Yie-Ar Kung-Fu Custom Cabinet

I’m embarking on a new-to-me bavacade adventure, namely working with Bryan Mathers to create custom side art for the 1985 fighter Yie-Ar Kung-Fu. This game was the most popular arcade conversion kit of 1985. What’s a conversion kit? It often refers to a board modification that enables operators to convert an older, less popular game into a brand new title—all without buying a new cabinet. It probably made good sense for the arcade owners back-in-the-day, and such conversions helped the industry recover from the video game crash of 1983. But the conversion kits often meant that the cabinets were never really as iconic as their predecessors, and the first thing to go was usually attention to the art, which was definitely the case with Yie-Ar. The side art was a slap on, rectangular image that does little justice to the various characters you challenge along the way.

Yie-Ar Kung-Fu side art

I got one of those Yie-Ar Kung-Fu conversion kits in a Defender cabinet a few years ago, and recently did some work to clean it up and add wheels. Rather than buying a reproduction sticker for the side art, I thought it would be cool to dream up some custom art for this cabinet. This is something I’ve seen folks do in the hobby, and it can make for an awesome art project. Problem is I’m not a graphic artist, but then I thought of the magical Bryan Mathers, so I reached out and he is game.

Fairly intact original Defender side art under 3 coats of paint

So, the cabinet we will be creating the art for is a previously converted Defender cabinet that has a very distinctive shape. When sanding down the various coats of paint the original art work appeared. What’s more, it was in very good shape! We primed over it as a layer of protection in the event someone wants to reclaim this cabinet in the future.

Defender Cabinet primed and ready for custom art

So we know the shape of the cabinet, and Bryan and I chatted about possible side art, and I was hoping to highlight the different backgrounds which are a cave-based waterfall for level one rounds, and a Japanese palace for level two. So using those backgrounds on the side art somehow would be cool.

Cave-dwelling waterfall background

Japanese palace background

Then I thought of the side art from the Sidam Explorer,  which features comic panels with an abstracted, brooding astronaut:

So amazing, then the idea brewed that we might do 11 unique panels each featuring one of the various characters you fight. perhaps 6 on one side and 5 on the other. Perhaps highlighting the cave fights on one side and the palace fights on another? I don’t know, but it sounded awesome in the moment. Bryan is planning on using a 3-D rendering of a defender cabinet  to fit the panels together like a puzzle, and then work within those pieces to see how it all looks in glorious 3D, so wild:

I’m not sure if the above model is what Bryan will use, but I really dug the idea of him modelling it all in 3D and building virtually first to figure out how to fit the panels to match the cabinet, see what colors will work,  and get a sense of the design in three dimensions, etc. Once we have that all locked-in, I will find a someone here in Italy who can do a hi-res print to vinyl. So, this is the beginning of what will be my first custom art conversion kit that will be a true one-of-a-kind in the bavacade. YEAH!

Arcade Therapy

I’m back from a trip to both Fredericksburg, Virginia for Reclaim Open and after that Long Island, New York for some extended family time. All of that coming off several days in Lisbon, Portugal, so I was feeling the effects of being on the road for a bit. I have a lot to say about Reclaim Open, and that will begin here shortly, but before that I need to ease back onto the blog, so I’ll highlight some of my recent work in the bavacade.

Turns out the arcade work can also do double-duty as a kind of re-entry therapy. My bipolar gets pretty acute when I’m on the road and away from the family for a while. If I’m not mindful my thoughts can begin to spiral. So for this re-entry—before blogging or jumping headlong back into work—I took some time to tinker on a few games. I usually lug a bunch of arcade parts, repaired boards, chassis, etc. back from the US, and this trip was no different.* On top of the random parts, I also retrieved a few game boards I had shipped during my last trip to the US in February (including Sidam’s Condor, Exidy’s  Cheyenne, and Nichibutsu’s Moon Cresta). On top of that, I took a few with me from Italy, namely a Moon Patrol bootleg board with sound issues, a Bagman with sprite issues, and my back-up Yie-Ar Kung-fu board. So, in short, a lot of boards to be looked at, and below is the tale of the tape for board repairs:

