Gottlieb Exterminator

[P-Man]

hi all,

Here's my Exterminator story... it spans 15 years, so hold tight

When i first started collecting arcade machines back in 1997, one of my primary aims was to get hold of one of my childhood favourite machines, Exterminator by Gottlieb and have it playable in my lounge. 15 years later and i have managed to make this a reality!

Exterminator is not a common game, it is an estimate, but i believe less than 500 were made, maybe as few as 300. I played this game BITD in Caister, near Great Yarmouth in a caravan park. Loved the sh*t out of it i did. It did one season, maybe two, then just dissappeared, i never saw the game again...

In about 1998 or so (not sure) Karl Doe put me onto a guy who was selling an Exterminator mini cabinet of some kind... It turned out to be a desktop machine that was custom-made for the developers of the Amiga and Atari ST home conversions. It contained an original wiring harness, original pcb set, original joysticks and a CPO applied to the top of a roughly made black-ash cabinet. It was intended to have a commodore amiga monitor sat on top of it, but was essentially fully playable. At the time i had no room for the whole thing, so i had to remove the pcbset and harness and strip it down. At least i was able to play Exterminator in my 26" jamma cabinet in my bedroom now! (the control panel fit nicely into the jamma-drawer of my cabinet and worked great.

While in Florida in 2001 i was at an operators warehouse and spotted one... much to my astonishment! It was in rough shape, and had the wrong joysticks on it. The Op wanted $900 for it as-is... waaaaay too rich for my blood so i had to leave it. My US trip that year was pretty epic and i found a colelctor in Texas that i visited also had one, but there was no way he was selling it to me. His machine had seized sticks so the game just didn't play correctly, but he wasn't aware this was a problem. (more on this later). When i got home, another friend in Chicago says he knew of a home use only Exterminator that was available for $900.. too rich for my blood once again.

About a year later the florida machine turned up on eBay working, and for $900. The guy kept listing it for about 6 months and it never sold. The next thing i heard was that it had turned up at an auction in Tennessee where it went for $200. The new buyer was somewhere on the west coast of the states. A few years pass and it appears on ebay for a reasonable sum. No new work had been carried out on it, it still had the wrong sticks, and still had the monitor with Xenophobe burn. I decided this was my chance for a restoration project, seeing as another machine just hadn't turned up anywhere else affordable. The guy was out on some little island off the coast, it was a right pain in the ass getting a friend to pick it up. I had it shipped across the states to new jersey where it stayed in a friends garage for another little while. Eventually I had a container full of games shipped from Philadelphia to the UK, and i got my friend to bring the machine to loading point where we hurriedly stuffed it into the container. This was the first time i had seen it since 2001, it was soft-wrapped, and we didn't have time to plug it in or look at it...

So off it went, and it arrived a number of weeks later in the UK... I had it in the workshop, and i could then see just how rough it was... It was going to be a long restore. I fired it up on 110v and saw that it worked, but knew it was unplayable because of the goofy joysticks. I took a photo though!

You can see the artwork on the front was cleaned with some sort of cleaning fluid and the art just dissapeared and left streaks where it was left to sit.. such a shame.. so.. a lot of work to do...

Because this was a personal machine that was a keeper, i put it to the back of the priority list, and just dealt with the tens of other machines i had to shift. The machine was not powered up again, and eventually got wrapped up and put into a lockup in about 2005? It came out of the lockup after a year or so and Rav was kindly looking after it for me with his stuff until earlier this year (2012).

Exterminator #2

Fast forward to mid-late 2011 and a guy from Blackpool appears on the forum looking for offers on an Exterminator that he had. He said he hadn't plugged it in, but it was working when stored.. After he was pointed towards me as the guy that was after Exterminator stuff, i made him an offer. He said he already had several offers more than double my offer. Although the machine looked nice, i couldn't justify the cost or the time to get it picked up etc so i told him he should take either of his offers, i couldn't improve on mine.




So early 2012 rolls in and lo and behold, the very same machine turns up on ebay. It looks like the offers he had fell through or weren't real I ended up winning the auction and this made me very happy. But now i had two machines...




Certain life events meant that i was suddenly blessed with space in my house, which meant i had the space to work on the machines properly. I got Martin to gather up a bunch of machines for me, and one dark evening my lounge went from no machines to 5 uprights. And so the work begins....




So there's the backstory, the posts to follow will be about the work i've done on them both in the past few weeks.

 

[tymawrcymru]

enjoyed that ... keep it coming ....

 

[Macro]

sounds like a mod for head to head extermination coming up ...

 

[strykr]

Played this game on southend seafront quite a few times back in the day, a fun game, and one of the last upright dedicated cabinets I remember seeing in amongst all the jamma cabs.
Quite the saga P man, look forward to more.

 

[smidsy]

Great story! Can't wait to hear more.

Craig

 

[forcefulfil]

Indeed great read,

I did play this in Blackpool seafront arcade,dunno which one mind but deffo in blackpool.

I had a phobia with cockroaches and feking hated playing it YUK!

Phil

 

[d-type]

I always thought Exterminator was a rip of Centipede, probably because I had a VIC-20 game of the same name, which was a Centi clone.

