Cebus Capucinis

Oh, the game comes up first time every time. But the first couple times it tries to 'play', there are weird dots and lines where the invaders are. The game itself is still sort of okay, just the display is having issues.

Meh, I honestly don't care one way or another, to be frank. Like I said, I don't care about either rarity 10 games OR world records; I care more about the personal feelings and memories connected to the games. I like playing the games and that's about it. I'm not picking on anybody. It just seemed like you were turning it into a contest of sorts. EDIT: I don't care about MY personal world records. Other people's are cool though! I asked for your autograph for a reason Homer. Your world record is cool! I just don't need to personally get any of them, though it would be nifty to me to get one for myself.

I've got a silver one that works beautifully but don't know if it meets cosmetics standards. I'd be more than willing to sell it. I'm not at my house until tomorrow but I'll send you pics when I get back?

So now making philosophical posts is a contest??? Damn, CPU beat me to it. I agree. Neither of them are great! I am more of a fan of remembering personal history in a game. I don't care what rarity it is or what score I got on it, I'm more interested in knowing that the Berzerk cart I have was the first 2600 game I got for my birthday or the Space Invaders cart is connected to hours of fun laughing in my basement with my dad. Those are so much more important to me than a number, whether that number is price or score.

What? You got to be IN that room? Lucky! My dreams are made of that room.

Okay, so we are KINDA back at square one, a little bit past....square .33? I popped it on and played 4 consecutive games at roughly 3500 points each. Before I touched solder points it was guaranteed to fade out during a playtime that long (roughly 20 minutes or so, I'm bad at this game) -- and it DID fade a bit, but not completely! In fact it faded enough that you were standing there wondering whether it had faded at all, which caused me to die a couple times. It fades SLIGHTLY now. Then a little bit lower, but nothing that renders the game unplayable. Still can see everything and it's still clear, just not as bright as it should be. This leads me to believe a capacitor is still going out but that it was a combination of a bad solder and a cap going out. I think replacing the caps will solve the problem completely! Huzzah! Also I believe the monitor problem with the dots and lines during first start up after intro screen is due to temperature. These games were likely not meant to be in 34 degree weather, so it takes a bit for the monitor to warm up completely. After cycling it for 30-40 seconds it plays perfectly. I think in room temperature it won't be a problem at all. So.....a working space invaders! Still with a very minor issue but it is CONSIDERABLY better than it was. Thank you so much for your help save2600, you are an arcade genius and a god among men! EDIT: Played it before storing it until I can pick it up. Played for 40 minutes and not a SINGLE fade, even in the slightest. I think it might be 99.99% fixed.

Haha! Well I did ask some pretty friggin' stupid questions, but I'm not completely idiotic when it comes to electronics. I'm just used to NEW stuff rather than old stuff. Yeah, I'm betting that's what it is, then, because sometimes it's really bad -- complete lines of junk -- but after you cycle the power a few times it gets progressively better and better. So I should just leave it on and let the CPU reset instead of doing that? Also when you actually try to play a game when the junk is displayed the game won't let you shoot stuff, it just registers hits in random places. I'm betting that's a sure sign that the CPU needs to cycle itself before playing, as that problem goes away too after about 10-15 seconds of resetting it. This happens after the 'play space invaders' screen -- that screen is perfectly fine but when the actual gameplay screen starts up, it shows weird garbage in the invaders and sometimes raster dots pop up on the screen. I haven't had it on long enough to test the monitor problem with fade-out as of yet but it appears that the monitor is shining brighter than it was. If I didn't fix the problem with the fade-out I at least cleaned up some solder points that controlled the brightness a bit! I saw the little screws for V. Hold, H. Hold, Bright, and Contrast so maybe it was something connected to those on the board. I'm glad I'm not a complete idiot, I was really concerned there for a while!

