Greetings, and welcome to

an LGR thing about Missile Command!

And in particular it is my version

of Missile Command that I have here:

the Cabaret Cabinet Edition by Atari in 1980.

Now, this was my first arcade machine

that I have ever bought.

And as of now, it's still the only one

that I own, but yeah, it's awesome.

It's an all-time classic,

one of my favorites,

and it's the Cabaret Cabinet Edition.

You know, it's a little bit shorter

but still, you know, more or less full-sized.

Totally playable, and it has these

really cool wood grain on the sides,

and dude, it's just a really awesome cabinet.

I did a video about it when I bought it

in the summer of 2019, so you can see that

if you'd like to see a little bit more

of just my overview of the cabinet,

how I got it, and what had been done to it to fix it up.

The trackball problems

and some of the board and monitor issues that I had.

It was pretty much all sorted when I got it

but there were still some things

about this particular cabinet that

I wanted to improve, and personalize,

and upgrade.

And that's what this video

is going to be about here.

So, as mentioned in the previous video

about this cabinet, there were some things

that I wanted to address

down in the coin door area.

While you can play this on free-play

and that's how it was set when I got it,

I really like the idea of inserting my own

quarters and credits and stuff

into the actual coin slots to play the game.

I don't know, it just, it rings more true

to me as an arcade experience.

But the coin mechanisms themselves

had all sorts of issues,

like they just weren't accepting coins

reliably at all, and the red coin reject buttons

they were kind of sticking, and the door

down in the little bottom right there,

that little flappy thing, was sticking as well.

Not only that, but I had no way of

saving high scores on the machine

and yeah that's an original feature

I suppose you could say,

these machines didn't come with

battery-backed saving or chips that allowed

memory to remember anything after you turned it off

or unplugged it.

It would just lose all your high scores.

But there are modern ways to get around that,

upgrade this. And that is one of the very first

things that I bought, was this little PCB

from Braze Technologies.

It's called the

Missile Command Multigame and High Score Save Kit.

And really it's just a little board

that goes between the 6502 Processor

on the Missile Command motherboard

and it adds the ability to save high scores

whenever it's powered off.

As well, as a bit of a nice bonus feature

in the fact that it also allows you to

switch over and play Super Missile Attack

whenever you want.

Which is a 1981 enhancement kit,

kind of ROM hack conversion

by General Computer Corporation

just like a more difficult version

of Missile Command. The main reason I wanted it

was the high score saving ability.

Just need to grab the key to the rear of the machine,

there's a wooden door panel thing

that comes off so you can access

the PCB and other internals.

And what we need to get to is

all the way in the bottom left,

like near the very front of the

Missile Command Cabinet, that is the 6502 Processor

and in order to reach that, it's thankfully very easy

to get the boards out of these machines.

Really in my case it's just a matter of

removing the wiring harness and

one screw on the top here,

and then just sliding the entire board forward

and there we go, I can now reach the CPU

and pull that out with a IC Puller.

Yeah look at that!

Classic 6502A Microprocessor, good stuff.

And, yeah, it's just a matter of

lining up the little notch on the board

and the CPU

and plugging it in right here

and then sticking that back into

the Missile Command main PCB

in the same direction as the

CPU would have been before.

That's it! That is all that is involved

with these kinds of upgrade kits

it's a very easy mod and there's a bunch of systems

that Braze Technologies and I'm sure other people

make these for. It's really cool stuff.

And there we go! Got the system powered back on.

So far so good, in fact it looks exactly the same

up to this point, but then if you press

the START 1 and START 2 buttons at the same time

you can switch over to Super Missile Attack

and play that version of the game instead

of the original Missile Command.

You know, again, I really just bought this

for the High Score saving ability

but it's cool to have this option

to play something a little bit different

from time to time, although this is

much more punishing, to just downright difficult

than even the original Missile Command.

So this absolutely destroys me.

Every single time.

Wow.

[Buzzing missile destruction sounds]

If you're like one of those crazy marathon players

and you can play it for infinity

then maybe you'll be able to have more of a challenge

out of this, but for me it's just punishing

so I pretty much never play it.

