Repairing Allied Leisure's First Video Game, A 1973 PADDLE BATTLE Pong Clone!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another cool arcade game repair video for you this evening. Today we're going to be working on this Allied Leisure's Paddle Battle. You may have seen the other video on this that Ronnie did, and technically this game is not broke. I know, I know, that's hard to believe, but technically it works. But it's just not good enough for us to sell. We have that problem a lot. A lot of these games over here on this side that you've seen for a while have something minor wrong with them that we haven't quite figured out. And we just can't sell it yet. So this one, it works, but it's got that crappy LCD screen in there and we're just not happy with it. This tinted glass is pretty cloudy. I'm not really all that happy with that. But the main thing is the monitor. They've hacked in a flat screen and it's just not how we want to sell it yet. Technically it does work, but we've got lots of machines like that. The Seabird you've probably seen in the background for a ton of videos. Technically it does work, but it's not quite right. So we don't want to sell it. It doesn't select the record, the right record every time. And sometimes it won't play the B side. But other than that, everything works fine on it. But we don't want to sell it that way. So it's just been sitting here till we decide to mess with it again. Sometimes when you're working on something and you can't figure it out, if you just take a break for a while and you come back to it a month later, two months later, you kind of forget where you left off. Then you start all over again and then you can figure it out. We've had that a lot. I've got this. This game is called Winner. It's basically a pong clone, just like the one we're going to be working on today. This thing works, but the TV is not quite right in it. Again, this one jumps around, can probably fix this with a cap kit. But we just, I don't know, we kind of got frustrated with it, I guess. But this is probably going to be the next one I mess with, the Winner. You can see it just had a regular TV in it. This is just a straight up TV that they screwed in there. Most of the stuff we haven't even worked on yet. I've got this Sprint over here, too. This Sprint, you may have seen the video on it. The dang thing works. It works fine. I've got the control panel loose right now, but it works fine. But after about three hours, it'll start acting up. You can turn it off and let it cool down, turn it back on. The dang thing will work perfect for about two to three hours, and then it'll start acting up. Something in it is overheating. Again, we just can't sell it that way. But, you know, we're operating a store here. You know, if you sold this on Craigslist or something, you could probably just, you know, wait till they come over and plug it in real quick. But we can't do that here. We got to figure out what's wrong with it. But again, we haven't messed with it in several months. That's why you've seen it around. A lot of people think it just hasn't sold yet. Well, we haven't even tried to sell it because it's got an issue. We can't sell it that way. So back to the paddle battle. I've got this thing that I do. I try to keep a few oddball games around. So I've got a lot of the common stuff. I've got Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Donkey Kong, all that type of stuff. I've got a couple of pinball machines, some 80s games, bad dudes, all that stuff. But I try to keep a couple of oddball games, like a pong clone would be a good one for an oddball. So last week I sold a couple of my oddballs that I had over there. I had a trophy gun, which is an old EM shooting game, just like the sharpshooter. I had one of those and I sold it. That was kind of one of my oddball ones. And then I had that cocktail table pinball machine. That's a pretty odd one. So I sold that one. So in my mind, I have to get another oddball game ready to replace the two oddball games that I sold last week, if that makes any sense. So I'm going to try to figure this thing out. Again, it works, but we got to get the monitor straight. We're not happy with the monitor. So I'm going to try to put this TV back here in there. I've been hoarding this thing. I've had this sitting right here for probably at least five years. I don't even know if it works. It's an old RCA TV. No idea if it works. But I've got my main problem is one, I don't know if it works. And two, it's about a quarter of an inch too wide. This is 24 and three quarters wide. And I've only got 24 and a half to work with. So I'm hoping I can take the case off of it or something and gain that quarter inch and make it work. And you might be wondering, well, why don't you just put any old TV in there? Well, the main thing is I want to have, you remember the old school TVs like this? You turn the knob to the right to turn it on. Or you can pull it out to turn it on. So that way it'll be automatically on when it gets power to it. A lot of TVs don't do that. You know, you have to hit the remote or the on button. Well, on an arcade game, they're not going to want to take the bezel off each time to turn the TV on or hit that remote. So I need something like this. It's going to be on all the time when I send power to it. So I