Tony's Arcade

OK, ok, ok… I have been asked to provide some updates on the Warehouse Raid. Here we go…

As part of the warehouse raid, I was able to get my hands on a game I first saw back in 2001. The Pole Position cockpit! In the last (and first) warehouse raid I participated in 2001, I saw the fabled cockpit which I never saw as a kid. Cockpit style arcade games were stuff of legend in my part of the state because of cost and probably weight and coins per game (50 cents)! I, living in an apartment in 2001, had no room and there was no way I was going to get that thing up two flights of stairs! Instead, I settled on a Pole Position II upright which has been in my arcade until recently. When I saw the Pole Position cockpit in the 2008 warehouse raid, it was time to get my grubby hands on it and sell the upright!

In the 2008 warehouse raid, I had my choice among FOUR Pole Position cockpits. The first three had been pilfered — the boardset was missing. The fourth Pole Position cockpit was a jackpot, not only was it complete but it had the Pole Position II boardset and the Pole Position II monitor bezel. The Pole Position cockpit has a few added bonuses over the upright cabinet. The cockpit has four-speaker “surround” sound (a mono audio source sent to two speakers in the front and two in the rear with four (ha!) volume knobs behind the coin door). The cockpit also has a brake pedal, unlike the upright. At the back of the cockpit, a curved tinted plexiglass allows onlookers to see the action. This cockpit has a 19″ monitor, standard with Pole Position cockpits. I lucked out — someone replaced the 19″ monitor recently and I had a “like new” one in there. I’ve read stories about Pole Position cockpits in the wild having a 25″ monitor but that was operator add-on thing.

The first thing I did was clean up the cabinet. I had to vacuum lots of fine beach sand out of the pedal floor area, probably from the game’s days at Misquamicut Beach, RI. I then got to work on the electronics and did the basic stuff. I installed the Bob Roberts Atari Audio/Regulator (AR) capacitor kits on the two AR boards. Then, I installed the Bob Roberts Atari AC Power Supply Repair Kit. This kit replaces the “Big Blue” capacitor, bridge rectifier, fuse assembly, and AC cord. I also had to purchase an extra “Big Blue” capacitor, as Pole Position uses a second one of these mammoth capacitors.

I powered on the game and saw a whiff of smoke from R29 on the “B” (bottom) AR board. Looking at the schematics I saw that R29 goes to pin 3 on J7, + sense. I wondered if the video board was getting +5 volts… the “B” AR board supplies +5VDC to the video board. Looking up at the video connector, I saw that the +5V wires were hanging off the connector. Examining the connector closely, I saw that someone had replaced it with a solder-type edge socket. They didn’t put any strain relief on the wires going to this connector, so three wires had broken off. (Actually, it was quite the hack job and I was wondering what kind of rush the tech must’ve been in. Beer?) I replaced R29 (a 10 Ohm resistor), reconnected the three wires (two +5VDC lines and Ground) to the Molex 15/30 edge connector, and powered on the game. No puff of smoke! Made sense — R29 is connected to the +SENSE line on the video board. Since the video board wasn’t supplied with +5VDC, +SENSE had nothing! I looked at the screen and there were white numbers and letters on a blue screen. Yesssss! Progress. Then I had a black screen every subsequent time I turned on the game. D’oh! Oh well. Using my multimeter, I saw that the video board wasn’t pulling +5V any more. That connector going to the video board was very loose and cheaply hacked together. I installed a new 15/30 Molex edge connector from Bob Roberts and saw my problem. I had connected the +5V line to pin “8″ instead of pin “B” on the video board’s edge connector. (My fault! The schematics I have are shrunk down to an 8.5″ x 11″ paper so the “B” looks like an “8″.) Pin 8 is unused but is connected to ground — that’s why I had no power, I had created a short! I moved the +5V line from pin 8 to pin B and I had power again to the video board but still random characters al over the screen. Onto troubleshooting that!

Here are the vital stats for the new racing game addition to Tony’s Arcade:

Arcade Stats:
Manufacturer: Atari
Year Released: 1983
Cabinet: Cockpit
Monitor: 19-inch Horizontal Color Raster
Coin Counter: 170690
Serial Number: SD0325?
Model Number: 38103
Tony's First Quarter: Great Skate, Norwich, Connecticut (Upright)
Tony's Arcade: Yes (October 25, 2008)

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Pole Position II (1983). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.