, but with the universally bad reviews, I may end up exchanging this one for another brand.

Sideart removal was just as easy as it was with the control panel. Slathered on the Citristrip, went to bed, and scraped the next morning. As you can see in the image below, the end result is something like a giant glob of chewing gum. Wiping down the cabinet with Goof Off afterward removed the final remaining bits.

The first complete piece! I’m impressed with the Phoenix Arcade reproductions, so far the quality is top notch. I tend to be pretty obsessive about proper alignment, so I went with the wet application method just in case things went a bit off-kilter. Happened to have a window film applicator kit handy, but windex or a squirt bottle with a dash of dishsoap added will also do the trick. Wet application is what you see window tinting guys do: spray the entire surface area lightly, then apply. This let me slide the artwork around a bit to get everything lined up just right along the main control panel area, then I wiped off the front and back lips and folded the rest of the artwork over. Finally, I ran over it a few times with the squeegee and clamped the edges to keep them down until the surface area was completely dry.

Finally, priming and bracing the interior. I decided to retain the original bottom piece, but added braces for some extra strength. Additionally, the braces will serve as risers onto which I’ll mount the power supply board, bringing it up from the floor of the cabinet.

The big Bob Roberts parts order came in:

• used Midway Service Panel
• 8 ohm 15 watt shielded 6X9 speaker x2
• Set of 4 Black steel cabinet corner protectors
• Video game leg levelers (4)
• Video game leg leveler mounting plates
• K4900 19″ color cap kit
• Tron MCR 4″ SCSI cables
• Tron/MCR Replacement Video Cable
• Tron Lithium Battery Conversion Kit
• Lock set keyed alike 641 (1)1 1/8″ & (2) 7/8″
• cable clamp assortment bag of 25 each size (100 total)
• cable clamp pan head screws 1/2in (100) black
• .084 Plug & receptacle 3 position w pins & sockets
• xcelite flushcutter
• (and bonus, they sent along a free wire stripper for lagniappe!)

Next time: sanding, and then some more sanding!

King of Kong 2.

Come with me if you want to live.

link love 08-22-08

Alongside the very kick ass Bionic Commando Rearmed OST, Sumthing has also released the original NES soundtrack. It’s three bucks, go get it.

Retro Space, the newest entry into the pre-built MAME cabinet scene. These things are supposed to sell for around 5000-6000 Euros (I think that’s like $40,000 or something these days). Kinda nice, but not that nice.

Speaking of paying lots of money for your games, here is Rotheblog’s writeup on the 15 most valuable classic arcade games.

And finally, Multiple:Option has released the newest version of Game Trivia Catechism DS (the iPhone version we’re working on is an expanded branch of this). It’s one of two apps he’s entering into the NeoFlash Summer Coding Compo, so wish him luck!