However, I just did a KLOV look-up on it and it's nothing like Centi - it actually looks like a really original and cool game!

There's a short video of it in action, here:

http://www.gamesdbase.com/game/commodore-vic-20/exterminator.aspx

D-T

 

[guddler]

I think we need to get the chance to play one in the flesh (hint, hint!).

I've honestly spent all these years thinking it was a vector game. No idea why! Phil's thought it was a centi clone. Wonder how many other people have been thinking all this time that it was something that it wasn't??!!

guddler2012-04-07 01:41:20

 

[P-Man]

Exterminator #1




So, After getting the beast into my lounge, i had better start to fix it up eh? Here it is:

First of all, i had to convert it to 240v as i didnt have a decent stepdown for running it, and ultimately i wanted to run it on 220v anyway. Thinking i might be lucky, i looked for a voltage selection plug on the transformer assembly. Bingo, there was one there, but how was it wired. Fortunately he manual for this machine is available as a PDF online, so i got the old voltage plug and cut/spliced the wires to make it a 220v plug. Before plugging the sucker in, i saw that this machine uses a HiTron switcher. Knowing what i do about switchers in dedicated cabs, the switcher may well be running off the line voltage and not the transformed voltage. Good job i checked, because when i looked at the switcher, it quite specifically said 110v. Undeterred i opened it up, expecting to find a wire post switch, et voila, there was one to change the supply to 220v...




Now, backflipper was round my house at the time, so we switched it on to see what happened, fortunately, the game fired up! The audio was a bit crappy, and the joysticks were wrong, but it coined up and played. We played a game or so as best we could with the crappy joysticks, then all of a sudden BANG! crackle fizz.... the game was still playing, but there was the exploding sound and lots of smoke.. i ran for the power switch and killed it... oh well, it was good while it lasted..




That HiTron power supply was the source of all the commotion, so i pulled it out and opened it up on the bench... and could see what was the problem right away :

It was a polystyrene 0.1uf cap that had blown its guts out everywhere. I got some ordered, but in the meantime i removed one from Exterminator #2 psu to get this going for now. Put in the replacement and the psu was back in action, so too was the game.




The sound was really odd though, it sounded like a blown speaker. So i whipped off the front speaker grille and bracket and set those aside for respraying. We had a couple of days of sun and i managed to get those resprayed nice. I had another speaker and i hooked it up, nope, still sounded crappy, must be the amp or the pcb... The audio amp pcb had had the amplifer (TDA2002) replaced, and the previous bodger hadn't bothered to put the heat sink back on it... Evidence that someone else had tried to fix the fault but was unsuccesful. I swapped the small audio amp pcb over with Exterminator #2 anyway and sure enough the audio was still sh*te! whats going on here then? so i swapped over the sound board, no difference... so i swapped over the aux sound board, no difference... this was getting annoying... At this point i had my own exterminator pcb set on my bench and had the pcbs out of the cabinet to track it further. On the bench i found that the sound board was the culprit, but piggybacking the op-amps with a good one did not clear up the crackly distortion and low volume as you'd normally expect. One thing i did notice was that there was no speech along with this cracklyness. Anyhow, after much head scratching i looked at the opamps with my scope, and found that the -12v supply was dead... I was runnign this from my jamma setup so i just had -5v connected. Everything works with it, but the volume is lower. Anyhow, the -5v was not firing up at all. Looked like the -12v rail was shorted.. suspecting the opamps i clipped legs but still the short remained. Finally i found a shorted plastic capacitor GRRR. replaced it with a tantalum and the board now had speech and full sound!




So i re-installed the pcbs into the cabinet thinking that i had the problem solved, it was not to be. The distorted crap was still there. Knowing there wasn't a short on the -12v rail anymore, i measured the -12v on the psu, yup, it was dead, the short must have killed the psu voltage long ago anyhow.




So out comes the psu once more to hunt for the missing -12v. I made up an IEC to molex connector to supply the 240vAC on my bench so i could poke at it to fix it. V4 was the -12v pins on the output connector, reading about -1v. I followed the traces back and as is common with a lot of switcher designs the smaller <1amp voltage rails are often created with a regular old school linear regulator inside the switcher box. Here was no exception, they had used a 7812 (positive 12v) regulator to create the -12v by wiring it in reverse.

Anyway, its likely this thing was just toast being shorted for so long so i pulled it and put in a new one. Bingo, the -12v (V4) voltage was back online.




I put it back in the cabinet, and i got speech as well as full sounds, alright! back in business, the games working properly now...




Onto the joysticks...

 

[P-Man]

Now to making the game playable again. This cabinet had unfortunately had the correct joysticks removed, along with their 'screen interface pcb' which deals with the rotary encoders. What had been put in their place were simply some 8-way sticks with fire buttons, this means you have no rotary control in the game at all, making it unplayable.

I can't think what would have possessed someone to remove the correct gear and put in such crappy sticks. Apart from perhaps the knowledge that the sticks are complete unobtanium. They threw something in there that sortof worked.. hmm... The panel is dusty and faded, but will clean up ok with greased Lightening and some elbow grease.

