Greetings programs!
I finally got some miscellaneous projects (repairing my MultiJAMMA, rewiring and repairing Joust, a pair of multicabs, resurrecting a dead PC rig for a MAME project) out of the way, so it is time to get to work on a Tron cabinet that I picked up several years ago and has been sitting, silently and empty, beside my desk. In that time, I have haphazardly assembled most of the hardware and parts that I need and the artwork is available, so it is time to get down to it.
The cabinet itself was gutted, with partially painted-over/scratched side art, mandatory security bar holes and assorted nicks and scrapes. The good news is that the shroud is in decent shape (nick in one part of the artwork) and the translite is intact.

Not long after I acquired the cab, I happened upon a box of misc tron cabinet parts on eBay. This included a pair of control panels (one populated, sans handle, one not), a spare lower marquee and a spare spinner assembly.

A long while later, well before RandyT came out with his
pretty new Tron handles, I came across an eBay auction for an "unknown" (it was Satan's Hollow) CP that happened to have a beautiful blue Tron handle on it. I bought the panel cheap, waited a LOOOONG time for the seller to ship it, but ended up with a nice handle with no cracks.

Somewhere along the way I managed to pick up bits and pieces of the main boardset -- 3 Super CPUs, 2 Video, 1 Super Sound IO (enough to make one complete boardset) and a set of raggedy interconnect cables.


On both optical boards, the 74LS491 chips had splintered to shreds and one of the traces was broken. It took me a while and I had almost given up hope until I saw a
post on CGCC about wysiwyg's work on his
new quadrature decoder-counter board. That gave me some hope, but also spurred me into a more active search for replacement chips. I had been through all of the
vendors in the BYOAC wiki, but went through them again, just in case. It was a good thing I did, because
ArcadeComponents.com (run by BYOACer channelmaniac) had what I needed (along with some 6502s that I also needed).
Once I had the replacement chips in my hands, I installed some sockets, fixed the broken trace and replaced the electrolytics on the optical boards.

I also had an MCR switcher adapter lying around that I had ordered long ago from
ArcadeShop.

Not bad ... I now had most of the parts on hand -- I have spare monitors (although I will probably order a new one for this project) and was just missing a wiring harness and amplifier board.
I had been completely unsuccessful in getting my hands on a Tron wiring harness and most of my WTB posts resulted in laughter and "I need one too" responses. I started assembling a list of the connectors that I would need and tried to source them (the only vendor who had everything was Bob Roberts). Then, last week, I heard from tester007 (CGCC, KLOV, CoinOpSpace) who pointed me to vintagegamer, who had a partially-clipped harness from a KICK cabinet that he was parting out. Close enough for me.

It needs to be modified and some connectors need to be changed out, but it is in good shape and is a good place to start.
While the cabinet needs a bunch of work (stripping, filling, painting, etc.), that will have to wait until the weather improves because I don't have space in my little workshop and don't have a garage.
Which brings me to my projects for this weekend:
- Complete unpowered review of the boards
- Check continuity/resistance in the interconnect cables
- Figure out what needs to be changed/added to the wiring harness
- Find a dual amplifier board
- Watch Tron again
"Like the man says, there's no problems, only solutions."