Nintendo Radar Scope Cabinet Refresh

[SNESNESCUBE64 | 541]

So over the past month or two, I've been working on a neat cabinet, a Nintendo Radar Scope! I bought it a couple months ago locally, it was sold to me as a red Donkey Kong cabinet. The cabinet was already in excellent shape for being about 40 years old, but was missing most of its innards. The challenge with this was identifying whether or not it was Donkey Kong or Radar Scope, unfortunately it was missing everything but the transformer and the monitor, neither were really good identifiers. Looking more closely at the sticker on the monitor's frame, I could faintly see TRS U, identifying the cabinet as Radarscope. If it was Donkey Kong, it would have been TKG U.

First step of the process was figuring out what worked here. Light fixture and the isolation transformer worked as it should. However, the monitor needed some help. It had sync problems. I just went ahead and recapped the whole monitor as that is always a good idea. After firing it up again, it still didn't have sync. It was the horizontal hold potentiometer ultimately (those nintendo pots are always crusty). Unfortunately I had to craft a new pot based to make what I had on hand work. But it worked great!

After I got the monitor working, it was now time to get everything I needed. The hard part about Radar Scope is a lot of the parts are getting hard to obtain. I sourced a broken board on KLOV, you can read about that repair here. From there I was able to focus on the controls. I ordered everything I needed (including a new coin door since the one on there was not correct) from mikesarcade.com. The challenge here was that the joystick was not like a typical Donkey Kong joystick, no it was some weird one that is kind of hard to find. My solution was to route out grooves suitable for a Donkey Kong style two way joystick. This worked out a lot better than expected, it was also my first time using a router!

Afterwords, it was time to source the artwork. I got the artwork from a company called arcadeartshop.com, a UK based company. They did an excellent job with the repro artwork. It was super close to how the originals were, so I couldn't ask for a better job. I can't recommend them enough. They even expedited my shipping, which was really cool of them. They were worth every penny that I spent.

After all that was set up, it was time to clean up the wiring and route a power switch up to the front. Typically I don't like making modifications to the cabinet, especially if it involves drilling holes into the cabinet. However, it was only two small holes on top of the coin box shroud and I hate trying to reach behind the cabinet for the switch. No harness hackery was required, I simply made a little patch cable that plugged in between the power in and the isolation transformer. In the previous pictures, the coinbox and shroud were actually missing, but I was able to source them without an issue.

After all that was said and done, it was looking super nice. It still could use some touch up work (including the long instruction sticker), but I am going to do that as I am able to.

I want to thank orlandu81 on KLOV, he really guided me through this whole restoration. Without his help, I wouldn't have been able to finish this project. There is more that I did to this cabinet, like install a highscore save kit, but that's diving into the nitty-gritty of this. I wouldn't call this a restore, it still has a lot of its battle scars from being in service. But I am rather proud of what I've done to it.

Edited March 3, 2021 by SNESNESCUBE64

[JamesRobot | 5,801]

Dig it! Nice job.

[croagunk | 798]

Super cool!

[MrWunderful | 2,927]

I applaud your electronics repair skill. Fixing monitors isnt easy.

 

Looks like a fun project though, and a great end result  

 

My only advice is to make sure that toggle is rated for 120v, if its on the primary of the transformer (I cant tell if it is from pics) because those older transformers can have a little bit of in-rush.  
 

If you already considered it, then nevermind!

[SNESNESCUBE64 | 541]

1 hour ago, MrWunderful said:

My only advice is to make sure that toggle is rated for 120v, if its on the primary of the transformer (I cant tell if it is from pics) because those older transformers can have a little bit of in-rush.  

Switch is rated for 125V at 10 amps, it should be fine. Yeah I had to double check as I know these old transformers can be trouble.

I'm not the worlds best at fixing monitors,  a lot of my fixing in that regard is based off previous knowledge (caps are generally bad and nintendo potentiometers suck). But I'm getting better at troubleshooting the more I repair them. 

 

56 minutes ago, ChickenTendas said:

I think I'm going to go ahead and binge-read the rest of your repair logs

 

I have a bunch of em, I try my best to explain how I got to the conclusions. I really try to go into depth to try to teach folk about the electronics and logic when I can. As well as show the troubleshooting process.

