Birthday Weekend

Friday night CP's friends spent the night for his birthday party. They had fun and stayed up well past my bedtime.

GP had his party at Laser Tag today. It was funny to watch the kids feed their tokens into the vegas-style ticket games like candy. They each converted $5 of tokens into 130 tickets so they could redeem them for a $0.25 prize in under five minutes. CP got a little more mileage out of his by playing a very graphic swat team shoot-em-up game. What ever happened to Pac Man & Galaga? (They live in our garage!)

Saturday morning we dismantled the trampoline and stuffed it in the attic. Good thing, too, as our Nebraska winds returned today. It looked like it was snowing from the seeds blowing in the wind.

I worked a couple of late nights last week to get a new control panel in operation for Dig Dug in time for CP's sleepover. We now have two joysticks with four buttons each so that we can play all the fancy games. Today I installed some nice small buttons to handle Enter, Escape, and Coins. It's almost there - I just need to get the monitor, PC, and speakers anchored in the cabinet so we can move it. I built and installed a video amplifier for Pole Position to help out with the dim display. The PC outputs less than one volt, and the original arcade monitor is expecting 4. It works OK - not great. I was excited about using the old monitor, but now I'm just tired of it.

Last night I worked a climb at the scout center. After the kids left, I was able to get in one climb. What a feeling! When I got home, it was over to JRO's for sliders, a fresh keg, and the Penn State game in his most excellent home theatre. Wow!! Too bad Penn State lost again to Iowa.

The Huskers won easily in their 300th consecutive sellout. They have sold out every game since 1962.

Fall Campout 2009

This weekend we did our fall campout with the cub scout pack. Our den lost one, but gained two. We are happy to have our two neighbors in our den now. They both went on the campout along with their families. We went to Waubonsie State Park in Iowa, near Nebraska City on the Missouri River bottom. I went there when we first moved to Nebraska four years ago and was underwhelmed. Now, I was pleasantly surprised at the beauty there and the breathtaking view of the river bottom. (BONUS: So far we have not found any ticks on us or the dog!!!)

The kids had fun running up and sliding down the slopes. The entire park sits in the Loess Hills. Loess is the 200+ foot thick deposit of windblown dust from the last ice age. It has the unique ability to form steep slopes and support vegetation. Imagine the badlands covered with trees.

The campground was filled beyond capacity with our pack, our corresponding boy scout troop, and another troop from Omaha. During the NU game, everything was quiet as everyone stuck close to their radios. After the game and early this morning, the troop from Omaha made up for their lost time. There used to be a time when JP & I would keep driving if we found such a campground. Now we're part of it.

We brought Maggie, and the G's brought Pooh. They were both very well behaved. JP had to scrub down the tub after bathing Maggie. She had fun rolling in the dust.

Metal Mouths

The boys got their dental metal installed this week. CP got full braces and GP got an expander. JP has to ratchet the expander a notch every night. Nothing like shifting your teeth around in your skull to get a good night's sleep...

The upside of it all is that for a significant chunk of my gross income, I get to eat popcorn by myself. It's almost as good a value as scout popcorn.

Garage Arcade

Friday night turned into arcade night in the garage. We had Pole Position running on AdvMAME in DOS7.1 on the original Atari monitor and MAME in the DigDug cabinet. I figured out the problem with PP's audio and got the upper speaker making some noise. We now have stereo!

More Pizza

Last weekend we didn't have a lot to do except relax, so JP & I decided to spend the day making pizza and watching football. I missed out on most of the details on pizza making at our pizza party, so JP let me do it all. I had no idea that it was an all-day activity. Good thing that we ended up with something tasty!

Labor Day

Today we enjoyed the final day of the holiday weekend. JP finished up her fall cleanup painting - so far she has done all the kitchen & powder room trim as well as half of the yellow, the back door frame, and now the front door trim. She said something about repainting the front door as well...