think first step is to get this out of here to see if it even works. Well, that's not a good sign. A crackhead doesn't cut the power cord off of it and strip it for the copper. So I got to take it apart and try to splice in another wire, another power cord to see if it'll even do anything. So what's next? Well, I was sitting here thinking it looks awful deep. It looks like I'm going to need probably 19 inches. In the cabinet, and I think I only got about 17. So I'm going to hope that they've got a little room here, but you wouldn't think that they do or they wouldn't even add that bump out. So not looking too good, but I think I'm going to take it apart anyway and try to splice the cord on it to see if it even works. Well, it ain't looking good. I don't think this is going to work out for me. Number one, it's too deep. Obviously, I could make it fit if I wanted to redo the back and make a bump out on the arcade game, but I don't want to do that. Number two, almost looks like it's been in a fire or something. It's pretty, I'm pretty bad shape in here. And I don't even know if it works, even if it did. I don't know, looking kind of rough. And the crackhead cut my wire too short. So I don't know, I may be able to cut some of that out and get to enough to splice to, but I can't splice back there because it's got to come out this thing, whatever that is. It's got a fuse on the back of it. I don't know. I don't think this one's going to work. It was too wide anyway. I thought maybe I could take it out of the case or something or cut the case and make it work. But I think this is going to be too much trouble to get this to fit in there. And again, you can't really get around it being too deep unless you want to make the back of the arcade game bump out, which I don't really want to do. So I'm kind of thinking I might just try to put a regular arcade monitor in there. Screw it down. It had been hard to get this one centered. This would, this is actually real similar to what would have been in there originally. See how the controls are on this side and see how this, I don't know if you can tell, but this part is masked off. The tube was actually over here. You can barely see the tube was actually to the left. It wasn't centered. And that's why that's all blocked off because the knobs were there for the TV. And again, here's the winner that I have, which is real similar. But I think I'm kind of leaning towards just putting a regular monitor in there, a regular arcade monitor that I can just mount the monitor on this board. And then, you know, it'll always be on as long as I've got 120 going to it. I was kind of hoping to use that TV. I thought it'd be kind of cool just to have the original style TV in there. And I didn't really have nothing else to do with that TV, but I don't think it's going to happen that way. I think we're going back with an arcade monitor. All right, just for fun, I put a spliced accord on it real quick just to see what's going to happen about it down. Hopefully we don't catch it on fire again. Maybe that's all just dirt and grease or something. I don't know. Here we go. So far so good. Stand back. All right, I'm going to turn the volume knob on the other side. Turn it on. Sounds like it may have came on. I don't want to go around to the front yet. Make sure nothing's going to catch on fire. All right, here we go. We're going to go around. Yeah, it had a raster on it. I don't know if you saw it cut off or not. I'm going to turn it off and see if you can see the screen collapse. You see it? All right, so I've decided I'm not putting this in the arcade game because it's too big. But now I'm curious what it would look like if I hook up a Nintendo to it. What do you think about that? Let's try that just for fun. It's all coming back to me. Remember you used to have to turn these things to get it to... not the channel, but it's got this other adjustment. It's like the fine tuner. I think it's dirty, obviously. Then you got the color and the picture and all that down here. It won't stay locked in. Almost had it though. It'll just stay pretty purple. What color we got? Well, I think the blue. I got plenty of green. I don't really have any red or blue that much. Well, I guess I must have red and blue because I've got a purple and pinkish screen. I don't know, I'm not getting anywhere. Well, there we go. Heck yeah. I had the tint too high. Wow, that actually looks pretty dang good. Holy crap. I might be able to sell this baby. I'm gonna make that money. All right, back to the pong, I guess. Would you like to see me play Mario on a TV like this? Man, I can't believe I actually got it adjusted like that. I was about to give up on it. I had the tint too high and the color too low, I guess. Wow. I might try to clean this thing up and sell it. What do you think? All right, well, I guess we should go back to the pong. What's it called? Paddle battle? Okay. All right, so back here, I've got this monitor here. This is going to be my candidate, I think. Sometimes I end up with extra monitors. Sometimes a customer might want an LCD instead of the old CRT. So I usually end up getting the CRT from them when I put in an LCD in their game. But this particular one came out of an old poker machine. I think it's even still got the touchscreen glass on it. It may have some poker burn in, but