My $50 Qix

mhkohne

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Today I drove 3 hours to pick up a Qix - for $50! The former owner is a great guy (Go buy his games! http://www.looneylabs.com/) who wanted it to go to someone who would play it. It was giving a memory error and he's narrowing his collection to the games he likes most, which at the moment include the games that actually, you know, work. It's a bit banged up around the edges, but the cab is solid, and the monitor has only light Pac-Man burn.

I got it home (Oh, I transported it in my '08 Scion xB, BTW), stood it up and messed with it - looks like the CMOS was corrupt - after I figured out the self-test, I was able to get it to play!

It needs monitor adjustments, and I'd be not in the least surprised to find out the CMOS battery is dead, but overall it's in pretty nice shape.

Are there any common failures on Qix that I should be looking for, or fix pro-actively? I haven't gotten the back door open yet (I'll do that over the weekend), so I don't really know what the boards look like.
 

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Ahhh Qix! Yet another addictive simple yet fun game. Sounds like a great buy. I'd personally own a cocktail or cabaret version for space reasons.

Congrats!
 
Today I drove 3 hours to pick up a Qix - for $50! The former owner is a great guy (Go buy his games! http://www.looneylabs.com/) who wanted it to go to someone who would play it. It was giving a memory error and he's narrowing his collection to the games he likes most, which at the moment include the games that actually, you know, work. It's a bit banged up around the edges, but the cab is solid, and the monitor has only light Pac-Man burn.

I got it home (Oh, I transported it in my '08 Scion xB, BTW), stood it up and messed with it - looks like the CMOS was corrupt - after I figured out the self-test, I was able to get it to play!

It needs monitor adjustments, and I'd be not in the least surprised to find out the CMOS battery is dead, but overall it's in pretty nice shape.

Are there any common failures on Qix that I should be looking for, or fix pro-actively? I haven't gotten the back door open yet (I'll do that over the weekend), so I don't really know what the boards look like.

Nice grab
My .02 worth If it has the battery on the board replace it. Also you might want to install a fan to help keep those hard to find boards cool. Just pm any questions.
 
Congrats! So you got to meet the owner of Looney Labs? Pretty cool if you ask me. I bought the game "treehouse" from there a while ago. It is actually a lot of fun.
 
Congrats! So you got to meet the owner of Looney Labs? Pretty cool if you ask me. I bought the game "treehouse" from there a while ago. It is actually a lot of fun.

If you like treehouse, you should look at Martian Coasters - you've already got the pyramids, so it won't cost you much, and it's still a nice, short game.

If you go for card games, look at one of the Fluxx games, or the upcoming Back To The Future - all really cool stuff.
 
Nice grab
My .02 worth If it has the battery on the board replace it. Also you might want to install a fan to help keep those hard to find boards cool. Just pm any questions.

I was thinking that I'd do so. I'm just hoping it hasn't leaked or anything. Are they prone to leakage?
 
Well, I was happy to find that the battery has NOT leaked - it looks like it's been replaced before, and I'm still going to get it off of there and remote it to prevent any future possible problems.

I was less happy to find that previous work had left several spliced lines simply twisted together, without even the benefit of electrical tape! One was the coin door memory interlock, so no big deal, but the other was some of the +12 lines off the power supply - Yikes! It's all got nice crimp-on splices now.

I also found something very odd - a coin counter. Why's that odd, you ask? Because Qix didn't ship with a coin counter. It's got software totals for that instead. The thing actually counted once at power on, and then once at each coin insertion, and included a diode in the mass of electrical tape. I'd love to know whether the original installer knew that it didn't quite work right or not...

The fun part is that one side was connected to +12, the other was connected to what appears to be a +5 output on the Qix board. So I'm thinking that output must pulse low on coin insertion, and be high the rest of the time (this accounting for the observed behavior).

I'm learning that OPs do some weird stuff...Any one got any ideas why they felt the need to wire in a counter when the software already had one? Takes too long to go into service mode?
 
Possibly 1 counter was used for op records and the added counter was used to keep track for pay out to arcades,7-11 and theater ect.

Just a guess
 
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