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 ...).
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