Tempest Restoration -
Inspiration or Insanity?

Page 6: Final Assembly
February - March, 2004

This will be the final page of the Tempest Restoration..

Click on images for bigger pics:

	10:00 PM Thursday February 19th 2004. She stands for the first time on her new feet, and with new T-molding applied. In the background is the rest of my arcade - Dr. Who pinball and the Mame machine I built from scratch.
	Here is the inside, wired up and ready to go (picture taken before PCB and monitor were installed).
	4:30 PM Tuesday February 24th, 2004. She powers on (monitor is not yet plugged in because I'm chicken) and plays blind! See details below.

4:30 PM Tuesday February 24th, 2004. Here's how the PCB experience went:

I swapped my PCB and some cash for a tested good PCB from Dick, a great local PCB repair pro. I got home, plugged the board in, flipped the switch and --- SMOKE!

After quickly un-flipping the switch I saw that the extent of the damage was a blown resistor R29 on the regulator board. Well, I am definately NOT a PCB pro, so I was fearing the worst. I fired up the PC and searched the newsgroup for "Tempest R29", and sure enough there were several posts that said that R29 will blow if you have contact problems with the edge connectors.

I new the PCB was OK, because I saw it run when I picked it up. So I picked up my friends borrowed multimeter and checked continuity between the PCB and the back of the Molex edge connector. Sure enough, several wires were not making contact.

After an unsuccessful trip to a local electronics store for new connectors I sat down and tried to figure something else out. I noticed that I could get continuity by moving the wires. Hmmm... I noticed that the larger of the two connectors had the wires bent at an angle. I must have done that when I cleaned the wires with a damp rag!

Figuring that it couldn't be that easy, I bent the wires parallel with the connector and flipped the switch. No smoke! OK, now what? Let's see, I now have the red 5 volt LED's lit up on both boards - seems like a good sign. Oh, I remember now - there is no sound in attract mode! I flipped the switch off and hooked up the controls to the wiring harness. Remembering that the manual states that the controls should be grounded, I hooked the ground wire up to the panel as well.

Flip the switch again, still no smoke. LED's are on, let's plop a quarter into a coin slot and see what happens. YES! The player one LED is blinking! How about another quarter, player two LED is blinking! You may be thinking, so what - big deal, but for me it was the biggest thrill since peeling the black vinyl off and seeing side art!

I then pressed the player one start, and sure enough I had sound! I spun the dial and heard that it was working, I pressed fire and heard that too! I have a running Tempest now! Next step is to plug in the monitor. I'm more than a little worried about that. If something there smokes, I don't think it will be quite as easy to fix as bending some wires.

Stay tuned for updates!

	I plugged the monitor in after checking that there was no stray DC current on the axis wires. As you can see, I have a slight video problem on the right hand side. The lines don't stop at the edge of the screen, they bend instead. I am still adjusting the picture, so I may be able to lessen or eliminate it. I don't think it will hurt anything, so I'm not too worried. It only happens when something is on the extreme edge of the screen, which doesn't happen much in gameplay - just when traveling between levels.
	Tuesday, March 2nd 2004. Here is the first shot of the cabinet all back together. It is still missing the monitor bezel, but you can hardly tell through the smoked glass.
	Angle view. Notice that I now have a monitor bezel. Well, I guess you can't see it, but take my word for it - it's there. Thanks to one of the many helpful folks on the RGVAC newsgroup.