Thought id share my SPACE GUN with you all. I have a couple of gun games and another on its way. I do like my gun games, they take me back to my arcade days as a kid on Brighton Pier.
I picked this up a couple of years ago and have been working on it on and off since then. Its only recently ive got it fully working. It had many faults and ive done a lot of head scratching over some of them to get it going again.
When i got this game it was obvious that it had been sat in some basement somewhere that had been flooded.. the first 200mm of the bottom of the cabinet was mud encrusted. This isnt normally too much of a problem but with gun games ALL the working parts are in the very bottom of the cabinet so the whole thing was filthy and smelly. After a clean up and some new black applied the insides looked as they should. at some point this game had locked on and ALL the 200 point coils had burned out ( 200 point coils... all 4 fire at once).The plungers inside the coils had brass sleeves with a rollover at the top to prevent the plunger firing too far. Sleeves were shot as were plungers and coils. Coils were an easy fix but the plungers took a while to replace, in the end i found that the plungers from TAF fitted and so i bought a few from Greg at RTTB. I seem to have a lot of brass sleeves as stock items and i managed to roll the tops over to prevent the plungers from just flying out.
The very front of the cabinet was missing.. im not suprised as its not fixed in and just sits there.. bit like 1930's pinball coin doors.. they get taken out, misplaced and are then gone to the gods.
If you look at the flyer for this game it originally had a lighted front cabinet... im not sure where the lighting came from as none are evident in my game , but none the less i remade the front and backlit it. i took the liberty of bringing this to the 21st Century and installed RGB LED so the front colour changes and leaves colour changing dots on the floor infront of it.. its a cool feature which had RGB been available at the time would certainly have been installed.
Anyway... heres the game front..
Game side..
Viewing window..
SPACE GUN is a bit unique as most gun games just have a revolving or side ways moving marquee that you shoot at. SPACE GUN has 4 balls that slot into holes with plungers underneath, if you manage to hit the direct centre of a ball then the plunger fires, the ball shoots up and lands randomly elsewhere. In the corners are 4 stars to shoot at that turn on after a certain amount of shots ( you get a total of 20 shots) plus spinner and revolving lights.
I havent found a gun game yet that doesnt have this one crucial achilles heel... the score motor works backward compared to a pinball in that it is continually turning. When you make score a relay pulls in stopping one of the turning logic discs, when score is registered the disc continues to turn, but the motor is continuous. This is a real problem if someone walks away mid game as the motor gets hot and eventually burns out. I had to replace mine with a Williams coil, when i fired it up it would go BANG and trip the game out. I had inadvertently put the coil in upside down and the current was going the wrong way.. not good as it would trip the house circuit too! I need to make a mod here that times the game out at say 5 mins so the motor doesnt overrrun ( Mike - any suggestions for a 50VAC timed trip?).
Like most early gun games, there are virtually no sounds except a bell that rings occasionally. The gun itself has a recoil action which is made via a 115V coil attached to the rifle. When you pull the trigger, this pulls in with a lot of force and gives a kickback action to the gun. This coil stop overtime gets magnetised and also the waxed insulator gets very very tiny shards of metal on it until it become a semi conductor... if you get a gun game and the gun coil fuse is fried then its the insulator and /or the metal stop. replace the insulator with plastic and attach the stop to a battery charger to reverse polarity and you should be good to go.
Mike ( Homepin) is making an add on board for EM games that you can program MP3 sounds and get better sound effects... this game is screaming for this as its before 8 track was added to these type of games but being a space theme then it needs some sort of space sound when you pull the trigger, so ill be adding this on also when its available.
So what are we shooting at??
Look here..
and video of game in action
&feature=BFa&list=ULRy5Ztp1gkmc