I don't think that's going to matter for us. Because we're going to have such tinted plexiglass in front of it. This may be the perfect one. And also, that paddle battle doesn't have an isolation transformer in it. And this particular monitor does not need an isolation transformer. So I think this is the perfect one to put in there. So I've got to get this out of there. I don't know if it works. I got to put it on my bench over there and test it out. I may go ahead and put a cap kit in it also, so we're ready to go. OK, we've got the monitor board out of the tube. So you guys have seen me do this a bunch, but I'm just going to take these capacitors out one by one, swap them. We've got all different values of caps. I do one at a time, put a new one in. These capacitors are only rated at so many hours, you know, and who knows the last time this monitor board was capped? Probably a long time ago. So it's ready for another one. So I'm going to do a cap kit on it, reflow the video connector, look everything over, and then I'll put it back in the tube. And then we'll probably set it up over on our test bench and see if everything's working on it before we put it in the paddle battle. All right, I got it over here on the bench. I got it capped. Everything seems to be working good. It's got a good picture on it. I haven't even adjusted it or anything, really. So I still got this touch screen on it. I got to try to get this off here. It's a piece of glass that sits over the tube and it was in a poker game so you could touch the screen, but we're not going to need that. So I'm going to take that off there and then we're going to get it mounted in the cabinet and then we're going to try to figure out how to wire it up. I think Ronnie knows how to hook it all up. So we'll get it mounted in there and go from there. All right, so I'm going to make a new bezel for it. This is just tinted plexiglass, but it's pretty cloudy and scratched up and just don't like the looks of it. So I've got this other stuff here. I traced it out. You can get these at Lowe's. They're like five dollars. You just score it like this. Cut it on the line. You score it four or five times, then you snap it off. That's all there is to it. Well, I got the monitor mounted in there. I had to raise it up a little bit because I guess the TV probably had a bass on it or something. I don't know, but I got it all mounted in there. It's not going to hit the neck board. So that's good. That other TV would have just never worked. It was too deep and I just got to hook up my AC for my power. And Ronnie said something about he had to mod the board. Something about the ball being stuck at the bottom. I'm not sure, but we'll be back later when we get all that figured out. OK, folks, the paddle battle, the beautiful Allied Leisure paddle battle. It's day has come. If it was up to me, I would just work on games like this all the time. These are my favorite type. They don't have any value, really, though. We're going to get decent money out of this one, but not what it could be. So Joey has swapped in a better monitor, an actual appropriate CRT for it. This is a Wells Garner 9203. I guess you just saw that in the video. And I have rigged up the video to it and actually got it displaying pretty good on it. So basically the way this thing is wired, one of these sets is audio, one of them is video. So the video I ran to the red, the green and the blue, which gives us a white image. I just touched the neck board. That's fun. Which gives us a all three of guns. So it gives us a white image. And then I've ran the ground off of the video ground straight to there as well. It would not sink some of these monitors. I've seen Todd Tuckey talk about how you can put some of the Wells Garner monitors in a something like, what does he put them in? Space invaders and things like that. Because of the processing on the CRT's board, it will figure out and get the sink off of the video signal, but on this, it doesn't do that. So I wasn't able to do that. So I had to run a separate sink wire. So right now I've just got it daisy chained in. We'll make it better here in a minute. I've just got it clipped in and it just synced up very well. Now we also have to do the audio because the original monitor that they stole out of the And yes, I consider it theft. They stole the TV that was supposed to be in this thing. And the TV had an audio amplifier circuit. So this wire would have went up to the TV as well for audio. Because these two wires are the audio, the audio signal in the ground. So what we need to do actually, because this monitor can't amplify audio and the board has no audio amp on it. So it's just line level audio coming out. Now, keep in mind, it's just there's like, I think there's two nodes. I think it goes if you miss. So I can just do bink and if I remember correctly. So we don't need much, right? But we need a speaker and we need an amplifier to amplify the audio for that speaker. So I think what I'm going to do is mount the speaker, maybe. Oh, I don't know. Maybe right there. And I'm gonna put a little audio amplifier right there. And I'm trying to make this so that you can just unplug the board. The sync signal gives us a problem. There are unused pins on the edge connector of the board. But the problem is I don't have the connectors for