Edited March 4, 2021 by SNESNESCUBE64

[Dr. Morbis | 2,089]

Wow, nice job on bringing that back to life!  I've always wanted a red DK for my arcade room, so call me a heathen if you must, but that red cab would not have made it back to it's former life as a Radar Scope if it had fallen into my hands...

[SNESNESCUBE64 | 541]

14 minutes ago, Dr. Morbis said:

Wow, nice job on bringing that back to life!  I've always wanted a red DK for my arcade room, so call me a heathen if you must, but that red cab would not have made it back to it's former life as a Radar Scope if it had fallen into my hands...

It was almost a donkey kong. I have a bunch of stuff for that, and I had actually tracked down a 4 board stack DK and was in the process of making it DK, then I noticed the TRS and said "this is gonna cost me a lot of money..."

This game has grown on me a lot. I spent a good chunk of time playing it, the game gets pretty hectic! I'll get a donkey kong one day, but I was convinced by orlandu81 on klov to do the right thing and make it Radar Scope. I suppose it's neat to have one of the few that wasn't converted to DK. Only thing I know about it is that it came from Minneapolis.

[DarkTone | 985]

Thanks for sharing. 

[Vectrex28 | 366]

I for one believe it's much more interesting to keep it a Radar Scope, as I think oddities like this are way more fun to collect than something everyone and their mother's goldfish knows about like Donkey Kong.

 

But then I'm an idiot that squanders money on shit like a Pioneer Laseractive haha, maybe I should make a writeup outta that haha

[drxandy | 3,225]

Great work man! You did it proper, love seeing the transformation. Super coooool.

[DefaultGen | 5,405]

Do you have a TKG2 Donkey Kong board from that cab? Those alone I think are pretty sweet. I'm also perhaps a heathen who would've kept it converted, especially if it had the right PCB. Either is a cool piece of history though IMO.

[SNESNESCUBE64 | 541]

38 minutes ago, DefaultGen said:

Do you have a TKG2 Donkey Kong board from that cab? Those alone I think are pretty sweet. I'm also perhaps a heathen who would've kept it converted, especially if it had the right PCB. Either is a cool piece of history though IMO.

It's a tkg3, if I ever saw a tkg2 I would scoop it right up. There are actually instructions for converting radarscope boards to donkey kong floating out there, it doesn't take much. From what I understand, some red cabinets were being made at the factory alongside the blue ones, those would have most likely been tkg3 DKs.

Edited March 4, 2021 by SNESNESCUBE64

[Tanooki | 4,934]

You may not call it a restoration, but it is, especially given where it started and ended at.  But perhaps, despite it not actually suffering from it, your accurate wording here would be a rustoration.  It's where you restore an object to working order, but leave the superficial damages in place so that you can feel the age of it and not cover that up.

5+ years ago I did the same style of repair job on a totally beat to crap 1965 AMF Fire truck pedal car I got at a flea market here.  Got it home, put like 10+hours into cleaning, clearing, de-rusting it and getting things nice.  Then accounted for the original parts, started poking around online and found two old employees of the company and sourced the missing original parts, and had them shipped.  I got it back to how it more or less should be, but probably 15% or so of the paint is gone and about that much of the white decals on the red paint.  I left it as is, same with the originally mostly there hard rubber around the wheels too while fixing the rest of those aside from that.  I've since moved on from it, looking to sell it shortly when it warms up.

[SNESNESCUBE64 | 541]

1 hour ago, Tanooki said:

You may not call it a restoration, but it is, especially given where it started and ended at.  But perhaps, despite it not actually suffering from it, your accurate wording here would be a rustoration.  It's where you restore an object to working order, but leave the superficial damages in place so that you can feel the age of it and not cover that up.

I like that word, rustoration. Reason I said refresh is for the same reason you brought up your word. Although, I suppose yours is probably better as I feel if it was a real refresh, I would have had more to work with to start. I feel I could have completely redid the cabinet, but that takes away part of the authenticiy for me. On top of that, it was already in really good shape for being 40 years old, so I feel the work involved would be more than it's worth. 

Ultimately what I did was I sourced the missing parts and fixed up the monitor and boardset.

[Tanooki | 4,934]

Yeah ultimately, as you put it, we both did the same.  Started with some solid bones, I had more than you did, even a few optional parts people paid extra for in the 60s still with it like a working metal wheel and hose on it (you can plug into a garden hose to use) and stand in rear too.  What was missing I went for original like you did, and left it otherwise as is once it was basically right.