Yesterday I went back to the arcade machine boneyard and picked up some more treasures: another 4.5" Missile Command trackball, a small Atari trackball, a cool rotating joystick, a bunch of buttons and switches, some opto-encoder boards, backs to Omega Race and Pole Position (the high voltage open frame monitors sticking out scare me), a Kung-Fu Master marquee for Dig Dug until I can get the right one, a pristine front glass and a perfect 1/2-silvered mirror for Omega Race, a Road Blasters yoke & control panel, a bucket full of buttons, an Akari Warriors control panel for CG, some coin door parts, and a sweet panavise circuit board vise. JP was almost as excited as I was.

Today I focused my attention to getting Pole Position completed. I hacked a logitech ball mouse and wired up the steering, shifter, and gas pedal. I still need to hook up something for the coin drop. I tore apart my old 1998 350 MHz Pentium 2 and installed the bare components into the cabinet (you can see it all mounted on the side in the photo above). I was able to reuse 75% of the old computer case; we used the outer shell for bb-gun targets, and most of the inside was cut up for mounting brackets. I would like to tear all the old stuff out and clean the cabinet like I did for Dig Dug, but the power supply, lights, etc. all work, and it would be way too much work for an old beater cabinet.

I finally got everything back together and even had time to mess around with the audio. The cabinet has two speakers, and I was able to get one of them playing sounds. Both amplifiers (original Atari 1979) are working, but there's something wrong between one amp and its speaker.

GP played a few games before bed. It's funny how crude and primitive these games are compared to what we have on our old xbox, but each one of the old ones broke new ground and set the standard for today's games. I am amazed when I look through the original Pole Position schematics - a lot of stuff was done in hardware, such as the car's engine sound. Nowdays, we just record whatever we want for a sound and replay it at the right pitch and volume. Back then, some fool was spending his EE degree on figuring out ways to make arcade sounds with electronic circuits. Wow.

JP needed some caulk, and I needed some steel for making a bracket for the hard drive, so we took off to the Home Depot. In addition to the necessities, we came back with a blind for the entryway window. In the afternoon, the sun shines thru onto the TV and makes things miserable. This afternoon, we noticed a big difference in the amount of heat that came in with the afternoon sun. Hopefully it will block out some of the cold on winter nights, as well.

Speaking of cold winter nights, the cooler nights are driving in the critters. At work we get ginormous spiders. Here we have a mouse in the garage that has been eating a sack of grass seed. JP hung the seed up on a wall and put out a no-kill trap baited with peanut butter. We never caught the mouse, so we figured that he moved on. Today when I got the ladder, I discovered that our friend had managed to reach the bag of seed on the wall and had been feasting on bluegrass seeds. JP is ready to get a normal kill trap.

Our neighbor, JON, completed most of a retiling project for his back door. JP is now in the mood to retile the laundry room as well as our bathroom.

Pizza Party!

Today was the Husker's first game of the season. We ordered the game on PPV and invited the neighbors over for a pizza-making party. Everyone brought some fixin's, and we made six large pizzas from scratch.

The pizzas were out of this world, and the game was OK as well. We beat Florida Atlantic 49-3 (I lived in Florida for more than a few years, and I still don't know where the school is located). I missed having GT there to explain all the intricacies of the rules to me.

After pigging out on pizza & beer all night, we retired to the garage to play on the newly completed Pole Position game. In addition to Pole Position, It currently has 92 other arcade games. JON's favorite was "Tapper" by Budweiser. Even though I don't have a real control panel, it was like stepping into a time machine that went back 28 years. We found games that we had forgotten, despite spending tons of quarters on them.

I should be able to hook up the steering wheel, gas pedal, and coin slot tomorrow.

[Technical Note: If you need hints on setting up AdvanceMAME (advMenu, advCAB, advETC...) or a DOS-based MAME cab with an arcade monitor, sent me a note. I spent a week on it and am putting together my own notes on what to do.]

Pole Position!