• The Sidam Condor board had a boot issue and missing star field caused by a bad 74LS32 chip. Mike ordered a MN6221AA melody chip and replaced that.  The last problem was that the foreground was shifted to the left, cutting off the “F” in Fuel on the left hand side of the screen. This was fixed by replacing chip 74LS00 at location J4. Seems like pin 6 of that chip was stuck at a logic high and never moved.
• Moon Patrol bootleg- dead sound cpu, replaced but still no sound. Traced sound all the way back to the amp. The problem was the folks who made this bootleg pcb switched the +/- speaker wires on the edge connector. Simply swapping the wires at the speaker fixes this.
• Yie-Ar Kung-Fu – there was nothing wrong, no graphics problems, sound or control issues. This means power is the issue creating sprites, need to test this hypothesis once that cabinet is put back together, more on that custom project setup shortly
• Bagman – the Z80 cpu was bad, but Mike did not report any sprites issues after it was fixed. I had recurring sprite issues and assumed it was a board/chip issue, but turns out it was power, as it always is. +5V DC needed to be raised a tad.
• The issues with the Cheyenne board were linked to the 440 Multi-kit. Turns out the the sound portion of the Exidy kit was causing the no sound condition.The logic portion (the kit) had a problem coming from the GAL chip. Specifically, addresses 14 and 15 were missing and these addresses get generated by the GAL chip.  The game boots and plays fine, but opted to remove the 440 Exidy kit and re-install original Cheyenne chips, now to fix that Hanterex Polo to get Cheyenne back up and running after nearly 10 months of that game being offline.
• Moon Cresta was a strange issue, it was working fine until Zach and I tried swapping out the main CPU chip for a high-score save kit. Once we did that the game just threw garbage to the screen. Turns out the chip (and or high score save kit) needed to be soldered directly to board given the socket was not making contact with the chip’s legs— which seems odd. That said, the board is working again without the high score save kit, so might need to solder the HSS kit directly to board, we will see.
• The non-working spare Dig Dug board was the final one Mike worked on, and that board had a bunch of missing chips, so that was a full blown salvage mission, but it works a treat.

That’s a fair amount of board work, but as of now there are no bad boards,. This will be a short-lived victory, but I’ll take it.

Next up is monitor chassis repairs.  I have two G07 cap kits (Robotron and Condor) I need to do, as well as a K4600 capkit for the Centuri Challenger. After that, the final project is the Hanterx Polo, which has been drawn out way too long, so I’m trying to resolve that sooner than later.

The other work happening has just been some random testing of parts and boards I brought back, such as testing a 15-pin Williams power brick for Make Trax: it works fine. I’ve also been testing boards like Condor (looks and sounds amazing)  Bagman (working again and power adjustment fixed the power-induced sprite issue), Dig Dug (works perfectly), and Zach reported back Moon Cresta is all systems go. So Cheyenne, Moon Patrol, and Yie-Ar Kung-fu are the last boards to test, but two out of the three will need to wait until the games are back online. That leaves Moon Patrol, and I’ll be testing that here soon.

This weekend I fell down a repair rabbit hole. I picked up a degaussing coil in the US, and brought it back to add the final touch to Exidy’s Venture (one of my absolute favs) which had a bit of discoloration on the CRT. The degaussing fixed the issue, but soon after the game was freezing and eventually it seemed the monitor was cutting out. When I adjusted voltage the screen came back, but this time with mono-chromatic colors and it was out of  sync. Major bummer. I started troubleshooting which lasted deep into Sunday to finally learn the monitor’s fine, but one of the chips that controls the color and sync (chip 13C) needed to have the solder re-flowed. I did that and re-seated everything and the game started working again and looking better than ever. That was a small, but rewarding, win.

It all becomes pretty consuming for me (which is true of most everything I do), but I find that focused attention and tinkering to solve small, elusive problems can be just what the doctor ordered when trying to return to a much needed work/life rhythm. Arcade therapy! But not so much playing the games these days as fixing them which is a really pleasurable, if unexpected, consequence of getting into this hobby.

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*I even found all my Dungeons & Dragons maps and guide books feared lost, but that is a post for another day.