this ancient edge connector here. I don't have the pins that go inside of that, the female pins. I don't think they make them anymore. They're a weird type that almost looks like a fork and it grabs both sides of the board. So I don't have anything like that. So on the board, I was able to find the sync signal if you look on the schematics. And by the way, we mentioned it on the previous video. I don't know that Joey talked about it much in this video. But this is a copy of the Atari Pong PCB that they licensed to William. So it's pretty much identical to an Atari Pong board. So if you look at the schematics, it's pretty much the schematics are the same as Pong. So there is one area here where they combine a bunch of stuff. And there's a resistor that the composite sync runs through. And so what I did was I just soldered a wire to that resistor and I ran it up. And right now I've got it daisy clipped onto the sync pin. On this monitor, the pin to the left that's open here is a ground pin. This is as well. This is ground and this is ground. If you look on the bottom of the board, they're actually connected together. This is vertical sync and this is horizontal sync. Vertical sync and horizontal sync. Originally, these would have been different where positive connects here and negative connects here. But on these newer monitors, and this was a newer monitor. It was one of Wells Garner's last 19-inch monitors. All of that's just connected together. So this pin is connected to that pin. That pin is connected to that pin. And the ground pin is connected to that ground pin. So I guess theoretically, I could just run the sync in there. If you plug the composite sync into horizontal, it figures it out and figures out the vertical out of that as well. So we've got that figured out. I need to clean up that so that the board can be unplugged. I think what I'll do is just put some kind of butt connector where you have to disconnect that one wire plus disconnect the edge connector. There's really no other way to do it. Again, wouldn't have this problem if someone would have left the TV in here. I think I know who did it too. So I don't want to talk too much crap because they're a good person. And it wasn't me. It wasn't Joey. But yes, it says here manufactured 2003 if he didn't show that earlier. So we got to do the audio thing. We've got to do the sync wire. Now, if you look at the score, it looks messed up. That's just because we just turned it on. If you start the game, it resets it. All right, look at this. Pong is such an exciting game. And without audio, it's just I don't know why anybody would want to play it without audio. Okay, so we got to get our bings and our booms back. So let me see what I can figure out with that. And we'll wire in a little amp and a speaker and see if we get our beeps and boops going. So for the little audio amp, I found one that can run off five volts. So just a little tiny cheapo little amp that's very low powered. We don't need a lot. So I'm going to run it off of five volts because the board actually regulates the voltage down to five volts. It's ran by the transformer. I think this is 24 volts. Oh no, 16 volts. Okay, so that's a little high for an audio amp. And I think that's 16 volts between the center tab. So it's 32 volts across, I think. I might have that wrong. So it uses five volts to go out and it sends it to the paddles. So you've got five volts and ground on the paddles. So we can get our five volts and our ground up by the coin door off of the paddle. So if we do it clean on the connector, we can just wire it straight in and then run those wires down to where our little amp is going to be. So we need to get that red wire that's up on the connector near the monitor down there. And we need to get a couple of wires off of one of the potentiometers down there. And the board doesn't draw a lot of amps or anything. So I don't think it'll affect the paddle in any way. The five volt is also used for... There's something else that it connects to. I can't remember. They use that five volts for something else. But anyway, that's what we're going to do. So I'm going to take the pins out of one of the second player potentiometer cable and then get a couple extra wires in there so that we've got those down to it. So look at this little baby. So I made a little pigtail, a little harness so that this can all be removed. And I've grabbed ground off of one of the pots, the connector to the pot. Five volt off of one of the connectors to the pot. And then, of course, this brown wire represents the audio signal that was up at the top, that red wire that you saw up near the monitor. And so I've got them all zip tied in where they need to be and running to a plug. And then the other side of the plug runs to this. So this is a little cheapo amp you can get on eBay. They're like four or five bucks. And it runs off of this. Some of you will appreciate the little chip. It's a TDA2822, which apparently is a nice little amp that can run off of as little as 1.8 volts and as much as 12 volts. So since I knew I was going to run off five, I picked this. I tried to find a mono one. They didn't have a mono one. So this one's stereo. So what I did was, and I didn't want to put a connector on the end. Since this is all just on a plug that can be unplugged, I just bridged it