Galaga Project...for the wife

postmortem01

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I got a hold of a Galaga in non-working condition. I bought it Saturday. The wife said I could get one more game if she got a Galaga first. Of course I took full advantage of that request.

This Galaga was in pretty bad shape. Water damage, gouges, etc. One long day of filler, sanding, primer and paint has produced quite a nice cabinet. I think in hind sight, I would have ordered a thin Formica style laminated to recover the sides.

Regardless, it came out great. 2-cents helped me out all day with this sucker. There's still a ton to do but not bad for a day.
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Looks great!

Aren't some Galaga cabinets just covered with black vinyl instead of paint? Mine looks like it has vinyl on it.
 
Yeah. Mine did too. I'll come back someday and laminate a new surface on it. This cabinet is in pretty bad shape.
 
Here's are a few questions:

This machine does not currently work. The harness is hacked and the board has been soldered to. There is a "Medium Power Supply PCB" on the side of the cabinet that initially blew a fuse. I replaced the fuse and all other fuses. It blew the fuse again. I checked the manual and the fuse was severely underrated. I placed the proper fuses in the machine and it fired up with a picture. The picture has the moving star field in the background but it had giant white vertical bars moving across the screen. The bars are digital bars not a monitor issue.

1. Where specifically should I start checking power to determine if the voltages are correct coming from the power supplies?

2. The sound is making a horrible noise so I disconnected it. There were two small chips on the edge of the game pcb that were really hot. Are these sounds related?

3. I have a ms pacman and a pacman. Is there a way to hook this board up to those machines to determine whether the board works? This would eliminate that as a possible problem.
 
Look for burnt connectors. Mine would constantly reset when I got it - one of the p/s connectors was literally burnt.
 
I picked up a power supply and harness from TwistedQuarter.com. it looks like this will only power the pcb correct? The cable in the picture look like it will hook up to the milky white molex connector on the board. Aren't there two connectors to run this board?

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You are correct about that 6 pin molex connector on the video board...it's the video output signal that goes up to the monitor.

There isn't a way to hook the Galaga board to Pac-Man or Ms Pac-man for testing the board.

It's not unheard of for chips to get fairly warm when running, but I don't know nearly enough about Galaga to say if that's the case with those 2 chips. From what you described seeing on the screen, it definitely sounds like a board problem. Galaga boards have some common problems like bad sockets or corroded legs on custom IC's. If you try to remove any of them to clean their legs, be very careful, because they are known to be flimsy and break.
 
Those two chips do get hot, its totally normal, they are bipolar proms. The biggest issues with galaga are the following..

1) Crappy IC sockets, the originals are single wipe and do not make good connections to chips with oxidised legs.
2) The custom ICs used a combination of metals in the legs that turn black with age, these will need to be cleaned up with a fibreglass pen, the legs are also extremely fragile.
3) The resistor networks are very very fragile, with legs that are semi crimped onto the SIP body, if these get bent or knocked they are liable to fail, actually yours are the more modern less fragile type.
4) Poor connection on the ribbon cable, oxide again and usually a lot of dust.

Once you rule out all of the above the board might work perfectly, the problem is that disturbing any of the above can make things a lot worse before they get better.

If the board is running I would focus on the video board first.
 
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Looks great!

Aren't some Galaga cabinets just covered with black vinyl instead of paint? Mine looks like it has vinyl on it.

Not that I've ever heard of. Galaga cabinets were typically fiber board with a smooth lacquer finish that looked like a glossy laminate.
 
I brought home two wall wart power supplies from work last night. I brought home a 5vdc and a 12vdc 4 amp. I crimped molex pins to them and hooked them directly to the game board. I made an extension cord from the monitor to the video board. I found a chip on the video board that was missing a leg. I broke the leg off another chip and soldered it to the chip until I can find another of these chips. This is the chip that has the broken leg. Any ideas what this is and where to get one? It has "0618" on the chip.
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After hooking up the temporary power supplies, the Galaga game actually fired up. I was in shock!!!!
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Tonight, I will wire up a new harness and distribute the 5vdc / 12 vdc power and test the controls.
 
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