Monday, March 5, 2007

Major progress with the "Drag-on" Lair project!

Wow, it has taken forever to find/buy the few remaining items I needed to wrap up this project. Thanks to the Laser Disc Game Classifieds over at the Dragon's Lair Project, I was able to buy a pair of authentic speaker grills. Shortly thereafter, I finally convinced Ethan over on the Daphne forums to assemble a custom scoreboard cable. I've had the grills for about a week now, and just received the cable today.

Click image thumbnails for bigger pics.








While patiently awaiting the remaining parts, I decided to wire up the coin door lights. It was quick and simple, receiving power from the PC.








The grills were in really good shape for originals (although I wouldn't expect the grills to experience a lot of wear).








The custom scoreboard cable plugs into the parallel port of the PC and is powered by a connecton to the PC's power supply. The scoreboard end is a 16-pin keyed connector, so I didin't have to worry about frying the board when I fired it up.






At first I though I had either purchased a fried scoreboard or somehow done damage to it. While the board did display some characters, most of the LEDs didn't light up. I played a short game to see if the display would change, but to no avail. In a moment of (not-so-quiet) reflection, I remembered I needed to change the Dragon's Lair scoreboard setting to External LPT1. Once I made that correction, the scoreboard came to life in all its lit up LED glory. Yay!

The cabinet is now about 99% complete. All I need to do now is replace the cracked bezel plexi and raise the monitor to the proper height. After that, I'll need to attach the cabinet back board. I can confidently predict that my Dragon's Lair arcade cabinet project will be absolutely complete by the weekend. Yay again!