Tail Gunner II stuff

Area69

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Don't laugh, but I plan to restore this beauty. Any help I can get would be great. I contacted wysiwyg2, and hope to be rebuilding the power supply based on his recommendations. A local collector owns one of these (in a complete cab) and hopefully I'll be able to take measurements.
Besides the missing back half of the cab, I'm missing one of the shield control panels, and the back plexi. The previous owner managed to find the back marquee graphic, so at least I have that.

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Hey, good luck and I think you should do it! It looks like a challenging project. With another cabinet available to look at, here's what I'd do..Take some time and a metal cabinet ruler and just measure every 'piece' of the other cabinet. Sketch it out, side, front, bottom, etc.. with measurements, and trace the side panels. Also, note finishes, measure the blocking, note how it's assembled, and in what order. I did this on a Football cabinet that I plan on reproducing. I already cut every panel and piece of 3/4" blocking based on these measurements, just need to flush trim the new sides to the old cabinet with the router.

I'd love to see you document this on here!
 
Love it!!! Hope you are able to get this in the condition you want.

Without a doubt this is my favorite game of all... I am anxious to see where you go with this one!!!
 
Wow, that's going to be an epic restore! Keep us posted with lots of pics, I'm anxious to see how it turns out! Damn shame they cut it in half because what's there looks to be in good shape.

Oh and let me make my obligatory request that you get and publish a decent scan of the side art, it looks to be mint and I don't think any files of it are available anywhere, the more things like that are preserved the better! :D
 
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Oh and let me make my obligatory request that you get and publish a decent scan of the side art, it looks to be mint and I don't think any files of it are available anywhere, the more things like that are preserved the better! :D

Thanks, yes the one side looks to be almost perfect. I'll try to get this scanned. Do all pieces of art like this need to be vectored in order to be reproduced? This one looks impossibly complicated.
 
Thanks, yes the one side looks to be almost perfect. I'll try to get this scanned. Do all pieces of art like this need to be vectored in order to be reproduced? This one looks impossibly complicated.

Anything is better than nothing but I've heard vectorizing provides the best repros and makes adjusting the size easy, but if it's a detailed enough scan and the colors are correct then someone can always vectorize it later if they want to.
 
After replacing the bridge rectifier and the two 13000MFD caps, the power supply has proper and steady voltage. I have one more large capacitor on the 5v side that I'm going to replace when it arrives.

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If the monitor is plugged into the harness, the circuit breaker goes after a few seconds. With it not plugged in, it stays on, but doesn't play blind. So that sucks. The main PCB didn't come with an LED, so I guess there's no way of making a quick diagnosis.

The monitor from this thing was very filthy. It looked like the rats had an all night house party on there. It's for this reason that I decided to finally hose down a monitor. I sprayed it down with simple green and had to use a toothbrush on the nasty parts, it came out pretty much spotless.

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Since there wasn't much more I could do, I decided to try my hand at scanning the side art. I made 9 overlapping scans and then fed the images into some free Microsoft image stitching app. It joined the images together perfectly. All of the 9 images I scanned at 500dpi, so the final image is over 160MB. I saved it in non-compressed tiff format. Hopefully this can just be cleaned up and reprinted when the time comes.

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I am loving this thread, what a great project. I would love to have one of these.

It was actually the first arcade game I ever played. Here I am circa 1980:

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I am loving this thread, what a great project. I would love to have one of these.

It was actually the first arcade game I ever played. Here I am circa 1980:

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Thanks man, this made my day, how freaking cool is that!? It's awesome to see the game in original condition too, in something other than the flyer.
 
A friend helped me with cleaning up the side art scans today. *It's a huge file, around 300MB in tiff format. *Here it is in preview on my laptop.

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And the 5v board from the power supply got new caps tonite.

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Waiting on p1001 to send the NOS fuse breakers. While I'm not certain this is a problem, the ones I have are rusty looking, and don't exactly feel right.

I'm still having an issue where the breakers trip after the monitor begins to warm up. I have a few parts on the way from Newark.

Also I see that two resistors are toast on the audio board, and there are a few bad transistors as well. If anyone has experience with the audio boards, please chime in.

I haven't had any luck finding a local collector with a Tail Gunner cabinet. If someone has this cabinet please contact me, I'll need to get measurements and a trace of the profile if at all possible.
 
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This will be a challenge but judging by your last restores I'm sure there will be a nice TG not far from me before too long. The back section will be a project but once you get measurements it's just a little woodworking. That is as long as your bearings don't go out on your bits. ;)
 
I seem to have dropped the ball on this project. At this time, I don't have a way of testing the board or the monitor, one or both could be bad. I'm fairly certain that the sound board is also bad.

If anyone repairs the Cinematronic CCPUs or Cinematronic XY monitors, please PM me.
 
Still waiting, he's getting the games on the 10th, but I can't be certain I'll be the one who gets it.

Here's hoping, I'd like to see you salvage this thing! Maybe if you don't get it you could work something out with the guy who does so you can repro the missing half of your game using his as a template?
 
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I thought about bidding on that Tailgunner II as well, but I decided not to. With no indication of the condition at all, I just wasn't confident putting a bid in. I hope you're able to get it and move your project forward. I'm in Atlanta so if you end up getting any parts from NoCashValue and you need someone to store them for you or something like that, let me know.
 
After finding some info online this week, I decided to drag this project out and check over a few things. I replaced a few burnt resistors and two or three voltage regulators on the audio board. After that I was able to coin the game up and it's playing blind. It's a huge deal for me to know it's mostly working, since my CCPU doesn't have an LED.

If I have power going to the monitor it trips one, then the other breaker after about 3 seconds. If I unplug the yoke and the CRT socket the breaker never trips. That's as far as I can get with it.

Any advice on where to look next would be great. I have one guide that recommends checking the +5, +15, and -15 regulators. I managed to test the +5 and it's good. The others are just too far down under to reach. I'm considering ordering replacements and swapping them out.

Right now, if I power the game on, I can see a glow on the screen, it seems to flicker a little, then when the breaker trips, it flashes and you can see maybe a line or two drawn for an instant.

As before, any help would be great. Thanks.
 
Two things:
1. I loved that game. I probabally dropped a week's pay of quarters into that thing, back in the day. I still remember the "ZZZZZZzzzzzzzz" as it screams back after a battle.
2. Try Chad at Arcade CRT CUP. You'll pull your monitor boards off, and send them double-boxed to him. He is incredible with monitors.

Check to see that he repairs them first. You have to finish this.
 
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