On the reverse you can see the pcb had been unplugged and the conenctor just left dangling there

Anyway, i am very fortunate to have a whole spare control panel from my prototype machine that came from the games developers. The sticks are almost like new, so i'm not actually short of a pair of unobtainable sticks. I have however put those onto Exterminator #2, so i took the sticks off of #2 and started the process of stripping them down because they were completely seized. Unfortunately the design of these sticks is not brilliant, sure it was enough for a couple of years of abuse in an arcade, but without lubrication, as i have found, the sticks seize up completely. The machine i saw in texas had completely seized sticks too, i'm not surprised really.

Anyhow, I stripped the pair of sticks that came off #2 and after a lot of cleaning, copper grease, hammers and stuff, i managed to free the grommet off the sticks and added a stainless washer in the area where it wore and seized up. I now had a pair of sticks that were useable, but it did take several days of labour as i was doing all 4 sticks i had at the same time. One of the fire buttons on the top of the sticks was also just not working properly so that had to be replaced too, all fiddley work.

Now, i was given a NOS CPO for this game by a good friend in Chicago many moons ago (i think in 2005). What struck me was that the CPO was orange... All the cabinets I had seen to that point had yellow CPO's, and knowing where my friend got al ot of his artwork stash (from the factories themselves) i wondered if he had got an early/late run CPO or one from a a colour test? Seeing as i had 3 CP's in front of me, all with pretty much the same yellow colour moreorless. Well, i was fairly convinced that the CPO should be yellow for all these years, but look what i found under the metal plates that the joysticks mounted to :

Bearing in mind, the sales flyer for this game shows an early prototype that doesn't even have a CPO at all, so there is no reference for it. Unmistakingly Orange... Both control panels showthis Orange to be the true colour, and when you think about it, the rest of the cab is flourescent orange.. The reason i had stuck with the yellow thinking was because yellow is also the colour of the siding, as well as the marquee... Anyhow. i will apply the CPO to #2 when i pick it up in a weeks time.

The metal plates were in horrendous condition :

The ones from #2 were about as bad. The underside of the plates shows that they should really have a standard engineering 'blue' finish. That finish is guaranteed for about 3 years, these have done so much more. However, because of the deep rust, even with some ironman sanding :

I just could not get a finish that would not show the pitting. I decided not to bother with the time out having them re-made or having them re-finished and decided to spray them black as i had done the grille and bracket already. They came out nice, a million times better than they were thats for sure. I bolted everything back together and couldn't wait to try out the game with the right sticks:

I also removed all the buttons, cleaned them out so they are all back to having a nice action. Once the panel was in the game i discovered the excessive wear on the microswitches on the sticks was affecting the gameplay so much it needed addressing. Fortunately the ugly sticks i removed were full of Cherry microswitches, so after a lot of swapping about, i vastly improved the playing action of these sticks. The fire button on the right stick was shot, so i had to replace that in-situ as well.

So there we have it... Exterminator #1 has travelled a long way in its lifetime, but finally it can be played as it was intended, even if its not the prettiest of cabs, its had a hard life!

.

And so, my post concludes....

I'll be bringing this machine to the South Coast Slam where you can play it if you wish, with the correct joysticks! Its impossible to play the game properly in MAME, play the real thing!

Do you fancy owning it? I now have two Exterminators and thats just greedy, therefore i am selling this one.. If you fancy giving it a home, then please let me know, i'm open to any offers at all, i dont have the room to have two machines in my lounge.

FOR SALE!

 

[strykr]

Great work P-man, and an interesting read, I love this stuff! Psyched that your bringing this to the Slam also! It's been many many a year since I played one of these!

 

[d-type]

Good read!

Regarding sticks, here's what it says on KLOV:

MiscellaneousThere appears to be two ROM sets for this game. The first which I call original follows the game playing methods described in the literature and the control panelcabinet instructions. The other set allows the player to fire the laser while in mid air, instead of moving to the edge of the screen. While this eliminates the need for rotary joysticks, it ruins the game play making it far too easy. Instead of having to pound the ground enemies, grab the flying enemies or swatting the wasp away, the player may use the laser on everything, thus making the game yet another bland shooter. I have only seen one or two machines play like this one still had the rotary sticks, but, obviously, these were not used the other had bog standard joysticks with fire buttons on top.

 

[P-Man]

Yes, i was the one that wrote the text in the KLOV entry in about 2001 (and firstly in 1997!). I had come to this conclusion based on seeing the machine in florida (#1) with the standard sticks with fire buttons plus the description of the game in Texas which had rigid sticks (whcih i now know were just seized). I can't remember if i played the machine in Texas, but the owner described to me how he played it as being just a laser shooting game, no rotary action... I couldn't put together how/why an operator had put normal sticks on the game unless the game code allowed for this...

It was a long time ago, and since then i have seen no evidence of two romsets... And my memory is so hazy of the trip to Texas, i can't remember what it played like if i even did play it at all. I wrote the text on Klov, so maybe the texas machine was modified, but who knows now.

No idea how to change klov these days, so the text remains.