Star Rider #1004 - Will it Ride Again?

64B1T

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It's time for another restoration thread journey!

Just yesterday, Star Rider #1004 rolled into the shop in an enormous crate. I've finally got it unpacked, and boy is it a doozy!

First: The cabinet itself.

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The left side of the cabinet (from the player perspective) is pretty good, minus one big scrape. Just a little dirty. The right side of the cabinet is HEAVILY planked. There is no repro available for the star rider art, and I'm afraid I'd make it worse, so the artwork will probably be left as is.

The chair portion of the cabinet seems to be in fairly good shape and has a williams raised letter over/under coin door which is fairly cool. However, as mentioned in another thread, the left handlebar is basically destroyed. I wonder what freaking happened to it. That is a THICK rod to bend.

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As we make our way to the back of the machine, popping up the hood (so cool!) we are treated to...
Lots of rat poop. And some PCBs!
Some very.... acid damaged... pcbs...

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And yes, because I assume everything was dead anyway, I tried booting it (power is ok).

It definitely doesn't work at all but it looks hella cool (not) doing it!

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So. As of now. Here's the list of things I need for this cabinet:
1) PR-8210A Laserdisc Player
2) Star Rider Laserdisc (If I can find a player)
3) Star Rider PIF PCB
4) Rear door (molded plastic wheel.) Anyone got one in a warehouse???
5) Left handlebar because WOW that's borked.

Edit: for whatever reason, all the guts were from unit 1265, but the cabinet is unit 1004.
 
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This is how I would fix that:

get a thick metal plate, or even a chunk of large angle iron, drill a hole in it just a hair larger than the shaft of that handle, then mount the plate or angle to a bench (bolted or clamped in bench vise) and insert the shaft through the hole to hold it at the area its still straight, then take a steel pipe a few feet in length and use it to bend the shaft. then you rotate the shaft to check for straightness and bend again.
 
Yeah, that handlebar can totally be straightened.

Can the grip be removed from the metal? Or is it somehow molded on? If it's glued, glue can be coaxed loose with mild heat. But that bar could be straightened as Charles described, it's all about leverage. Or if you can separate it from the grip, worst case maybe you could fab a new pipe.

If the grip can be removed, a shop press could also be used to straighten it. A local metal shop might be able to help you out there.

I may have mentioned it over PM, but you might try contacting Gene at Vintage Arcade Superstore in CA for parts. I feel like I read that he had some Star Rider parts at one point. He's got a warehouse full of stuff.

Oh, and you still suck for scoring one of these. I'm so jealous. :) Looking forward to the resto!
 
Wow, I literally just donated a couple Star Rider pcbs to Pinball PA a few weeks ago. Hopefully yours aren't too damaged and you can revive it.
 
I, for one, am glad there is no repro art available. Even with the condition issues, it is a gorgeous cabinet. The artwork done by the old coin-op companies of that era is always going to be a lot more interesting to me than whatever new stuff people slap on there.

Looking forward to seeing this come together.
 
Its a big sticker. I bought a set for mine. I know a sticker sucks vs og art, but the planking on mine was absolutely horrible.
It looked to me like it was silkscreened on the cab. There are lots of little additional details everywhere. The planking is bad, but not too bad that I want to try to do something about it.

Yeah, that handlebar can totally be straightened.

Can the grip be removed from the metal? Or is it somehow molded on? If it's glued, glue can be coaxed loose with mild heat. But that bar could be straightened as Charles described, it's all about leverage. Or if you can separate it from the grip, worst case maybe you could fab a new pipe.
I could not find a way to remove the grip. There are no obvious screws or adhesives.

I tried using a pipe to straighten it, and found out real quick that the plastic is extremely brittle. :/

I may have mentioned it over PM, but you might try contacting Gene at Vintage Arcade Superstore in CA for parts. I feel like I read that he had some Star Rider parts at one point. He's got a warehouse full of stuff.
Will have to reach out and see if he's got anything on the list...

Oh, and you still suck for scoring one of these. I'm so jealous. :) Looking forward to the resto!
We shall see! I really hope it doesn't just sit in my garage for years. It takes up a lot of room!

Now that it's finally off the pallet and on dollys at least I can scoot it around.

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I could not find a way to remove the grip. There are no obvious screws or adhesives.

I tried using a pipe to straighten it, and found out real quick that the plastic is extremely brittle. :/

Yeah, that's why Charles's tip was key, about mounting the whole thing in a thick piece of metal with a hole drilled in it. You need a fixture to take any strain off of the grip itself, and just hold it by the metal, while you bend the metal, putting no force on the grip.

Strange that the grip doesn't come off somehow. If you ended up damaging it beyond use, you could at least break the grip off, to see how it was attached. Sacrifice one for the knowledge, so maybe others can be saved.
 
Yeah, that's why Charles's tip was key, about mounting the whole thing in a thick piece of metal with a hole drilled in it. You need a fixture to take any strain off of the grip itself, and just hold it by the metal, while you bend the metal, putting no force on the grip.

Strange that the grip doesn't come off somehow. If you ended up damaging it beyond use, you could at least break the grip off, to see how it was attached. Sacrifice one for the knowledge, so maybe others can be saved.
It's not really much worse than it was before. Thankfully.
 
