Museum of the Game® & International Arcade Museum® Forums

Ok, so...exactly how rare (and valuable) of a piece am I sitting on here? This Gremlin Fortress has little to no info online, and the ROMs have never been dumped. Found an article online that says the game was built, field-tested, but did poorly and wasn't produced. Any idea on the finite number of these in existence?

I bought it as part of a small lot that also included Asteroids, Gun Fight, and Laguna Racer. Seller said the guy he got them from inherited them, and had them in a semi trailer they converted to a man cave type room. The previous owner died and they sat for a good 10 years before they got removed and sold by the guy I got them from. Lord only knows how the original owner came across it.

I have signs of life, but not yet a working game. Power supply has been replaced by a switcher. I have a manual with schematics and the power harness takes +5, +12, and -12, as well as 3vac it still gets from the old power supply. Power is good at test points, so I'm satisfied there's no power issues. Monitor comes on and shows garbage that sometimes changes to different garbage when the coin switch is hit. When powered on, you hear a high-pitched noise and an explosion, which I assume is the normal boot up noise of a cannonball being fired and landing.

I have replaced all RAMs and some other socketed chips and haven't gotten much else out of it. The manual lists a few other non-socketed chips and a couple transistors as part of its troubleshooting if the game won't boot, so I now have those on order. I'm hoping that once I replace those, I can get it to boot and play. Board repair is not my strong suit, so if I give up on it at some point I'll seek outside help on repairing it. With simple hookups and full schematics, I bet someone more well-versed in PCB Repair could bring it back to life if I cannot. I'm not ready to tap out yet, though.

Anyway to ask again: what value would you place on this? With no prior sales info, I'm guessing the answer across the board will be an unknowing shrug. Is this rare enough it needs to be in a museum? Yes, it will be for sale. No, I don't want to sell it as-is. No, I don't have a price yet. No, I don't have the ability to dump the ROMs. Without the machine working, there's no way to tell if they're the issue yet so there's not much point right now. If I get it running, we'll take it from there.

I'm excited to have it though, and I'd like to think I'm going to bring a piece of arcade history back to life. That, or like 40 of you guys have one and I'm just delusional. I'll get more photos after I've done some more work to it.
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