across both of the inputs. The grounds are all tied together on everything. So the DC ground, the ground for the input, and the ground for both of the speaker outputs. And then I tied together the two outputs as well. This thing, if we're running at five volts, it might not be very loud at all. But if we've got it both tied together, if we've got it tied to both of the outputs, maybe that'll give us some more volume. I don't know. And then I wired it up to a cheap little eight ohm speaker we've had knocking around for a while. It actually has a hole in it. I don't think it'll matter that much. And so I'm going to plug it in and we'll see if that works. Maybe, I don't know. It's worth a shot. It'll also be interesting to see if it affects the second player paddle. I don't think it will because that five volts is also running to the first player paddle. The ground is also running to the first player paddle. It's daisy chained together. We've just daisy chained it into this little lamp as well. And same with the ground, the ground and the five. And then the other thing is technically, we're using a different ground than the ground for the speaker that's coming out. But all that stuff's tied together on the board, the game board. We just don't have the nice twisted pair running up to our speaker. If we did, you'd probably have a clearer signal. So this might have a little fuzz in it or something. We'll see. It's going to be down inside the cabinet. The whole thing with this game is, and I think some of you will get this, some of you won't. This isn't meant to be like the hottest, newest thing out. This is meant to be an artifact, basically. It's an antique. It's something that somebody's going to appreciate for how old it is. So if it has kind of crappy audio, does it really matter? It never had good audio, right? We don't need high fidelity out of this. There's a bunch of ways you could do it more expensive and nicer. But something like this is just as good as what would have been on that TV, probably. And the speaker. The speaker in the TV was probably smaller than this. So we'll see if this amp's powerful enough to make it where you can hear it outside of the cabinet. Because the other thing is, the original cabinet, a TV speaker was sealed up in the cabinet. So you're just hearing something from the bellows of the cabinet, right? The bowels of the cabinet, I guess would be the better word. So this is going to be the same way. I'm just going to have this screwed in there somewhere. And you'll hear a little beep coming from inside the cabinet. That's in my mind how it should be. Another thing that I want to do that I didn't mention earlier is they've got that start button, the coin button on it. I want to take that off too, because nobody's going to stand there and just play pong over and over again, I don't think. I think they want the whole thing where you drop a quarter in and all of that. And it looks like the coin mech stuff is still in there. I'll probably rig that back up to where the coin mech actually works. All this is going to be good for is an experience, right? So the quarter drop is actually part of the experience. If you're playing Street Fighter, you don't necessarily need the quarter drop. You're just going to hit start and play some more, because the gameplay is what's attractive to it. An old school Allied Leisure version of pong, the only attraction to it is how it looks and the experience of playing an old game. This is what it must have been like in 1973. So we're going to try to give them as much of that as we can and not worry about the convenience of being able to hit a button, for instance, to start the game. OK, so the audio line would have been right here. I repinned this side and ran it out. You can't even see it, but the two wires are coming in there. I could have just took that all the way back, but I guess I could have pulled it loose and took it down and put it in the thing. Whatever. It's good enough the way it is. So I just ran an extra wire down through here and across to there, grabbed the five in the ground there, ran the chain down to here, ran it into the little board. We don't have anything screwed in yet, obviously. And I've got this little speaker hooked up. If this speaker isn't any good, we can easily just put a different one on it. So let's see if we blow anything up with my mad little experiment here. Is anything smoking? Seems all right. OK, let's turn up the volume. OK, I think it's like halfway. I have no clue if it's working. We do know that the volume works, because if you watched the first video, we had it hooked up to an LCD. It is a horror show, folks. OK, let's see if we get any sound. I hear sound. I love it. I love it when a beautiful plan comes together. Let's turn it up. Let's give it some juice. That's about all it's got. Oh, it slid it right by me. Let's see about the volume. So the knob is right here. That's it. Let me go the other way. Yeah, so that's all I've got. If I turn the speaker up like this, that's going to be plenty. That's going to be plenty. It doesn't need to be crazy loud. All right, let me install that real quick. And then we'll see what we can do about that sync wire. So luckily, in the box, they had the original coin mech. It was missing the coin switch, but I put a new one on it. And it was missing