Saturday's Road Trip

YellowDog

In Memoriam

Donor 2011, 2013
Joined
Apr 12, 2008
Messages
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Location
Humble, Texas
I finally decided that my back was about as good as its going to get, so it was road trip time. With the help of KatanaJoe and his son, I made the trek to Austin and picked up the Black Widow Greg (Perfidious) has been holding for me.

After picking up the game and chatting with Greg for a while, we stopped in to help support one of the few arcades left, Pinballz in Austin. They have an amazing collection of pins and quite a few classic video games as well. If you are ever in the area, it is worth dropping by. It was kind of fun to walk around and go "Darren outbid me on that game", "I remember seeing that one at the last auction" and "do you remember what he got that one for at the auction?". As well as playing some of the pins that always seemed to have a line at the shows. Avatar (so-so), Tales of the Arabian Nights (me want), Theatre of Magic (drool), Iron Man (big no), Lord of the Rings (Dear Santa....) and a bunch of others. Surprisingly it took the three of us about an hour to go through $20 worth of token. Most of the games and the pins are 2 tokens ($0.50) with the newer ones and the top 20 pins were 3 tokens ($0.75). Medieval Madness was 4 tokens ($1) and got fixed just before we left :(. Overall a pretty good road trip. Even if my back is paying for it today.....

Joe and his son unloaded her (a Black Widow has to be a her) and hauled her into the house last night, but I decided to let her sit overnight to cool down. Color vectors can be rather finicky.

I opened her up this morning to see how everything survived and to my horror, the CPU board had popped the mounting screw and was laying sideways inside the cabinet :eek:. So I pulled the board out and carefully pressed all the chips in, remounted it and put a bigger screw in to hold it. I then reattached the edge connectors, crossed my fingers and plugged it in and prayed. I could see the LEDs come on and the player one and player 2 switches stared blinking. Yay! Then I moved around to the front and the screen wasn't on. Oh sh!t. After 3 minutes it still wasn't on. It played blind. But no screen. So what would an operator have done??? Oh yeah! A quick slap to the side of the cabinet and the monitor popped right on! Hurrah! I've turned it on and off 3 times now and the monitor still works, so I guess the old fixes are still the best fixes.

I moved things around, plugged her in to a remote controlled socket (Atari puts the power switches in the most inconvenient places for home use) then pushed her back into her new home.

Anyway, without further ado, the BlackWidow in her place of honor at the entrance to the Whole House Arcade (along with Jeri (my current yellow dog), who wasn't real impressed with the new addition :)).

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ken
 

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I love Black Widow. Hard as hell and just as addicting, much like Gravitar. I sure hope I can have one someday.
 
Thanks. I got addicted after playing one at the Houston show.

Btw, Greg was concerned enough when he read the initial post that he PMed me. I appreciate that level of customer support. Greg, it's OK. The game was working fine when I picked it up and everything is working fine now. My guess is that it was the power connector to the monitor. It seemed a little bit loose when I wiggled it (after slapping the side of the cabinet) it had probably vibrated loose during the drive.

Anybody who has ever moved a vector game and not had any problems when they get to the other end can consider themselves lucky. Everytime I moved my Battlezone I reseated all of the edge connectors and pushed all of the chips down. I learned (the hard way) the first time I moved it. I was expecting no less this time. That's why I resisted the impuse to just plug it in and play with it last night. I knew I was tired and I knew I needed to go over it before I powered it up. Vector games are just like that. So if anybody thinks I was trying to blame Greg for anything being wrong with the game, get over it. The game was working perfectly when I picked it up. Anything after that is on me.

ken
 
Glad everyone made it back safe. I almost went over to Pinballz to play some games with you guys but got distracted by some BBQ. :D
I didn't think anything negative from your post but I did want to send you a msg to make sure you investigated a little further than the 'Fonzarelli Method' to see what happened. ;)
It was nice to meet you and see Joe again and chat for a while about games. Hope we can do it again some time.
 
I've never even heard of the game, but it looks like a nice pickup. I look forward to maybe seeing it one day and meeting some more of the area collectors sometime in the future. I met Joe and his son last week and they both were good guys.
 
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