Anyway, I am happy to have the

High Score saving ability on the

regular Missile Command game.

That was enough for me!

But with that out of the way,

the next order of business was to address

some of the coin door and coin area issues

and just little things that I wanted to tweak

and make better and, [laughs] Actually,

one of the first things that I did

was I dropped 800 quarters into the coin tray.

[laughs] Yeah, okay.

So the reason that I did this was very simple.

When you dropped quarters into this thing

they were just plunking down on this plastic tray

and it sounded stupid.

You know when I was playing arcade games as a kid

I always liked that satisfying sound

of the quarter or the credit just dropping

into the machine, and "clink" it just,

ah, you know, the metallic coins up against coins.

So a quick and easy way to get around that

you know, just make it sound a little more awesome

was to drop a lot of my own quarters in there.

So I just went to the bank,

withdrew some quarters, and put 'em in there.

Yeah, it sounds much more legit now

when dropping quarters in

[satisfying clink]

Yeah, but whatever. That's just a silly thing.

The main real thing that I wanted to address

with this coin door

were the mechanisms themselves.

And as you can see, the little red reject buttons

stick in place, not that there's much reason

to press them in, this machine

doesn't actually reject coins,

but the fact that you could press them

and they got stuck annoyed me.

Anyhow these flappy doors at the bottom

were getting stuck,

and just inserting quarters to begin with

sometimes they would just get stuck

in the coin mechanism.

So I needed to really take it all apart.

And to do that, there are several different

nuts to take off of these bolts

because as far as I could tell,

the coin mechanisms were working okay,

they're just plastic ones,

they weren't metal ones unfortunately

but it's all this metal, and kind of the

rail where the quarters slide through

that seemed to be the problem.

But yeah, once I got this first part off

I was able to get to the red plastic reject buttons

and see what those were about.

[laughs] For one thing they were

incredibly dirty, so that probably had

something to do with it, and then also

the labels that are inside there were different.

That bothered me as well.

I wanted to replace those.

Anyway, continuing with some more of

the mechanism here, and I was able to get

this top part off,

and yeah this thing is bent

in several different spots.

Who knows what happened to it over the years.

And then finally, these little doors at the bottom,

turns out they are screwed into

the front face plate as well.

It's not just the door that comes out,

like this entire front piece comes off with it.

So yeah, that's interesting.

It was very dirty, very grimy.

I figured, yeah, it's probably just crap

getting in the way,

so I took these over to the sink

and gave them a thorough washing.

In fact there's a lot of this machine that could

probably benefit from a thorough washing

but we're going to start here.

And yeah, just a bit of dish soap and warm water

and it's already looking a lot better

and the door is flapping around more freely.

But once it dried I started noticing

there's this kind of rubber degradation.

Maybe it's the kind of plastic or something,

I don't know, but there's a coating on here

that is coming apart.

And I think that's actually what was causing

a good bit of the sticking.

So I pulled off all the chunks that I could

and actually added just a little bit of lubrication,

screwed them back onto the coin door itself

and yeah check it out! The doors are nice

and freely flapping around as they should.

Now that, ah, little things like this

are super satisfying to do

on such a big machine like this.

I don't know why.

Next up were the coin reject button areas

and yeah, [laughs] these were so nasty!

I can't imagine they've ever been cleaned.

So I just took a little cloth, alcohol wipe thing

and swiped away the main junk that was going on.

Years and years of sticky fingers,

coin residue, and who knows what.

And it was not enough.

Absolutely had to bring out a toothbrush

and some isopropyl alcohol and just keep on going

until I got as much of that grime away as I could.

Now as for the red buttons themselves,

I was considering replacing them outright

with some brand new ones,

just to really make it shine

but I realized they weren't quite the

exact same size, even though they seemed to be

online, according to all the websites,

but no, man, they're totally not.

They're a totally different design and size.

And when I put them in there,

they wiggled around, and just didn't feel right at all