Haven't had an update in awhile, so I figured now would be a good time to have one!
My friend John Butler decided to liquidate about 99% of his Arcade stuff and today was the Sale. I dragged my friend Dave down there. Ok, it wasn't really "Dragging" as he's an Arcade addict like myself.
When we got there, we started digging though the TONS of things that John had and wanted to get rid of. I had a plan to only spend a set amount of money and only pick up a set number of things. That lasted about 5 minutes :-) I'll be mailing John a check for the additional stuff and I got a lot more then I had imagined I would have.
It's a shame that John is getting out of the Arcade hobby (but staying with Pins at least) since he's such a great person to deal with. It's thanks to him that I have a Great Sinistar to play every day. He is one of the nicest collectors in the area. If you call Apache Junction "The Area" :-) I'm sure he'll be lurking though as once you're bitten by the Arcade bug, it's hard to shake it.
Dave and I arrived at John's place at around 7:30 - 8am. There were several other people (sorry forgot most of the names) already there loading up and rummaging though the piles and piles of stuff like Dave and I were. I walked away with a good number of things that I hadn't even planned on picking up due to John's generosity. John has always been an honest and fair collector to deal with, and I thank him for that.
We finally left his house at around 11:30 after hanging out, bullshitting and rummanging though more things. John was trying to get us to take as much as we could :-) After all was said and done, here is what I wound up with:
Univid 1000 Video Game System Tester with 6 Harnesses
Tektronix 475 Oscilliscope
Atari System One Main Board with Temple of Doom, Road Runner, and Marble Madness
Guantlet Board
Tutankam Kit (PCB, Marquee, CPO, Harness, Joysticks)
Donkey Kong 3 (with Marquee)
Williams boards (CPU, ROM, IO, Sound. about 30 boards (mix) in all)
Joust Joystick (Yellow, NOS)
Arch Rivals/Sinistar/Bubbles Joystick (49way)
Cadash PCB
Unknown PCB
Again I would like to thank John for his generosity and hope he doesn't wander too far away from the Arcade scene :-)
I tested a good chunk of the CPU boards and all of them had problems (as John figured they would). Just like the 5 I currently have :-) So this gives me a lot more project boards to work with. However, if I can fix the majority of them, I will have backup's and some things to trade.
Now I get to learn how to use an Oscilliscope! That should be a cool thing to learn how to use. That combined with the UNIVID 1000, should make testing boards a lot easier and a lot more fun! I'll need to build an adaptor to hook up Williams games to it.
I'll see about getting pictures up some time in the future of the UNIVID 1000 and my test bench once I get it all setup. Time is in short supply these days, so it might be a little bit. I'm trying to get back into the swing of things again, but it's not easy.