Okay, so I may or may not be back to square one now, which is a great relief. The machine is working again. Hooked it back up and it plays fine, so I didn't destroy anything significant in the board accident. The board is loose and not screwed in at the moment barring a removal again. At least know I know how to remove the video board from it, lol! Another problem it is having: occasionally when I turn on the monitor there will be raster characters screwed up. Like the bottom two rows of invaders will have little dots above their heads in between rows, and when they move in one position you can't see them but in another they're fine. Once you cycle the power it's fine. I'm thinking it needs a cap job after seeing both of these problems combined. I have yet to leave it on for long enough to figure out whether the monitor fades out or not, but my guess is that the solder on the back was okay and the caps just need replaced, which I can say without doubt WILL wait until I get home. I think I've irritated my parents enough by asking them to come outside while I zap out a monitor just in case I kill myself.

So here's the good news: the board is out. It's sitting on the dining room table. I have taken some pictures of it in an attempt to show what's going on with it. Maybe someone else can figure it out. Here's the bad news: I got everything out, discharged the monitor, and then set it on the shelf to start touching solder points. I got almost all of them when the board slipped. The board slipping caused the wiring yoke to fall out. This broke the bottom piece of the little orange plastic boot that keeps the prongs separated for the wiring yoke. I don't know if this is a major problem. The top of it is still not only complete but on there fine. The bottom glass part of the tube still looks perfect, obviously it didn't crack or break in the process. I think the monitor will still function. Just the little cup part of the boot that slides the yoke in broke. It doesn't look like it held anything in place, but I am very concerned that this now renders my monitor useless. Is there a replacement part I can get from another monitor or something? I've attached pictures to this post of the problem(s) it's having. The end-all is that I need to send this board to someone who can fix it. I'm frustrated and unhappy with breaking things further and I won't feel comfortable with the potential to ruin this..... The last pic is the biggest chunk of the little plastic that broke. It wasn't necessarily connected to anything, just a ltitle spacer to keep the bottom of the tube in place, it seems.

No, I've bought it already. It's at my parents house, it was a closer drive and I had to borrow their truck to pick it up. They just have absolutely no room whatsoever in their house (we tried moving furniture today and it's basically impossible) so it's in their garage at the moment. Unfortunately they only have 1 light bulb in their garage so I can't see much of anything no matter what time of day it is. I am confident I can repair it with guidance! And I've been playing it for 2 days so I can tell you this monitor thing is the only issue with it. Plays great aside from this monitor fading out randomly. The monitor itself is in great shape, I think you're sending me the right direction with the solders and I think if nothing else a cap job on it will repair it to 100%. I just can't do it in their garage because I can't see what I'm doing. I may try again tomorrow during the day and we'll see what we can see. I'm glad to know that I could send it to someoene if I absolutely cannot figure it out! My biggest logistical problem is figuring out how to get it from my parents' house to my own house, it's a 500+ mile drive and my parents don't want to be exhausted with it since they don't get time off from work until Spring Break. I will likely have to wait until then, and my parents will get the week off and deliver it to me. Nonetheless I'd love to get it working in the 24 hours I am still here so they can deliver me a machine I don't have to tinker with.

Well, it's too dark in their garage to be able to see anything no matter what time of day it is. I need to figure out how to get it back to my own house first, which is proving to be impossible.

Okay so I've taken some pictures. What should I be looking for and where should I be inspecting? I am a total newbie to this coin-op restoration and don't really know what I'm doing. I can tinker around with electronics pretty well and I am okay at soldering so that doesn't freak me out I just don't really know where I should be looking. I will replace the starter, that's easy enough. The monitor problem I'm drawing a blank on though. Here's the pictures of my total assembly: And here is the offending starter, but I'll just replace that now:

Sweet! I was awaiting your answer. Crap! We were just at the hardware store and exchanged the bulb and bought a new fixture. Wouldn't the starter just cause it to blink? It wouldn't completely light up, right, but it would attempt to? I may have to pop back in there for a starter then, I saw it in there and I have all the assembly documentation. Could there also be a fuse on that fixture that's out? The starter would be awesome as there's one at Lowes that will work for $3.00. So the cold solder points on the monitor assembly itself might be screwy or the solder points on the board itself? I'll go take a picture of the assembly and you can point me to potentially what I should be looking for. I knew you'd be able to help me man!

