I bought a populated Counterforce playfield at TPF and finally put it to good use. I thought I would post the story here.
Never saw one at any show or in the arcades, but I played the VP version and liked it. So when I saw the playfield hanging on the wall in a booth I knew I had to buy it and resurrect the game.
Of course, I needed a backglass too. There was a pretty nice one on ebay for MONTHS. I kept looking at it thinking I should buy it, but kept holding out for a complete game so I never pulled the trigger. Well, after TPF I immediately bought the glass. Sorry if any of you were one of the watchers.
Now I wish I would have kept the cabinet from the parts Panthera game instead of selling it to be used for VP.
So now it resides in my Mars God of War cabinet. At least it's space themed.
There were a few challenges to make it work:
1. MPU. It looks like it's completely corroded, but it ended up being bird sh*t from the barn it was stored in. Oh yeah....the top of the backbox is delaminating from water damage. The Mars inner backglass is gone and most of the artwork on the outer glass has peeled off. Anyway, cleaned off the MPU, but it still didn't work. Pulled the MPU out of my Black Hole project. This one has corrosion. Plenty of it. But surprisingly, it works! Burned a new EPROM and installed a memory cap and we're up and running.
2. Driver board. Same bird deficant that infected the MPU. Screw that. Pulled another board out of my stash and will clean and test this one some other day.
3. Sound board. It uses the same board as Panthera. Great, I thought, I have one of those. But wait, Mars has the sound/speech board. Same connector, but it has an extra power wire with 30V on it. Can't have that with the Panthera board. I cut the wire and put in a butt connector so I can still use either sound board. I look at the Panthera board again.....great, somebody did what I just tried to avoid -- plugged it into a sound/speech board harness and fried a diode and trace on the board. I make the repairs and plug the board in. No dice. I have good voltages. I have activity on the CPU, but the proprietary chips are dead. So I bought a Flipp replacement and sounds are working.
4. Score displays. The P3 & P4 displays on Mars are very close to the P1 & P2 displays. I had to really stretch the harness to reach the P3 & P4 score windows on the Counterforce glass. Also, because I mounted the backglass in place of the outer glass, that left a lot of space between the display panel and the glass. I used tall playfield posts to mount the display boards, but it still leaves a good inch between the display and the glass. Fine if you're standing in front of the machine, but as you move up/down or to the side it affects visibility. I could use taller standoffs, but I don't think I can stretch the harness even another 1/2 inch to reach.
5. Credit/match display. This display is in the playfield apron on Mars. Either I build a new harness or somehow extract the harness from the playfield wiring. Luckily, the display cable is not integrated with the playfield wiring and is simply ty-wrapped to the harness. The problem is that the hole in the Mars display panel for the P2 display wiring is right where the credit/match display needs to go. I mounted it just to the left of the hole. I'll need to make a special bracket to align it properly with the glass.
It's a fun game to play. Kind of like Space Invaders meets Missile Command. I like the risk vs. reward strategy. When you complete the bank of drops, do you shoot for the reward (special/extra ball/bonus collect)? Or do you keep shooting targets to save your bases (bonus multipliers)? If you miss even one missile, any rewards you've lit, but haven't collected, are gone.
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