Robotron Instruction Manual
Robotron Drawing Set
Robotron Parts List |
Purchased: June 2005
Restoration:
I purchased this cabinet at the Rockford Superauction, it had been converted
to a Trivia Whiz. The instruction art was gone, the control panels had
five light-up push buttons installed on each side and there was no
game board included. The cabinet itself was in fantastic shape though, and
the biggest surprise was the near perfect graphics on the player start
buttons and the complete coin door with the original coin box still there.
On top of that the original locks AND keys were still present.
The first thing order of business was to strip the control panels down to
bare wood, and remove all of the wiring that was added for the Trivia Whiz
conversion. This was a pretty clean conversion and after cutting the
harness where it connected to the speakers, power and coin door I pulled all
of the non-original wiring out.
PhoenixArcade.com sells some
great lexan control panel overlays for the Robotron Cocktails. A
friend offered to bondo the extra holes in the control panel (Thanks Brian!)
and I sanded the tops smooth. It is a good idea also to paint the top
of the control panels black before applying the overlays. This helps
give a finished look around the edges of the overlays. Standard
joystick discs are needed under the overlay in the area routed out around
the joystick holes. Once the overlays are applied
the end result is
fantastic!
I then moved on to one of the most tedious steps of the process, installing
the new joysticks and control panel wiring. I purchased new 8-way leaf
switch joysticks, these are the same ones used on the upright cabinet.
I had a lot of hacked up Williams harnesses from other restorations and
decided to use as much of it as possible in wiring up the control panels to
keep the look original.
The first thing I recommend doing is wiring the common ground wire to each
of the switches, then wiring the unique wires. Once all the wires were
soldered I wire tied them as neatly as I could and pulled them to the proper
side and trimmed them to the same length. I also used 15 pin Molex
connectors I salvaged from the hacked up harnesses further keeping the
appearance original. For the light bulb holders I pulled some bayonet
holders off of some rusted Williams coin doors I keep around for parts.
These of course required light sanding to clean up but work great to
light up the center of the
control panel.
To wire the control panels back to the I/O board I used a pair of original
control panel harnesses. Fortunately, days before I did this Steve
Muccione put one up on RGVAC for free and it arrived the day I was ready to
start wiring (Thanks Steve!). I simply pulled the wires off of the
connector at the I/O end and added them to the other harness I had. I
now had a set of cables that connected to the I/O board and split to two
separate 15-pin (original) disconnects for the Player 1 and Player 2 control
panels.
I installed an extra CPU mounting plate I had (again the
same as the upright cabinets use) and mounted the CPU/ROM/I/O boards.
The sound board in the cocktails mounts by itself along the side wall of the
cabinet. There was no original mounting hardware left, so I asked a
friend to cut one of the metal Sound/Power board plates from the upright
cabinets to remove the portion for the power supply and heat sink (Thanks
Bruce!). This ended up
working great.
I used some more of those hacked up harnesses to lengthen the wires on the
Player 2 side speaker, and re-soldered one of the wires on to the Player 1
speaker. Using a 4 pin Molex connectors from Bob Roberts Williams
wiring harness kit I connected both speakers to the sound board. I
also installed a new volume control to the original volume control mounting
bracket that was still in the cabinet.
Wiring up the coin door and lights for the control panel and start buttons
was another tedious process but once I had that done, all I needed to do was
wire the test switches and CMOS Write Protect switch and the rest would be a
snap. The problem was the test switches mount near the top of the
cabinet on the cocktail, not on the coin door like the upright, and the
original mounting bracket was missing in my cabinet. To solve this I
took one off of those extra coin doors I have and had a friend cut the
bracket so it would mount
flush on the side of the cabinet (Thanks again Bruce!). One of the
switches was pretty stiff so I replaced it with a new one.
One more problem I came across were two missing leg levelers. One of
the missing leg levelers was also missing the 1/2" piece of plywood that it
screwed into. I took one of the original levelers up to Menards and
was very fortunate to find near identical replacements. I cut a 2"x2"
piece of plywood, drilled a hole in the center and installed a 1/4" T-Nut.
I stapled the plywood piece to the bottom of the cabinet, installed all the
new leg levelers and it's as good as new.
That's about it, I was lucky to find out that the original monitor that came
with the cabinet still worked, and after degaussing it the picture is bright
and sharp!
To Do:
Touch up paint on the control panels
Cocktail Notes:
The lights in the cocktail are 11.5VAC not 6.3VAC like the upright.
This requires jumpering one the power board if you use one from an upright.
To get the game boards to go into cocktail mode you need to remove a
resistor on the I/O board.
|