So we thought we had fixed the Space Invaders monitor issue but apparently we haven't. Blacklight also does not work, we're thinking the ballast is dead in it. I'm going to go exchange the bulb and buy a whole replacement fixture to swap it out. Anyway, I need some direction on where to go with this monitor issue. The rest of the game plays perfectly fine with no problems, but the monitor randomly blanks out. It doesn't just 'blank out' fast, it fades out -- takes about 3 seconds to completely fade out. It does this intermittently and if you leave it on, sometimes it will come back to life for a while, then fade out again. The sound still works, and you can tell the game still plays -- you can hear yourself die and shooting plays the appropriate sounds. This tells me it's gotta be something with the monitor board or monitor itself. It's completely random and no structure to it. I just had the machine on for about 40 minutes and there were no problems. Then I cycled it on and off to put the wooden panel on the back on again and my dad started to play -- about 35 seconds into it the monitor faded out again. We cycled the power a few times and it kept doing it but there's no consistency to it. Totally random. I wiggled around a couple connections and it didn't seem to have any effect. Where should I be looking for a solution to this? I'm scared to death to poke around a charged monitor so that's preventing me from checking too much. Any ideas?

Good to go! I found a GE F15T8 18" flourescent black light at Lowe's for $8.99. Same part number, same wattage. We're going to do some more playing today and see if the monitor keeps having some issues. If it does looks like it's time for a cap job for starters.

When I bought it the guy said it had a monitor problem wherein the monitor would fade out quickly and then stop working after a while. He said it was once every couple hours or so but when you turned it off and on again it was fine. Today it started doing it every 5 minutes or so! I was pretty irritated but when my dad got home from work we tag-teamed on it; he was holding the schematics and telling me where to poke and I was down in the cabinet. We got some canned air and sprayed likely 30 years of dust out of the machine, checked some connections and the monitor looks perfect now! It's a ton brighter and we played for a while with no problems. I think we may have fixed it completely! $3 fix! Sweet! We also discovered that the 18" black light in the back that lit the moon and space background was burnt out. Tomorrow's mission -- spend $4.99 on a new black light and put it in and play Space Invaders in all of its glory!

My dad didn't actually play regularly on this particular machine -- he wasn't the biggest fan of Space Invaders, preferring Atari Football over anything else at the time. Since they probably only went to see my aunt once every 3 months on average, it's likely that he realistically only played this machine 10-15 times; when my sister was born in '82 they decided they couldn't afford video games anymore so they didn't go nearly as much. I was born in '83 and by the time I was old enough to remember, we would occasionally go to arcades and when we went to Boise to go see my mom's sister we usually went to Chuck E Cheese by that point in time. Either way, though, I'm still pretty happy that I have a small piece of my family history, so to speak!

Well, ironically the reason I found it was MAME. I wanted to find a gutted cabinet like yours to put an older Dell computer I have lying around into it and make a functional MAME machine. I poked around on CL for a while looking, and of course I would only purchase a broken and gutted cabinet, I don't want to destroy something original to make a MAME machine....nobody had anything. I posted a want ad and the best I got was a Stargate cocktail (I want a cocktail MAME) for $85 -- no glass, no nothing, cabinet in horirble shape. So I decided to just look up 'arcade games' to see what I could see. Maybe someone had posted a broken one that was generally beyond repair that I could gut and rebuild. SHAZAM! Found this one in Boise, and I was headed there to drop my wife off at the airport. As for having room for a few more, who knows? I told my wife about it last night and she actually wasn't mad. Irritated that I didn't inform her of my plans ahead of time, but not mad, so there's definitely room for a Pac-Man and a 1942 in my house. Mention it in a podcast or blog all you want! Doesn't bug me, I think it's really cool! My dad told me this morning he was really happy that I bought it since he can remember playing it.

