Spy Hunter Arcade Restoration with The 8-Bit Guy

[Music] hello this is David with the time Rift arcade and my next restoration project is going to be this Spy Hunter now if you don't know these Spy Hunter machines are pretty rare they're hard to find pretty expensive when you do find one and so we're pretty stoked to have this one in our inventory obviously it's going to need some work uh this thing's actually been sitting in our shop for about 2 years and along with many other machines we're just now getting around to uh bringing this one out to the front burner so uh let's get started this thing was already covered in dust when we got it and it's only gotten worse over the last 2 years but when you look up close you can see imperfections everywhere like this warranty molding and this vinyl appealing off on the inside uh part of The Medallion art has been peeled away and I think somebody's actually painted this section white to hide it so let's see if we can get some of this dust off and that just reveals more more problems you can see the bezel artwork is falling apart underneath the plexiglass well time to plug it in and see if it works and well there's music but no picture but after nearly 3 minutes of waiting the screen sort of became visible but it is really dim uh let me coin it up so I can attempt to play it it's actually so dim I can barely see to play it it doesn't look quite so bad on camera but in person it is really dim uh we'll definitely need to work on that let's get to work um I'll start by pulling off this old te- molding it actually wraps almost all the way around the cabinet there appears to be damage on the back of the cabinet that I'll need to deal with as well but for the moment I need to get this worn artwork off it actually peels off surprisingly easily I mean it's literally held on about as strong as a Post-It note the trouble is I realized this part here was paint and it won't come off I think somebody tried to fill in where the artwork had been torn off so I'm going to have to get out the sander next thing I wanted to tackle was this broken area on the back uh this is bulging out and it's very brittle so I think the best thing to do is just remove this chunk here then I'll mix up some Bondo and I just want to fill this whole area in solid in just a few minutes I'm able to sand it down and see the result I'm also going to fill in some of these small holes on the side of the machine and I'm also going to add a little more to this area I need to remove the rear but uh the lock is broken and instead there is a screw holding it in place and this is more common than you might think but we're going to fix that anyway um Here's the final result of the Bondo uh so now I'll just go over the whole side with the sander to make sure the texture is uniform and of course I'll need to use a router to recut the slot for the t- molding and so this damaged area is completely repaired and what I haven't shown yet is that there was also s similar damage on the other side that I also repaired okay let's have a look at the inside it is quite Dusty in there I can hardly see any of the components so I'll hit it with some compressed air and that did improve the situation a lot but it isn't perfect okay time for some primer uh the main goal here as usual is just to create a base for the new artwork to stick to and um now the primer is done but looks like I missed a small hole so um I'll just stick some wood filler in there real quick and now to sand the primer to remove any chunks or debris and then I'll do a coat of paint and while the primer is done drying in an hour or so this paint will need to sit overnight oh and by the way here's that area I repaired with a Bondo after painting you can't even tell it was ever damaged all right uh the next order of business will be to release the control panel which is done through the coin door uh this will allow removal of the main glass and in the case of this game it has a tinted piece of plexiglass mounted underneath now I'm going to work on removing the CRT that way we can take it into the electronics room and see about repairing it now the first thing I want to do is fire this thing up on the bench but I'll need to connect it to power the trouble is I don't have a matching connector for this so the simplest solution is to depin the connector temporarily like so then I can just use some alligator clips to connect it to our isolation Transformer and we'll also need a video signal so that's where the pattern generator comes in handy and so we have a picture it is still very dark in fact it looks brighter on the camera than it does in person which is a common phenomenon when recording CRTs we tried adjusting the flyback some and it made it brighter but also blurrier so I was going to recap this Monitor and then I remembered I'd already done it um actually I recapped it like two years earlier when we first got this machine this was actually one of the very first machines that we got when we decided to open an arcade and um when we originally got it Not only was it very Dem but the right side of the screen was collapsed into nearly a single line and so I recapped it and it did fix the horizontal collapse but it did not fix the brightness issue and not knowing really what to do with at that time and not having any spare tubes we just put it in storage and kind of forgot about it until now so since I knew recapping would not help the situation I asked Mike Woods to come over with his magical device known as a CRT rejuvenator uh the first thing we needed to find was the model number of the CRT which is right there and then Mike looked it up in the book and you you can see there it is and it tells all of the settings we need to configure for this type of tube and he set them accordingly then it's just a matter of removing the neck board and plugging in the rejuvenator to the back of the tube like so at this point he presses a button on the device and I can see some Sparks happening inside the tube I have to be honest I don't fully understand what this is doing but it is something to do with cleaning the electrodes inside anyway after that's done we'll connect the tube back to the chassis and test it out and what Wizardry is this uh this tube looks almost brand new now granted it still has some bur in on it but now that it's much brighter the burn in is much less noticeable so a bit of a reality check the Rejuvenation process doesn't always work and when it does work like in this case it doesn't always last so um sometimes it could just last a few days or weeks or sometimes it could last years it really just depends on whether this process has been done before if it hasn't then we probably extended the life of this tube by a couple of years but if it has been done before