Installed the new Left handlebar from @aztecf earlier. Fits like a glove. The trigger is a little sticky, but I think something is just slightly out of alignment. I didn't have any time to mess with it, but I'll deal with that later.

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That's one major star rider problem taken care of. The first of many, I assume. Anyone got a laserdisc player? 😅
 
Dug into Star Rider a bit more today.
Before we get into the PCB meat of it, let's talk a little about the handlebar, because now I've adjusted it.

Here's the diagram in the schematic of how the handlebar goes together.
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There's a small plate that has two bent pieces which trigger the optos to form the dual mode brake. What the schematic does NOT show is that the brass piece which triggers the opto is attached to a smaller steel piece, which seems to add rigidity. It does not specify in what order these pieces are attached.

On the original handlebar that was in the machine, the ordering was:
<handlebar>-<steel plate>-<brass interrupter>-<spring>

But when I used that configuration on the new handlebar, the trigger was sticking and didn't feel right.
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I swapped the ordering of the plate and the brass piece to what is shown in the image above. That fixed all of my trigger problems, and the thing is installed properly again. Feels nice and smooth.
 
Now, for PCB stuff.

I've started to dig in a bit. WOW this PCB is bad. And dead. It boots up to a grid screen. I know it's bad, because I can get it to at least get to the RAM test with a borrowed (also not fully working) CPU board. This one does nothing.

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Look at all that corrosion:
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So I started by removing all the ROMs. It was pretty gross underneath also. But it was necessary to give the board a good cleaning.

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Finally, I hit it with isopropyl alcohol and deoxit and a fiber brush to take up as much of the corrosion as I could. It's looking a lot cleaner now. But.... I realized I'm out of sockets! D'oh! Guess I'll have to wait and reinstall all this stuff until a later date...

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Naturally none of these ROMs verified. So that's off to a good start.
 
If the sockets were that corroded, the ROM legs are going to have a thick layer of crap on them too.

You're going to need to file or 1000-grit sandpaper between the legs of each ROM (i.e., where they make contact with the ZIF socket on your burner, which is different from how they make contact with the board sockets), to have any chance of them reading.

Or, clean the inner and outer faces of the ROM legs, and then put the ROM in a new dual-wipe socket, then stick it in the burner to make better contact.

But it's likely not all of them are bad.
 
So some good news, bad news, and medium news. In varying orders.

First Good News!
An original player for Star Rider arrived. It's unlike any I've seen before (more on that in a bit) and an original disc!

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This means that (component-wise at least, anyone got a back door??) my Star Rider is complete!!
However.

When I plugged in the laser disc player to test it out (it was sold to me working), it kinda blew up an outlet: Fucking yikes. This is the first piece of bad news.

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When I opened up the player and started digging around inside, it started looking around inside, several small pieces of plastic fell out, and I noticed that the power switch itself was destroyed. No fuses blown though...

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Also noticed that a corner of the player seemed busted out, like it got dropped or something. The box indicates this also, as two corners are crushed.

I did find something very interesting inside the player though...
 
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The player is an original player for Star Rider, with a williams sticker, however it is NOT A PR8210-A! It's a PR8210-R. With a ribbon cable coming out from under the regular PR8210-R controls.

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This really piqued my curiosity, as I know that PR8210-R players can be converted to PR8210A by removing the rear panel and a couple PCBs from inside a PR8210A, and transplanting them, but this had the regular R style controls. So I really hoped there was some kind of williams bodge inside. My hopes were rewarded!

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It looks like this player was factory modded by williams. You can clearly see the Williams logo in the back on this replacement PCB for the player. This is NOT a PR8210A interface PCB. I have no idea what this is. I've never seen a photo of one like this. Has anyone else?

It doesn't look at all like the layout of the 8210A, so I'm wondering if Williams came up with this thing to convert regular 8210R players in-place. Would be very cool if that was the case. Does anyone have a photo of the PCB that goes here in a regular 8210R player?

Anyway ------ onward to more debugging.

I was able to power the player by jumpering that power switch.
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However, I can not open the player. The circuit which opens the lid does not appear to be working. I looked at the PR8210A service manual and it says this about the lid-open circuit:

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I watched the slider move, so it's clearly not that. I measured at SYPS (13), but between ground and SYPS (13) I got 24V, not -20V. Nothing on LIDOPN, so it's not that.... Any ideas from anyone who may know more about these players?
 
Update:

I was able to get the player open, and I put in a disc. Unfortunately it does not spin up or do anything, so it wasn't just the eject button.

There are signs of life though, but it's just sitting on that annoying "STAND BY" light. The control indicator comes on if I press any other buttons, but it won't do anything.

 
Wow! Such an incredible find (and bad luck). Do you have any other laserdisc players around that you can use to test the disc? Hopefully you are willing to share intimate pictures of that pcb in the hopes of getting it reproduced?
 
Wow! Such an incredible find (and bad luck). Do you have any other laserdisc players around that you can use to test the disc? Hopefully you are willing to share intimate pictures of that pcb in the hopes of getting it reproduced?

Maybe a Firefox / Star Rider multi as a solution till the SR is ready? LOL :cool:
 
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