Tony's Arcade

OK, ok, OK ROB! I’ll put up another post! Believe it or not, I have about eight (yes eight) posts that are sitting in the drafts bin. Some of them are about a year old! I have been getting side tracked a lot (and I’m not talking about the vapor cart [Side Trak] that we all waited for on the ColecoVision. Right, Brian?) Since the warehouse raid of 2008, I have made a few return trips to get parts I needed as well as a couple of… arcade games. On a recent trip, I picked up a Chicago Coin Night Bomber and another Atari Football cabinet. I’m not going to talk about those two gems yet. Instead, I am going to talk about another EM game that was lurking in one of the warehouses. The Allied Leisure Industries 1971 Sonic Fighter.

The warehouse had about five of these games which made me wonder… was it a popular game in the very early seventies? It was the only electro-mechanical (EM) game at the warehouse that was in multiples. All of the Sonic Fighters there were in various states of disrepair. They had been hacked in one way or another. I found the best cabinet, located the missing pieces, and brought the beast back to my house. Now, when I say beast I mean BEAST. These EM projection games are huge in order to have room to project different images on a screen. No 19″ monitor here! Just a 25″ x 25″ piece of frosted glass, three projectors (shots, enemy plane, explosion), mirrors, and a spinning cloud image.

After bringing the game home and letting a few months pass by, I decided to check it out. The inside was incredibly clean (these games are like time capsules sometimes when you open them). Opening it made me wonder if the last time it saw the light of day was 1971… the year I was born! Unfortunately, no 1971 quarters in this time capsule. The operator had made sure of that! At any rate, I got down to business. I cleaned all the glass (e.g. frosted glass, projector lenses, bezel) and plugged in the game. It surprisingly worked! There was no sound and the fire button was missing. I soldered in another button I hacked off another Sonic Fighter from the warehouse and looked at the speaker. It appeared that someone had tried to put a new speaker in and didn’t do a good job of soldering its wires. Some soldering (and plugging the speaker’s molex connector in) and a little later, we have game!

Playing the game, the low rumble of my jets are heard as an enemy fighter jet appears on the screen. Clouds zip by as I pull the yoke back and swerve to the right to get the enemy fighter in my sights. The cross hairs, silkscreened onto the bezel, are strange to use. I lay on the fire… in a red blur, the enemy jet explodes, my score advances to 2 and I hear, “Zzzzzzzzzip!” Man that was difficult!

I still have some kinks to work out — the firing sound seems to be a bit off and the “shots projector” is not projecting my fire. Not too bad, though. The game uses solid state circuits for the sound effects, so I should replace the electrolytic capacitors. This will be a nice addition to the arcade and will compliment the other EMs, especially Sonic Fighter’s progeny which came out five years later… F-114.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Allied Leisure Sonic Fighter (1971). 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.