then we're probably going to be disappointed after a few weeks of running this machine okay the next thing I want to look at are these light bulbs uh these light up to indicate which weapon is active and I'm pretty sure this one's burned out and so if I'm going to replace it I might as well replace them all with LED substitutes the question is go with warm white or daylight color while I prefer daylight for my house in this case I think the warm white will better duplicate the original look so I'll go ahead and replace all of these bulbs next I'll clean the CRT up a bit and then Ashton can earn his paycheck by installing this back into the cabinet and then I'll just uh test play it for a bit to see how everything else is working and dang that CRT looks so much better it does have some burn in but I don't think it's going to be a problem one week later so coming back to work on this a week later I found it to be dead and actually this isn't the first time we've seen this um it did this once before and just jiggling around on some of the boards and cables brought it back to life so I think it's time to get this board set out and have a look look for bad connections okay so there's a couple of problems I'm going to have to figure out uh problem number one is uh this bracket which is uh supposed to hold us in place and it's got these nice little grooves in there um but for some reason I don't think these are the original screws cuz one of them is actually poking through uh which is going to be in the way of actually getting this to slide down properly but the bigger problem is uh that this is supposed to go on here like so but it won't fit so as you can see this one here is uh not fitting in there if you look at it it just they're not lined up and I think somebody has uh I think somebody's put these on the wrong order or something so we're going to see if we can figure that out so I took this whole thing apart it amazes me how arcades from the time period had so many boards uh such as one board just for sound with its own CPU another board for video and so on anyway uh it looks like the boards should go together something like this so that they all line up unfortunately the screw holes don't line up if I do this and I can't find any Arrangement under which I can improve the situation so I'll think on this and I'll come back to it later but at least I can fix this bracket I unscrewed this thing and it's actually pretty obvious what the problem was uh somebody had used a much longer screw on one side for some reason and so I'll just replace both screws with ones that are the correct length that problem is at least solved now I'm going to clean up these boards starting with some compressed air next I'm going to pull each and every chip out of this board and rub some deoxide on the pins and then put them back in this is actually going to take a while because there are a ton of socketed I's on this board and there are about three boards total uh one of the chips I pulled out I even had a bent over pen um I'm guessing it wasn't terribly important otherwise this thing would have probably never worked at all nevertheless I'm going to attempt to bend it back out without breaking it I was um having trouble finding anything that could get underneath it this plastic razor blade finally did the trick then I'll squeeze it with some pliers and there we go I think that'll work I am also going to use deoxide on all of the pens on these connectors in fact while doing so I also discovered this bent pen on one of them so I'll also correct that I mean for all I know this is what was causing it to be unreliable after all of that I put the board set back in the cabinet and everything did appear to be working again and as for the situation with the bracket not fitting correctly I've decided what to do as you can see it won't seat all the way down because the metal is hitting the edge of the board and if you were to force it down you can see on this side that it would be shorting up against this test connector here I looked up some other photos online of uh Spy Hunter board sets and they looked considerably different from ours at least in terms of the metal plate configuration so I think something we have is not quite original and I'm not quite sure what so normally I'd like to keep things original but if I can't do that I'd at least like to make it reliable and so my plan is to modify the bracket some I'm just going to cut a little bit of the metal off the bracket uh this should allow the bracket to seat properly with the new section cut the bracket now fits comfortably down on the board set and should hold it in place snugly and now we're going to turn our attention to this piece of glass with a decaying artwork on it as you can see some of this is just peeling off on its own a plastic scraper had some success we added some stripper to see if that would speed things along unfortunately it really had no effect even after hours of sitting there so we resorted to using a traditional metal razor blade that actually did work but it was pretty timec consuming especially being we were trying to be really careful not to scratch the glass but we did eventually get it all removed next we cleaned up the glass really well to prepare it for new [Music] artwork and there we go yeah uh we need to clean all the fingerprints off but otherwise it went on nicely now it's time to turn our attention to the Marquee I think this artwork on the Marquee is probably fine so I'm not going to replace it but we definitely need to clean the glass up unfortunately I discovered a lot of little specks of white paint that needed to be cleaned this is probably my own fault from when I was putting on the primer on the right side it isn't hard to remove using some alcohol there we go I think that will look great I also wanted to deal with this piece of loose hanging vinyl or melamine or something on the inside of the cabinet after removing I masked off the area and painted it with some black spray paint I knew this wasn't going to look perfect but redoing the whole inside Area would be a lot of work and to be fair this will be in a dark arcade so probably nobody will ever see it and there we go the next thing I wanted to do was remove this fluorescent light and replace it with an LED we do this on all of our arcades because it reduces maintenance uh uses less energy creates less heat and reduces UV damage on the artwork now I'm going to need to save this old power connectors so I'll just snip it off like so since this doesn't have a backing board for the light to mount to I'll need to create some sort of mount for the light I just need to capture the angle of the top of the cabinet like so and the plan is these will fit right up in here like so and then the new light