Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Come together, right now (damnit!)

Becca sure loves me. How do I know? She fixes everything I break and has the patience of a saint. Me? ... not so much. Its thanks to her that I can type up this update.

Click image thumbnails for bigger pics.






I wired up the control panel, taking up more than an hour of wire-stripping fun, and ... nothing happened. I went over my wiring, consulted the online diagram, and ... nothing again. Having finally reaching my peak of fustration, Becca came to my rescue and corrected my half-assed wiring job.






Becca also recently finished hotrodding the workhorse of the operation, a Windows PC with a new motherboard and mammoth RAM.






Since the control panel and PC were all wired up and rearing to go, it only made sense to go ahead and wire up the coin door. This was by far the easiest of the wiring jobs.






Yep, the monitor looks pretty shot. As bad as it is, the picture is an optical illusion. The Dragon's Lair text doesn't look green to the naked eye. Must be a combination of the camera flash and the monitor plexi. The colors are washed out and everything has a yellowish tint. I admit I was a bit rough with the monitor once it was removed from its housing. I'll replace it with a flat LCD in the near future.






Things are coming together somewhat nicely. Dragon's Lair is playable and accepts quarters for credits. I still need to mount the scoreboard plexi, wire up the scoreboard, and replace the monitor. I'm really nervous about frying the scoreboard, so that part should be fun. Replacing the monitor will be quick and simple, but somewhat unexpected and not accounted for in my budget. Mounting the scoreboard plexi is the most simple of the three, so I think that's what y'all will be seeing by my next update. Oh, and I still desperately need some speaker grills ...