Berzerk restoration: changing my legacy

[mourix]

I’m a 26 year old electrical engineer with a love for restoring old arcade gear and electronics. At this point I can fix a lot, but this whole arcade hobby actually started with a massive fuckup in 2008… This thread will be my attempt at making this right.

Back when I was a 14 year old tech kid, I found out about this cool app called MAME. I got very excited and started throwing some old flea market monitors and pc’s together. I read about all these arcade machines I may or may not have been alive to see, and really wanted a my own. I found a very cheap ad for two very broken arcade cabs: Lady Bug and Berzerk. Online I found quite a few geocities era Berzerk crapmame conversions. Of course I wanted this too, so with a friend I completely gutted the berzerk cab and threw away quite a few of the part. For god’s sake, I even cut two massive holes for car speakers in the thing…

So some time passed and I found BYOAC and arcadelifestyle.net. I saw the proper Berzerk restores and read about the rarity… My heart just sank. I F’d up big time. Turned out this thing was actually incredibly rare and I just destroyed so many parts I could never afford to fix up. Cuss words were had… I got into this massive dilemma. I could never fix up this thing as a kid, and I also could not throw the machine away for obvious reasons. Selling it or posting about it would also be very embarrassing. The cab was put to the back of my parents barn as a nice reminder.

I just dug it out.. Are you ready to see what we are dealing with? You may look away now:



So here we are. I am actually trained and ready to tackle the mistake I made 12 year ago! This time I will fix this machine up and make it shine, as opposed to what my old self ruined. I will not settle for mediocrity.

The plans are as following:

• Use original glass artwork from storage.
• Fully refurbish all the wood and metalwork.
• Put in a rebuilt arcade monitor or low hour RGB scart crt tv.
• JROK BZF game board.
• New wire loom, Meanwell PSU, and LED lighting.
• Source original optical joystick.
• Put vinyl overlay on control panel, source reproduction if the results are not satisfactory.

And last but not least:
I would like to ask all of you for input on the above. I will spend all winter gathering the parts and want to do this cab justice. No compromises!

[Mike A]

I think I love you.

These old games need to be saved.

I will try to source an original stick for you.

I am still on the lookout for the stick for ladybug.

Your Ladybug cab is awesome.

If I can find a stick I will pay for it and ship it to you.

[jennifer]

 

[yotsuya]

Arcade Adventures sells a repro Bat Joystick handle. Good luck finding the base!

https://www.arcadeadventures.com/berzerk-joystick-handle-reproduction/


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[mourix]

Thank you for the replies
 
I had to sell the Ladybug in order to make space at my parents' for the next cab, but it went to a game corner in a shop that sells refurbished vintage decorations. I preferred that over putting it back into a damp barn again...

The Berzerk actually comes with a whole bunch of extra parts being hidden in storage. From memory, I stored the back panel, marquee, bezel glass, bezel, and inside/back/control panel and even some metalwork. At some point I will do a whole analysis.

The definite omissions are the pcb stack, monitor and monitor mounts. I have already sourced a <2000 working hours 19" Philips curved crt, but unfortunately the JROK board seems to be out of stock and Arcadeshop does not ship internationally for now.

For the joystick I struck gold last year. This whole thing was 30 euros shipped:


I also found the original control panel:


My plan is to try to get the paint off the original panel, and put a high quality print on the painted part only so the metal still shows. I prefer the white parts in the originals over the metal repro. If it does not turn out as I imagine, I'll get the repro. What do you think?

[yotsuya]

Nice score on that control panel!


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[mourix]

I also got lucky on this Philips 21PT1654 CRT from the year 2000. It got less than 2000 hours on it and is crazy bright. Over RGB scart I'm sure it will do Berzerk justice.  This is the image before ANY geometry adjustments:


This post does kinda sum up all my part gatherings so far. Prepare this thread to slowly trickle with new parts until the weather gets good enough for woodwork around april/may

[mourix]

I got most of the part list worked out but the JROK Berzerk/Frenzy board seems unobtainium. Does anyone know if those will ever be made again?

At this point I'm tempted to go for a MiSTer FPGA system with jamma rgb adapter. It has decent cores for Berzerk and Frenzy too

[mourix]

We're going all in, boysss Got one of the final stocked repro control panels on the way to Europe.

Only the last few with "shelf wear" were left, but Highscoresaves was quick to reply with pics that looked good enough for me.

[yotsuya]

We're going all in, boysss Got one of the final stocked repro control panels on the way to Europe.

Only the last few with "shelf wear" were left, but Highscoresaves was quick to reply with pics that looked good enough for me.

Joe sells quality stuff - even the shelf wear item would be as good as freshly made. You’ll be quite happy. :cheers


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[mourix]

Yotsuya was right. There is literally one single scratch on top of the thing and it looks great. Can't wait to update here once I get new buttons to put it all together

[mourix]

Restoration is on the way! Got the barn and machine cleaned, and have disassembled farther.



Scanned/restored up the coin door decal already and ordered a print. Attached is a 300DPI PNG of the decal for you guys. The ones for sale online are surprisingly inaccurate



Next up is respraying all the metal pieces and fixing the stereo speaker holes that 14 year old mourix added...

[yotsuya]

Looking good!


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[Mike A]

This thread makes me all happy inside.

[mourix]

Collected all the metal pieces off the machine and storage. Lots of painting to do the next week.



Most of the metalwork got this weird bubble texture from factory. I am gonna use Hammerite matte black rust covering paint to preserve it as much as i can.

[mourix]

The imperfections could not really be avoided, but all the big metalwork came out well with textures mostly intact

[javeryh]

Looks great so far.  The coin door is really going to look cool with that decal.