Tag: Defender

These posts have to do with my partial restoration of a 80’s Defender cocktail table.

Monitor 3

Posted on by nolageek
Click to see more information on the monitor.

I haven’t updated this in a while since I’ve just been fairly frustrated with the whole thing. I hooked up the new monitor and it blew. I knew it would since it was a Nintendo monitor that only took 100v and our wall current is 120v. I took it back to my parts guy and he said it would work anyway (bullshit), and if it blew he’d give me a new one. So, just to prove him wrong I did it anyway and BOOM! It blew and he gave me a 13” Hantarex with bad trivia burn in. I should have played it safe but I didn’t want the Nintendo monitor anyway.

After pluggin the Hantarex in, I fried a resister on the main PCB since I forgot to ground the monitor properly. Stupid stupid stupid. Fast forward three months to this weekend and I’ve finally made some progress.

Many thanks to Dave Martinez for coming over and helping me with the Hantarex monitor cap kit. The monitor is working fine now. Yay! Dave’s going to help me solder the blown resister tonight. After that it’s troubleshooting anything else that may come up so hopefully I’ll have a playable game by the end of the night. Yay! I’ll try to post some pics tonight if I remember.

Monitor 2

Posted on by nolageek
Click to see more information on the monitor.

Since my monitor didn’t come with the full chassis (no boards) I was looking to either get the boards for it, or get a replacement monitor that had a full chassis already. I picked up this monitor for $40 from the guy that sold me the cabinet. Good deal I think. I hope. My switching power supply from Andre Chromey came in today, so I’ll be putting it in this weekend. I’ll be plugging the PS and the monitor both into the service outlet inside the cabinet. I’ll then need to unplug the cabinet (or use a outlet strip with a switch) when it’s not in use since the service outlet is always live while it’s pllugged in. (it doesnt get turned off with the rest of the machine. The monitor and coin door will be powered by the old DC(AC?) current from the Xformer, and the new PS will be also – but the boards will be powered from the AC(DC?) new PS. (make sense?)

Beauty School Dropout – Cosmetics

Posted on by nolageek

This is the before/after pictures of my glass top. As you can see the black paint was badly chipped when I got it, plus there was a lot of blue paint that had seeped under the surface. This all had to scraped off and repainted. I think it came out pretty good. I have to print out new instruction cards. The ones I have are in decent shape, but are faded quite a bit. There’s a few good scans of the cards at robotron-2084.co.uk.