I am that generation that grew up without cellular phones, gaming consoles and no computers in school.
As soon there was an arcade game in my sight I just had to put a coin in it and play. Fortunate there were very few arcade games nearby.
One game that made an immense impression on me was the classic game "Defender".
A few years ago I realized that arcade games was something that people actually had in their homes. As soon as I realized that I started to build my own first arcade game from the ground up and had a Raspberry PI that was running MAME, of course that first game just had to be Defender.
Here is an image of the game when finished.
I was pretty satisfied and it has given me hours and hours of joy. There was just one problem though. It was not an original. It was emulated with MAME on a Raspberry PI, It had an LCD screen, the joystick was a modified 8 way joystick and the buttons were buttons with integrated leafswitches. It was not the same as it was to play the real deal.
I then finally got my hands on a original. The cabinet is in pretty rough shape, previous owner started to clean of the black spraypaint that it had been painted with, but did not succeed very well so it is still sticky. The front still have the spraypaint left and when I turn the game on the screen just shows a mess of colors.
So there is a lot to do with this piece of history before it is in good shape. What I know right now that it is to do is:
- Replace the broken Marquee. The plexiglass is cracked beyond repair. The upper retainer is missing.
- Replace the speaker. The original speaker are gone and replaced with some oval spaker of half the size as original
- Replace the speakergrille. The grill has a huge hole in it and are covered with a smaller grille with bigger holes. As seen in the image above
- Replace the bezel. The original glass is replaced with a tinted plexiglass without print.
- Repair the control panel. The joystick is very sloppy, one button is missing and some buttons are replaced with the wrong colors. The leafswitches looks pretty good though. The upper right corner had a hole that was repaired with bondo and then was covered with a random decal.
- The front was sprayed black so I need to remove that paint.
s - The game itself were playing but rebooted once in a while before shipping. After shipping there are some weird vertical pattern lines that are flickering a little bit. That means that the monitor is at least working but the board has some issues. No sounds either.
- The sound card had one broken fuse-holder
- The coin door has some broken parts, no lock and the mechanics inside are not working as smoothly as the should. There are one missing bulb-holder and the bulbs are of course not working.
- The backdoor is missing so that needs to be replaced. Since this is almost standard that an arcade game are missing the backdoor I suppose that this means that it needs to be rebuilt and painted.
It was surprisingly clean though. Of course it is some dust on the monitor and the chassi but not as much as I have seen on other games.