O rly? Looks like I might have to get a camera... I've always wanted a TG high score! Correction: you have always wanted a TG high score for every game but Ms. Pac-Man

I am looking into the history of this Keystone Pizza place in Boise and it's pretty interesting! Apparently they were one of the very first pizzerias in the state to have an arcade in their location in their flagship location in Boise. They turned into a chain in the early 90s but the flagship store closed in 2002 due to eminent domain issues. The owner had retired by then and they decided not to move the location and just to sell. The guy that bought the machine said that he has the original Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Gorf machines from the flagship store. He purchased them in a big lot from the owner when they decided to sell. Honestly it's really weird that he let it go for $200. He is a collector of arcade cabinets and he had to know how much the machine was worth. I didn't press it, obviously MY DAD PLAYED THIS SPACE INVADERS CABINET BACK IN THE DAY! Holy cow! I was reading an article about Keystone Pizza and my dad came in, saw the address and his eyes about popped out! My mom's sister lived in Boise until 96 or so and they would go up there once every couple months to visit her! They would go to the mall to play some games with her and then they would go get KEYSTONE PIZZA! He couldn't remember the name of the place but when he saw the address he knew it was it. Maybe he had the high score sometime! Awesome!

I gotta figure out how to get it to MY house that's going to be the hard part, as the wife and I both sold our trucks years ago. My parents are going to deliver it come Spring Break in March (they're both elementary teachers) but I really want it at my house sooner so I can bust out the beer and my friends can come over for a high score party!

I'll go out and check tomorrow morning but when I glanced when talking to the owner about it it was above 75,000, but I may have read that wrong. Actually going out to look right now! The coin counter reads 76939 and the carved number on the back is 25372. Does that mean this was the 25,372nd Space Invaders cabinet Bally/Midway made?

So some of you already know that I've been cooking up a deal on Craigslist Boise, ID for a week or so. Well, yesterday I arrived at my parents' house to use their truck, and today my partner-in-crime father and I went to Boise to pick up this original 1978 Space Invaders cabinet! I paid $200 total for it, and it's in great shape. It's not perfect but it plays wonderfully! The sideart is still complete with some small scratches I will need to retouch and there are some chips in the wood on the corners which shouldn't be too hard to fix. The core to the back cabinet door lock is not functioning at the moment so we have to duct tape the bottom wood panel to the back so the safety switch is pushed in to play, but that should also be a really easy fix! The overlay for the control panel is worn from use over the years, but it's only faded and I think I can either recondition it or replace it for a great price as well. Basically the machine just needs a good cleaning and some paint added to it to cover up the minor imperfections. Included is the original bill of sale from the distributor, the original manual for the game, and the original shematics. They don't have room in the house so tomorrow is going to be spent moving some furniture around to get it inside -- humorously enough, my dad was really concerned that my mom would be really unhappy with having to put this in the house, but she actually A) wants it in the house and B) wants to play it! Haha! My dad said that when they first got married in 77 they spent the first two years of their marriage pumping rolls of quarters into this and other machines! My parents were COOL before they had kids! haha! Anyway, this Space Invaders has only had two owners -- the guy I bought it from bought it from the original owner, who owned Keystone Pizza in Boise, ID. They bought it when it first came out as one of the first arcade machines in the pizzeria and kept it there until they closed in early 2002. He knew the owner so bought it but didn't have time to play it anymore and wanted it to go to someone who will take care of it. This game has some cool history to it as well which is equally awesome! So how'd I do? I think for $200 I got an AMAZING deal on this. Now I just have to figure out how to get it back home to Moscow.....but my mom said she doesn't mind holding on to it for a while....haha! This really surprises me actually because if you haven't read my Dr. Mario blog post my mother is a gigantic stick-in-the-mud when it comes to video games.....I think she'll have the high score by the time I pick it up.

I think an interrupt controller is likely the easist all-encompassing solution. If it is accessible for a developer to program it to their liking it will keep all solutions on the table rather than forcing anyone to adhere to a VDP-only standard.

Soon....soon I will have your Space Invaders cabinet's twin.....