America 3000 (1986) [Trailer]

I have an irresistible attraction to movies with four-digit numbers in the title. Love is the only thing worth nuking for! Great trailer, but I suspect it’s a shit movie.

Come back this Friday, midnight CT to read my thoughts on Logan.

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Monday I bought a pinball machine and a Blitz ’99 conversion in a TMNT cab. I fixed the monitor (Looks brand new with no burn-in whatsoever!), but I haven’t even touched the Blitz PCB or hard drive yet. The pinball machine is a little overwhelming, to be honest. I haven’t done much other than poking it with a multi-meter and checking fuses, but I have read about fifty-million pinball-related webpages in about two days.

As for my Pac-Man restoration project, the cab is sanded and primed, but a tube rejuvenator verified a heater-cathode short in the monitor. Looks like I’m doing my first tube-swap very soon, but I’m still exploring options.

As always, you can see pictures of my games on my Instagram.

Arcade game woes

Last Friday I decided to pull the electronics, but a fever I’ve been having on and off for about a week knocked me on my ass. I’ve been alternatively freezing and sweating my ass off ever since. Hopefully I’ll be able to start the bodywork next weekend.

Whenever I haven’t been too exhausted to stand, I’ve been playing Gyruss on my MAME cabinet. It’s one of the few space shooters I might like more than Galaga.

full disclosure: this guy is way better than me

Gyruss music is just flat-out fucking rad, isn’t it?

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I’ve finished the first draft of Church Camp. It’s easily the best first draft of anything I’ve ever written. More details soon.

Here’s what I did this weekend

So I picked this up on Friday:

And I got it into fairly decent shape by Sunday:

I’ve got a marquee coming in the mail and I still haven’t decided what to do with that awful Taito overlay. I’m also unsure of what I want to do for a bezel at the moment.

Right now I’m running Retropie on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 23″ LCD monitor and 4-way joysticks. Yeah, I know I should have gotten a CRT, but I already had the monitor and I’m keeping an eye out for a cabinet that’s worthier of a complete restore. I’m hoping to find an upright Pole Position, Dig Dug, Galaga… something like that.

The guy who sold me the cabinet said it used to be a Silent Dragon machine, but judging by the manufacturer’s plate (Exidy) and the original holes beneath the overlay it’s obviously an old Mouse Trap unit.

See more of what I did to this thing on my first ever Instagram account.