I spent last weekend (plus or minus a few days) cleaning up Dig Dug. The cabinet is in pretty good shape, so I figured it wouldn't take much to get it up & running with MAME. A little epoxy cured the water damage to the MDF, some Kilz helped the moldy smell, and I found a junk 19" monitor at work to replace the burned-in arcade monitor. All I needed to do was to setup a PC with MAME, rebuild the control panel, and I would have my own custom Dig Dug machine that would also play another 5000+ games.

The monitor had an intermittent issue that became permanent after I tried to Fonzie-fix it a few times. I was able to figure out (without any shocks) what it was, but it would take an entire day to replace a $3 chip, so I went on to Plan B: use the original arcade monitor.

I knew it could be done, but I didn't realize that it would take more effort than repairing the broken monitor. In the end, I spent an entire week's worth of evenings trying to figure out how to get it to work. We now have a working pole position game (except that the steering wheel and gas pedal are accessed thru my prototype Tempest control panel that is attached to the cabinet with Gorilla Tape, and the other controls have to be typed in thru a keyboard..., and I still need to construct a video amplifier..., and I need to vaccuum out all the mouse poop..., and I still need to disassemble and clean the old monitor..., and ...).

End of Summer?

Perhaps we have made it thru summer. The overnight lows are dipping into the 50's, and it's dark when I go to work. That means we can cook in the kitchen!

JP was in the mood and made a super roast with pureed veggies in her fancy indoor non-boyscout dutch oven. Mmmmmmm! We love cooking on the grill, but it is nice to get into something different.

Lost Treasures Found

I found a listing on Craig's List for some video games starting @ $25. Usually stuff like this is a scam for some fool that has some junk that he wants to peddle for $6000. In this singular instance, that was not the case. I had truly stumbled into the coolest thing I have ever stumbled into (perhaps except for JP). My three neighbors were up for the adventure, so we headed out to the rendezvous with Arcade Gary on a sunny Sunday AM in JP's minivan.

We got there and found a semi trailer half full of arcade machines, but no one ever showed up. I called Arcade Gary, and he informed me that the day before he had sold most of the gear to someone from OK City for $18k. I convinced him that we were serious buyers and were willing to drop all of $200 on some arcade cabinet. He agreed to meet us on a weekday evening...

I brought home a 10 x 6 ft trailer from work and we all piled into the xterra and journeyed out to "El Ranchero" to search for arcade machines. El Ranchero is an old mexican-looking structure (actually we found out that it has been nominated to be on the register of national historic places due to its old adobe construction and highway architecture) a few miles west of Lincoln on the south side of O-Street. The grass has been mowed regularly, but upon closer inspection, you can see that the semi-trailers that are parked there have been there for more than a few years. (After our adventure, I learned that El Ranchero was once a lively Mexican Restaurant, but was closed down due to a bordello on the second floor.)

Anyway... we met Arcade Gary and the guy that actually was responsible for the largest arcade game business in Nebraska (Father Time, white beard & all). He let us poke around El Ranchero and the 10 semi trailers parked there. Despite the OK guy buying $18k worth of machines, we found more than we needed to.

SD shot a video: http://vimeo.com/6351078, which shows some of what we found, but it doesn't come close to communicating the smell, odors, and gagging mold in the air associated with 10+ years of roof leaks. There was no electricity in the building and it was something straight out of a Rob Zombie film. Most of the ceiling was falling down, all of the floors were covered in a blanket of toxic mold, and everything in the place was fuzzy with rot, damp & decay. When I think about it, I think of HP Lovecraft's tales of nitre and decay and the Necronomicon. I found a huge Peavey mixer, tube amp, and concert speakers, but left them due to the extensive rot.

In the end, we came home with six arcade machines. JON got "Chinese Fighter" or some similar 1984 fighting game, CG got a sweet "Mortal Combat", and SD beat me to the discovery and got a super-cherry "Asteroids" cabinet from 1979 that looked like it was only a couple years old. I brought home "Dig Dug", "Pole Position", and "Omega Race". JP was thrilled!!!!!!!! to say the least. Our overfull garage was now truly overfilled with smelly moldy crap that she absolutely hates. Thank goodness for bleach & febreeze.