Just a minor update. The Egret 2 is now sold, gone to a new home and moved to the “past games” category accordingly.

Couple of games have been sold and therefore moved to ‘Past Games’.

Other than that, not much arcade related been going on lately but added a new gig to the list today and spotted a bunch of changes. I think I must have found a load of ticket stubs a few years back when we moved, so here’s the updates

• Added: Kiss, 5/5/10, NEC.
• Added: Fish, 22/9/07, Exeter.

Read More...

After 2 years of more or less complete inactivity on the games front, a new games room has been built and the games should be arriving home this weekend (fingers crossed). Watch this space. Pictures of building the new games room in the new house plus each machine will be photo’d to replace some of the poor pics that are up at the moment.

It’s surprising how few decent picture of my games that I have! One day, probably when the new home for the games gets built I’ll take some decent pictures and write up a small piece on each. Where it came from, any history etc. For now though, I’ve just added a few of the missing games. Cosmic Alien, Monaco GP and the two pins. There’s also a pachinko, Egret 2 and the Tron cocktail but I don’t seem to have any pictures of those at all at the moment!

Reworked PCB list has been added and a new dedicated section for 9100 stuff Read More...

A new machine came our way a few months back. A Dig Dug upright in the Ireland built European style cabinet. It needs some new artwork for the control panel so if you’re interested in the project to create some repro artwork then please click below to read the rest of this entry!

Oh, and a couple more gigs have been added to the list Read More...

The Aero city is now sold so it moves to the "Past games" section, although it is strictly speaking still here awaiting collection. Taking it's place is a nice Taito Egret 2 so I will probably add some pictures of that some time soon. In fact, the machines are all a bit out of date. Cosmic Alien has been missing from the current games section all along for some reason, plus there's also a Woody Woodpecker pachinko to add as well. Maybe I'll get some time soon to bring things up to date.

A new page has been added with a software modification to add a freeplay mode to the Zaccaria version of Space Invaders (called "The Invaders"). This machine was prolific throughout the UK and Europe around 1980 and well beyond. The page has been added to the "Misc Stuff" section of the site.

Okay, as promised, v1.1 of the 9100 keyboard adapter is here. Quite a lot has changed in this version so please read through the project page thoroughly. New in this version is a new USA keyboard layout, circuit compatibility with in-circuit programming and debugging and, in order to facilitate this, the PIC has changed (although I have maintained circuit compatibility with the old one). Read More...

v1.1 is on the way...

Just for anyone that's keeping an eye out for this, the source code has been recovered / rebuilt and I now have a US key map as well. I've also modified the circuit so the reset line from the 9100 is no longer directly connected to the /MCLR line of the 16F84A. Read More...

After months of inactivity I'm back with an interesting little project for anyone that owns a Fluke 9100 digital test system. I was recently able to get one of these from the US but as with so many of them, although it came with the video card (many don't) there was no sign of it's long lost programmers keyboard. Not to be put off, I set about making an adapter to allow me to use a standard PC keyboard with a 9100 to PS2 interface. Check out all the details in the projects section.

Okay, so what exactly have I been doing lately if all the arcade stuff is packed away? Well, this has been going on for a few months now and to start off with I found myself actually watching the TV, something I don't normally do too much of. Stargate Atlantis had started back up, as had A Town Called Eureka. One afternoon we stumbled across a catch up weekend of Heroes entirely by accident out of boredom and that quickly got added to the list, but there's only so much TV that someone who doesn't normally watch it can take!

Bring it on Apple!! Read More...

A new section has been added to the website on the left - photos.

Read on to find out why. Read More...

Well, what can we say? The UK house purchase system just plain and simply doesn't work!! We've been trying to move for a while now. Compared to some people we know of our problems have been minimal too!

Read on for some fun... Read More...

Welcome to my new look website! This is a complete overhaul from the ground up so if you find anything that's not working as it looks like it should please use the contact form from the menu on the left to let me know. If you do so then please don't forget to tell me what operating system and browser you are using so I can investigate the issue and try to fix it.

There are a number of reasons why I've taken the time out to completely rework the site... Read More...

Added pages for my current games. Just pictures for the moment, some text to follow. Also a few missing right now!

Added a PCB list to the misc section of the site. I've never really been one to list what i've got and what i haven't but it does make sense to have a list i can point people to in the event of trying to arrange a trade. PLEASE NOTE: Just because something is listed, doesn't mean it's available for sale or trade. That said, everything has a price. However, if i don't really want to sell or trade something then expect that price to be way, way, WAY over the market value

Will be adding a few banners to the menu on the left over the course of the next few days. These are not sponsored links or anything, I don't get anything from any clicks, they are just things that I'm either involved in or have an interest in

First up is the Retro Ball. An event coming up on the first weekend in December. I will be there together with a whole bunch of people from the Jamma+ forums, and it looks like it should be a good weekend. Click on the banner to read up all about it and grab your tickets before they all sell...

Took a lot of finding, but got there. Recently I was working on removing all the div's because they didn't look right in all browsers. While trying out a few different web development tools on my new mac mini I accidentally put things live well before their time. Turns out there was a spurious width property on one of the tables. Doh! Never mind, all sorted now.

Also had problems with the alignment of any content that had tables embedded within tables so that took a bit of playing about with. Haven't tested it with anything other than Safari since it's getting late. Will try and check it all out in Firefox and IE tomorrow.

I just spotted a whole bunch of layout problems with the site. I'll get onto them ASAP, but I'm really busy with work right now. In the meantime the site displays best with Firefox on Windows. Still not perfect though. IE is worse. Safari on the Mac is about the best as it's what I use mainly, but again, it's still not perfect!

All the useful repair logs are up for now (not as many as i'd thought). I have more but they're not complete yet. I also have a bucket load of notes on Tron board repairs but these need sorting through and probably some of the boards fixing up first. I basically have lots of MCR boards but none of them are mine and all are individual cpu, vidgen or ssio boards and before i can really post much info up on them i need to work through them and match them up as much as possible. Anyone got any spare interconnects by any chance??

Over the last few years I've been keeping a log of all the board repairs I've done (well, some of them anyway) and I've finally decided to put some of them up for all to view

They're all written up in a humerous and (hopefully) useful manner and not just of the form chip X was causing fault Y. Hopefully it will give you some insight into my thinking as well as just what the faults were and how they were cured. I also don't hide my mistakes either - so no rolling around the floor laughing or emailing me if you know better

Obviously if you know better on a repair log that says it's still unresolved then by all means feel free to get in touch with me!!