Friday Jones's Page

My Space Duel Rescue Conversion Story

First of all, the cabinet came to us by accident. We were on our way someplace and we passed a house in my neighborhood where they'd dumped a Space Duel amusement machine by Atari (circa 1982) on the curb. I told Larry that I'd played one of those a few times in the olden days, and that it was a full-color vector-graphics two-player sequel to "Asteroids." He heard the covetousness in my voice and asked me if I wanted to stop and grab it, and I told him it was OK, we had stuff to do.

Well, later that day when we were done he deliberately drove by to see if it was still there, and it was. So we borrowed my roommate's truck and picked it up. it was fully loaded, but had lots of water damage to the side panels at the bottom back corners of the cabinet. The vinyl was shredding at the bottom, but the artwork was fully intact. We stashed it in my garage for later inspection.

I hooked up all the cables according to the schematics I found stuffed into the back of the cabinet, but it was completely ruined below the coin box by water damage, and partially corroded in random spots above, so it did not work and had little prospect of working with the original equipment installed. I decided to repair it using a MAME (Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator) system.

I picked the back lock, which allowed me to open the coin receiver door, and Larry drilled the lock out of the coin box door. I stripped all of the hardware out of the cabinet, and then we laid the cabinet down on its back and dug out all the rotted particle board that was in the two back corners. The art work is all intact, and we managed to remove the wood from underneath it without messing up the vinyl.

We traced the resulting void on cardboard to make templates, then I cut some new fiberboard with a jig saw using the templates, and we each installed our side's piece and then I mixed up some Bondo and we made the side panels nice and flat again.

After the Bondo set up, we squirted some adhesive caulk underneath the loose vinyl and glued the artwork down to the new material. After it completely dried, I painted the wood wherever the white vinyl was missing. Then I used a hacksaw on the corners and a crosscut saw on the bottom to cut a new channel for the plastic T strip. I glued and hammered the T strip in, then I replaced the old feet of the cabinet with some shiny new furniture glides.

I painted the inside bottom of the cabinet black, and painted the new wood and bondo (that repaired the old water damaged areas) black too. I removed the coin receiver mechanisms from the door, and stripped and repainted the metal frame and the doors, then I reassembled the coin receiver door except I reconfigured it so that the coin return buttons are hooked up to microswitches now, so I can either add coins or exit using the left or right coin return buttons.

Instead of putting the coin box back in (it took up loads of room), I built a black shelf inside with a sill on the back right at the level between the two doors. I put the original mainboard back in for historical appreciation and to prove that I own the ROMs legally. I installed a Dell X6400 computer with Win98SE, and used the DOS version of MAME because it runs so nicely on legacy hardware. Larry and I went to the local Pick-n-Pull car lot and got a couple of oval speakers for $5 apiece, and I used the amplifier from a set of desktop speakers to drive them.

The most interesting parts were the monitor and the control panel. The original monitor was a Wells-Gardner 19" Color-XY, so I got a 19" SVGA monitor for the replacement. The plastic shroud and chassis was way too big to fit through the available openings, so we unmounted the picture tube and PC board and remounted them on a homemade chassis we made out of a thin marine-grade plywood sheet and some aluminum "L" brackets. The resulting assembly fits perfectly.

The second interesting bit was the control panel. I bought some small quick-disconnect slide terminals that fit the existing switches, and I cannibalized the wire from the old control panel harness. I had a Dell USB keyboard that was missing a keycap, so I took it apart to use as a converter. The keyboard was simple inside, it had three sheets of mylar, two of them printed with pads and traces and the third simply peppered with small holes. The encoder chip was mounted on a tiny board at the corner of the keyboard, with some traces that contacted some of the traces printed on the top sheet of mylar (which had some direction-reversing traces to connect the bottom mylar sheet too) via a strip of rubbery isoconductive ZIF material.

I used an ohm meter and an Excel spreadsheet to make a table containing the encoder-chip connections required to generate the keypresses that MAME captures for their "Space Duel" emulation. There are fourteen of them, not counting Coin2 and counting ESC. Then I connected the existing control panel switches with quick-disconnect slide terminals and soldered directly to the encoder board. When I was done, I had converted the Space Duel upright arcade cabinet's control panel into a USB keyboard version of itself for MAME!

I found a number keypad so I could also run Spacewars (I was addicted to that one in 1979), I dug out my old giant-sized USB trackball mouse, and I also dug out my old Act Labs GS Dual Light Gun System, and installed them all. Larry, who is very good at matting pictures and who knows how to cut matting cardboard better than anyone I know, made me a new black paper bezel. We replaced the smoked glass over the monitor with clear glass because vector monitors are WAY brighter than raster ones.

I soldered remote power switches to the start buttons on the computer and the monitor, and led them to pushbuttons mounted on the old internal control panel plate which mounted on the far left of the shelf, right over the old mainboard.