can mount to these but before we can do that I need to get this connector spliced onto the new light fixture my first attempt was using these self soldering butt splices I've used these many times before with great luck but they just didn't seem to want to work here I made several attempts even trying to dip the wires in flux but ultimately the solder didn't want to adhere to the older wire as you can see I can just pull it right back apart so I gave up on that and then I had the bright idea I could just dein the connector and crimp a new PIN onto the new cable problem solved right well unfortunately that didn't work either um unfortunately the rubber sheath on the new wire is just too large to fit into the pin so I went with plan C which is just to put some heat shrink around the wires and solder them together the oldfashioned way and that seemed to work out just fine next I screwed the new light onto little wooden blocks I made so the spacing will be guaranteed to be correct and then I put the whole thing up here to Mark the Spot I added some wood glue and screwed the blocks down from the top of the machine now I can just plug it into the old connector like so and there we go I'll just adjust the light to cool white mode moving on it's time to take these grips on the steering yolk apart so here you go these are made of metal but uh the paint has certainly worn off from all the use over the years so we'll need to repaint them but these will need to be powder coated which is something we can't do at our place so I'm going to take these down to Godzilla race works this place is actually owned by a friend of mine Chris Miller you might wonder why take them here well let's follow Chris and you'll see why uh what they do here is repair and restore old Japanese sports cars specifically Nissan and Dotson's and they have to do a lot of Custom Fabrication and this also means they need to be able to powder coat things so he's going to show me how this will be done uh they'll start by sand blasting the parts in this little Contraption and then they'll hang them up like this and paint them and then they'll get baked in the oven here right now there's some other parts already in there which are getting painted blue so back to our shop for a moment Ashton's going to change out these locks which is something we have to do on every machine and while there won't ever be any money inside these we still need to keep these uh various doors on these things closed and locked speaking of money and coins and stuff uh Spy Hunter does not have a free play mode so we're going to need to install a button for that this is fairly common on the older games basically we just install a button which is then connected to the coin detect wires so that you can simulate a coin press with the button now we're going to lay this thing on its side I'm not sure why but Spy Hunter is one of the heaviest Machines of its era Ashton will do a quick sanding of the paint to remove any debris that may have gotten stuck on it and then we'll clean the surface really well and now it's time for the artwork this requires a lot of measuring and adjustment to figure out exactly where it needs to sit and then we clamp it down so it won't move as usual we'll start at the bottom like so once we get the first 12 in or so applied to the machine uh then we can remove the clamps and then start working from the other direction once the artwork is applied the next job is to trim the excess and Fold It Down Over The Edge then we'll run a knife along the t- molding track then once that's done it's time for the t- molding itself also while the cabinet's on its side we should have a look at these feet we have to replace most feet on these machines but uh this one's bent up pretty badly okay after replacing all four feet it's time to start reassembling things on this machine starting with the Marquee I'll plug in the power and see how the Marquee looks and it looks great now I'll replace the CRT bezel and the tinted plexiglass that goes on top of that and finally the main glass piece I also noticed a bit of white paint right along the edge of this t- molding I wish I'd seen that before I put the t- molding on but a fairly quick fix for this is just to use a Sharpie it covers it up pretty well even with the lights on but you'll never see this in the dark arcade okay the last thing we need to do with this arcade is fix up this steering yolk uh we've already taken the cover off here and you can see how terrible the paint is on it it's rusted out and the paint is flaking off I'll go ahead and spray some paint stripper on this part and then we'll lightly sand the main part to remove any rust looks like the paint is mostly coming right off this piece but I'm going to use a sander to remove the bits that didn't come off there we go that's pretty clean now we'll spray some primer on the yolk and some more primer on this piece here once that's set we'll hit both pieces with some red spray paint [Music] I also didn't want to put these Rusty bolts back in place so one trick we use around here is just to put the bolt in the drill and then run it on a sanding sponge and there we go now we can hit them all with some primer once that's set some black paint after a bit we removed the masking and I think it turned out pretty well so we continue to put everything back together and I did get the grips back uh from Powder Coating and they turned out pretty good but we did run into one more minor problem uh we wanted to clean this corrugated plastic but that turned out to be harder than we thought so we took the pieces off and scrubbed them in the sink and I thought it was just dust but I think it might have been cigarette smoke either way they're clean now so we'll put them back on uh and then we can reassemble these grips and that's it folks so just as a reminder of what we started with and here's what we have [Music] now I spent a little time playing it and believe it or not I've never played the arcade version until recently I grew up playing the Kor 64 version I think the arcade version is much more difficult or at least it seems like to me after I played it for a while Ashton tried playing it this game came out 20 years before he was even born he also found it quite challenging anyway um I think this game is now ready to be played at the arcade and enjoyed by a whole new generation of Gamers so uh I hope you come by the arcade and give it a try [Music]

Channel: Time Rift Arcade

Views: 231,795

Keywords: spy hunter, spy hunter arcade, arcade, arcade restoration, restoring, restore, repair, time rift arcade, the 8-bit guy, 8bitguy, David Murray, Mike Murray, Mike Woods, Electric Starship Arcade, Free Play, Cidercade

Id: 9j6E8zDYhbg

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2024