16. Restart.
By Ahchay

My first few months of arcade machine ownership were, for the most part, spent in blissful solitude with just me, my soldering iron and a hastily scribbled sheet which contained the JAMMA pinout. I was happy, for the most part, just tinkering with my lovely Taito cocktail cabinet - trying to figure out why the bits that didn’t work didn’t work and nearly destroying the bits that did work in the process. I even played a few games.

I was mostly impressed, if that’s the right word, by just how stupidly simple the inside of an arcade machine was. Having never really understood how videogames work – at the electronics level at least – it was quite a relief to see that most maintenance work on the machine came down to soldering bloody great wires to really obvious places. These ones over here went to the power supply, those ones to the controls, and those to the monitor. Plug the speakers in here and it all springs to life. Within the first month I’d managed to rewire the cabinet, sort out some dodgy control issues, adjust the coin slot to work with modern coins and get about half of my games working – albeit with one or two minor problems (missing sound and the like).

Soldering brought on Bruce’s asthma

And then I hit my first real snag.

A couple of the games I’d bought just refused to work. They were, as far as I could tell, wired up correctly. And, more importantly, they looked like they were trying to work. I could hear sound from the speakers and the display was tantalisingly close to being readable.

But it was no good. No matter which wires I fiddled with, or which dip switches I changed, or which twiddly things I twiddled, nothing would make the games work. I was forced to admit that I had reached the limits of my knowledge – nothing that I could work out was going to get these bloody games working.

You definitely want to be cutting the slightly less red wire.

My main problem was a simple one. Almost everyone that I’d encountered on-line up to this point was based in the US. It is one of the oddities of the internet – and even more so back in the late 90’s than now – every single person on it appears to be American. So, I’d ask around and I’d get offers of help from Southern California to New York State and most places in between which were all, to all intents and purposes, useless to me.

And then, just as the frustration of it all was becoming too much for me, I stumbled across a single page on a forgotten site with the simple title “UKVAC Meet 1.0”. Did the “ UK” part of that mean what I thought it did?

Yes it did. The page described the first ever meeting of the fledgling UK Video Arcade Collectors group. There were photos (including one of our very own Fuseball). There were grown men and women who not only collected arcade games, and not only were they based in the UK, but they were sufficiently organised to hold meetings. (Although I was to later discover that the words ‘organised’ and ‘UKVAC’ were not normally associated unless the word ‘Crime’ was attached somewhere)

So I searched some more and, eventually, stumbled on – and in – to the UKVAC mailing list. Finally, I’d managed to find somewhere where I could talk intelligently (or, at least, intelligibly) about arcade games with people who were reasonably local. I settled in gently at first and eventually found the courage to ask for help with my PCB problems…

Which led, somewhat indirectly, to a rather nice New Zealand chap called Chris Hardy coming round to Chez Ahchay.

Chris (Hardy, not me) took one look at my Commando board and confidently declared my problems to be due to the sync refresh rate and asked where the monitor controls were.

This was news to me. I had never, in all my time spent in the innards of my machine, noticed any controls on the monitor itself. At all. This turned out to be for the none-more-simple reason than that the monitor PCB was installed upside down.

Cue a rather frantic couple of hours as we tried to get to the totally inaccessible monitor controls. The first, and rather obvious step, was to try and take the monitor out, but it refused to budge further than an inch or two. But we were not to be thwarted by a simple matter of an immovable object – if we can’t move the monitor, the reasoning went, then we’ll move the rest of the cabinet.

The legs came off fairly easily and, for a moment, it looked as though this would be an easy task. Of course, as is so often the case, this turned out to be almost immediately untrue. First of all the bolts holding the cabinet together turned out to be uncommonly stubborn. Then we discovered that the wiring loom was glued onto the base (effectively holding the whole cabinet together). And then, finally, that the last bolt was only accessible from within the coin box.

I neglected to take any photos at the time. Shame, because after two hours of hacking we had managed to successfully turn a mostly working and complete Taito cocktail arcade cabinet into a room full of dust, wire and wood. And we still hadn’t managed to get to the blasted monitor controls.

Er…the player two button doesn’t appear to be working now either…

Eventually, through a combination of brute force, blind luck and creative swearing, we managed to get enough of the cabinet free to get one hand into the back of the monitor – country vet style.

Incredibly, and luckily, everything still worked and – hey presto! – a bit of very careful twiddling later, I had a working Commando running on my (still in pieces) cocktail cabinet.

Getting the machine back together proved to be as much of a trial as taking it apart, but we finally put the last bolt back together at around 11pm – after about six hours of aggravation.

I didn’t care though. My machine was back, the number of games I had had effectively doubled and – more importantly – I now had an ally on my road to arcade Nirvana.

July 2005

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