the actual coin mech itself, the cartridge. We just had this plate. So I had to modify it a little bit. This little sleeve here. I had to cut that channel in the side of it because apparently this originally took dimes or nickels because the quarter couldn't fall through there. And the wire couldn't get far enough out of the way that a quarter could get past the wire. So, you know, the way a coin mech works is this weighs and measures the coin. And then if it accepts it, it throws it through this chute. So it drops down and it pushes that switch down. And you just heard it click. And that gives you your credit. And then the quarter falls past. Well, this sleeve is slightly too small for it to be a quarter. So I cut the side out a little bit so that it falls and then kind of goes off to the side a little bit, which is fine because, you know, it's over this pan here. So that's a good working coin mech. That'll be a good one for it. And we'll mount this back in there so that we can use this instead of the button. OK, so we're going to put some paper to block the top of that so that the light doesn't shine down on the monitor, which will actually make the monitor look a little brighter, too, by the way. And the coin door does not have a light on the name on the quarter marquee. But that's just how the early games were. I don't think they were intended to be in dark rooms like this originally. I love them in a dark room, but I don't think they were originally. Let's see if the quarter thing works. Perfect. And that's what the door shut volume was. Look, you can get it. You can't quite stick it because there is a there is a little thing built into the program where depending on where you hit it on the paddle, it changes how it bounces off of the paddle. So if you hit it straight on, yeah, it'll bounce straight off. But if you hit it like near the edge of the paddle, it bounces at a different angle. But you can kind of get it stuck where it's just going back and forth, but eventually it'll break out of it. So that's it. That's the whole pong experience or I'm sorry, the paddle battle experience. Now, if you didn't see the first video, we put a marquee in it and it had like an LCD monitor in it. So really, the only upgrade is that I say marquee. We put a light behind the marquee. The light that was in there was pretty crappy or I think we just moved it or something. And we've done some wiring stuff. We got a better monitor in there and we've got the thing up and playing pretty good. And we've got the sound working pretty good now with the sound amp. One little thing about pong that a lot of people don't realize. And again, this is like a perfect copy of pong. When you can't go all the way to the bottom and you can't go all the way to the top. So if the ball hits the top of the screen exactly when it hits your paddle or exactly when it hits like where your paddle is, you will not hit like that one right there. He may have missed. It looked like it bounced a little before him. But yeah, if the ball hits right on the edge, it will go under your paddle or above your paddle. You can do a little mod to change that, but it causes a bunch of problems. It makes the ball get stuck and it just does weird things with the board. The original design was the ball could squeeze by the paddle just a little bit if it hit just perfect on the edge. And so a lot of people, they don't really like playing the game like that because it's a little unfair if the ball just happens to hit up there, there's nothing you can do to hit it. But that's just part of the game, people. That's just how it was designed. Okay, so we're going to do just a little bit more to it. We've got to, I want to change this little thing where the power plugs in here and put one that has a fuse on it. We've got some of those. So I'm going to do that so that it's all fused. There's a fuse up here too, but I just like that. Well, let me make sure there's a fuse up here and then we won't worry about it. We've got to put the back door on, put a lock on it, put a lock on the front. And we've got to do some kind of paper above the monitor to hide that light so it doesn't shine down on the monitor. And then we're good to go. Okay, so the fuse on the game board back there is actually the main fuse for it. I thought maybe it was for the monitor, but the way the TV originally was done was it plugged in here downwind from that fuse. So that fuse is for the entire thing, not just the monitor. So it is properly fused. So we don't have to worry about that little connector. It's a little, it's a little chintzy, but the originally it probably, the cord just ran in and was soldered to the board. So it's probably better than that because now you can remove the connector. All right, this is how it turned out. We've got our locks on there. One on the front, one on the back. That's two if you weren't counting. Here's how the monitor turned out. We got it all kind of trimmed out. So you can't see the glare from the marquee light anymore. You can still see me though. Uh, everything works good. Ronnie said he already played it for you guys. Cabinet turned out pretty good. I touched up some of the black. Looks like an eight to me guys. Looks like an eight to me. But anyway, thanks everybody for watching. We appreciate it. And we'll see you on the next one.