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.