Zippyy
New Member
Greetings! I'm Scott, I've been helping out with the Fullscale Falcon since the project moved to MindGear Labs, I've done mostly electronic work, but as the project grows I plan to get my hands dirty with some of the actual prop building (I hope I get to build the Dejarik Table!). I first learned about the RPF from Greg (SofaKing01) a couple of months back, and I've been browsing almost daily since! There's lot of awesome stuff going on here!
Greg thought it would be a cool idea for me to share the Fix It Felix, Jr. that I've been building for the Southern Fried GameRoom Expo. I started working on it roughly in the middle of March, and finally it's starting to come to a close. I'm just waiting on one more piece of artwork to arrive! 'But enough talk, let's look at some pictures!
Here's the earliest shot of the cabinet I have:
It's hard to see, but this machine started its life out as a 1982 Popeye made by Nintendo. Unfortunately it fell victim to what a lot of classic games have when times started to change in the arcades. The original game was stripped out and replace with some shooter or beat-'em-up, the cabinet was hastily given a coat of the cheapest black paint, and new "artwork" was cut and crammed into the marquee brackets. All in the hope that it might get a few more quarters...
I spent the first couple of days sanding off the black latex paint:
I also had the CNC machine cut out a new monitor bracket:
As I was wheeling the machine back in for the night, a member mentioned that I should skip the sanding a use Kilz to cover the black. I was a bit hesitant at first; I didn't want the black to alter the final color any, but a few more people made that same suggestion so I gave it a shot.
First I filled the cabinet's numerous battle scars with bondo, and smoothed down the black as best I could:
Then after two layers of Kilz, the black was gone! Excellent stuff!:
Once the Kilz had dried it was time to repaint the machine blue. I settled on Valspar's "Ocean Sigh", I felt it was the closest match out of the 50 or so swatches I grabbed to the original Popeye/Donkey Kong blue. I also touched up the interior black with some Rustoleum black door paint:
Now that the painting is done, I started working on the electronics. First things first, the big o' heavy CRT.
A round this time the new white t-molding came in:
Motherboard; check, powersupply; check, key-encoder; check, audio-amp; check, messy-as-hell wiring; check...
and...BAM!
Here's a quick video of the full attract cycle. Also, that's Greg and Mike discussing Millennium Falcon greeblies in the background
.
The game wasn't playable just yet, I still needed to hunt down a Nintendo style joystick and some blue and yellow buttons. As I looked for those parts, I shifted gears and started to work on the art that goes on the machine. Luckily before I started the project I had found all of the artwork on a site- only the files had been horribly compressed, it was a bit tough and tiring at times; but I was able to re-vector all of it.
I ordered the side-art first since it's two of the biggest piece of the art set. About this time a friend of mine gave me a Sanwa joystick that's incredibly similar to a Nintendo stick, he also had a pair of blue and yellow buttons! Sweet!
After a little bit more wiring Felix was finally playable! Here's Jessie, one of MindGear's Lab techs, getting the first go:
Then came the control panel overlay and new marquee art. I goofed on the control panel art and gave the printer the wrong measurements, on top of that InkScape decided to not render the instructions card. Bah. At least the marquee is a 100% improvement over the old one!
And that brings us to today. I picked up the bezel art from the printer this afternoon and reordered the control panel art.
With a little less that 45 days until the show, it looks like Felix is on track! I'll post some final pictures of the build as soon as I get the control panel art in.
All in all it's been pretty fun fix'n up this machine, 'hope you guys like it!
Greg thought it would be a cool idea for me to share the Fix It Felix, Jr. that I've been building for the Southern Fried GameRoom Expo. I started working on it roughly in the middle of March, and finally it's starting to come to a close. I'm just waiting on one more piece of artwork to arrive! 'But enough talk, let's look at some pictures!
Here's the earliest shot of the cabinet I have:
It's hard to see, but this machine started its life out as a 1982 Popeye made by Nintendo. Unfortunately it fell victim to what a lot of classic games have when times started to change in the arcades. The original game was stripped out and replace with some shooter or beat-'em-up, the cabinet was hastily given a coat of the cheapest black paint, and new "artwork" was cut and crammed into the marquee brackets. All in the hope that it might get a few more quarters...
I spent the first couple of days sanding off the black latex paint:
I also had the CNC machine cut out a new monitor bracket:
As I was wheeling the machine back in for the night, a member mentioned that I should skip the sanding a use Kilz to cover the black. I was a bit hesitant at first; I didn't want the black to alter the final color any, but a few more people made that same suggestion so I gave it a shot.
First I filled the cabinet's numerous battle scars with bondo, and smoothed down the black as best I could:
Then after two layers of Kilz, the black was gone! Excellent stuff!:
Once the Kilz had dried it was time to repaint the machine blue. I settled on Valspar's "Ocean Sigh", I felt it was the closest match out of the 50 or so swatches I grabbed to the original Popeye/Donkey Kong blue. I also touched up the interior black with some Rustoleum black door paint:
Now that the painting is done, I started working on the electronics. First things first, the big o' heavy CRT.
A round this time the new white t-molding came in:
Motherboard; check, powersupply; check, key-encoder; check, audio-amp; check, messy-as-hell wiring; check...
and...BAM!
Here's a quick video of the full attract cycle. Also, that's Greg and Mike discussing Millennium Falcon greeblies in the background
.The game wasn't playable just yet, I still needed to hunt down a Nintendo style joystick and some blue and yellow buttons. As I looked for those parts, I shifted gears and started to work on the art that goes on the machine. Luckily before I started the project I had found all of the artwork on a site- only the files had been horribly compressed, it was a bit tough and tiring at times; but I was able to re-vector all of it.
I ordered the side-art first since it's two of the biggest piece of the art set. About this time a friend of mine gave me a Sanwa joystick that's incredibly similar to a Nintendo stick, he also had a pair of blue and yellow buttons! Sweet!
After a little bit more wiring Felix was finally playable! Here's Jessie, one of MindGear's Lab techs, getting the first go:
Then came the control panel overlay and new marquee art. I goofed on the control panel art and gave the printer the wrong measurements, on top of that InkScape decided to not render the instructions card. Bah. At least the marquee is a 100% improvement over the old one!
And that brings us to today. I picked up the bezel art from the printer this afternoon and reordered the control panel art.
With a little less that 45 days until the show, it looks like Felix is on track! I'll post some final pictures of the build as soon as I get the control panel art in.
All in all it's been pretty fun fix'n up this machine, 'hope you guys like it!
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