Pacific Novelty - 'Computer Portraits'

Holy. Shit. That's amazing. Thanks so much for posting.

Did you know about this unit before this thread existed, or is it a recent score?

I very much look forward to seeing you get it working. Holy crap there's a lot of stuff in there. Amazing they were able to do this with the tech available at the time.

Hopefully the schematics will be of help. Glad to see someone benefit from them.
 
I've known about it since the mid 90s and always had designs on grabbing it. I've actually been talking with him about picking it up for a several years now, and finally rolled it into a deal with some other games he had. I've worked on this exact machine before - it was in a skating rink until the printer driver fried for the 5th time and it was warehoused about 20 years ago.

The original owner bought out some big parts stock for them when it was a couple years old and already being retired, so I actually have 8 NIB printers and about 30 new rolls of paper. I only have 2 partial rolls of carbon paper though, which might be a problem. I didn't find anything with some quick searches for continuous tractor feed carbon paper... I will probably just have to get lucky in talking with a manufacturer of 3-part forms.

It'll be a few months before I can really get to messing with it, unfortunately, but it'll get the usual full treatment before I ever even power it up.

I've already been talking with the owner of the NIB booth, and it's having some problems, but it hasn't been electrically restored yet AFAIK so that's not unexpected. I'm curious if it has the "printer head booster" PCB installed. My guess would be no.
 
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