Mad Planets deconversion

GaryMcT

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Tom (Paladin) and Jason came over and worked on heat-gunning the vinyl off of my Mad Planets cab to see what is underneath. The cab was converted to Thundercade at some point.

Results are great! There are a couple spots where there were holes in the vinyl where someone painted black spray paint through to hid the colors showing through. Will try to get the black paint off, and in the worst case, my wife is insanely good with hand-mixing paint to match colors.

I have a repro CPO on the way from QuarterArcade and a (questionable quality) marquee on the way from EBay. Trying to locate something that'll work as a bezel, and trying to get all of the parts for the controls/control panel. Need to find a harness, or make one too. If you have any leads let me know please.

I have a working audio board on the way for this. I may wait for JROK to finish his Mylstar board to put in here. Not sure about that yet. Would like to have the original setup in here really with the JROK board as a backup.

Thanks!
Gary


Untitled by GaryMcT, on Flickr


Untitled by GaryMcT, on Flickr


Untitled by GaryMcT, on Flickr


Untitled by GaryMcT, on Flickr


Untitled by GaryMcT, on Flickr


Untitled by GaryMcT, on Flickr


Untitled by GaryMcT, on Flickr
 
i need to have them come over and help when i do my Juno First cabinet!

and no, Gary, i am not selling you my Juno First cab too.
 
download the bezel from coinopart and have someone laminate it to glass....

buy the qbert harness for sale in the the FS section and mod it...
 
Q*bert wiring harness on the way which I'll convert to Mad Planets.

NOS joystick base coming soon.

Control panel with spinner, joystick base, and buttons coming soon.

I think at this point, I'm nearly there except:

1) joystick handle, trigger, etc.
2) power brick, supply, etc. I haven't looked to see what is supposed to be in there yet. I'm assuming it's the same as Q*bert, and I have one of those to look at.
3) rest of board set (have working audio board on the way)

I'll likely hold off on shopping for the rest of the board set for a while.
 
That top back corner that we started at was the only place where the vinyl removed any paint. A little extra heat and pulling the vinyl from the center toward the edges took care of that.

Funny how the art reveal has bumped the priority of this cabinet up the list!
 
Tom (Paladin) and Jason came over and worked on heat-gunning the vinyl off of my Mad Planets cab to see what is underneath. The cab was converted to Thundercade at some point.

That poor Thundercade ! it looked mint ! :)

- James
( ducking from the imminent tomato throwing )
 
That poor Thundercade ! it looked mint ! :)

- James
( ducking from the imminent tomato throwing )

Hahaha. . . I uploaded pictures to Facebook of this, and a person I don't know very well was excited to see a Thundercade, until he noticed that I was deconverting it. Turns out he worked with some of the folks that made the game. :)
 
Q*bert harness is converted and Mad Planets is up and running on the bench. Need to finish stripping lower control panel, clean the cabinet it up, and then get the guts in.

I'll document the inversion process and the process to get the Arcadeshop power supply conversion kit working without the Gottlieb transformer. Doesn't work out of the box for that.

 
Here's the before/after for the lower control panel so far. Forgot to take a shot before we started stripping the right side, but the left side was intact in the first picture:




 
We finished stripping the lower control panel:

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Got the guts completely working outside of the cab:



Waiting on some PCB mounts to show up and then we need to copy my friend's PCB mounting board and mount it in the cab. I also need to fix a collapse problem on the 4900 from the cab.
 
I'll be writing up a guide on converting a qbert harness to mad planets after the whole cab is together. We took notes as we went.
 
Tom (Paladin) and I made a board the other day to mount the Mad Planets board set on. We used the mounting board from a friend's cab as a template:

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Haven't posted an update in a while.

Tom (paladin) and I got most everything together a few weeks ago except the monitor had an intermittent vertical collapse issue. Here's everything inning with the monitor outside of the cab:



A couple of weeks ago we put the monitor, marquee, and bezel in. Still need to attach control panel to be completely playable. Still needs t molding and a few other things. I'll change out the control panel overlay at some point:



We'll soon start getting a Reactor back together after this is done!!

PS: skforty should probably make fun of me for the vertical youtube videos. They work fine on an iPhone if you upload to Facebook, but YouTube does really stupid things with playing them back on a vertically oriented phone.
 
Nice work, I'd love to find a Mad Planets one day. The sounds & game play is awesome.
 
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