Moon Alien Restoration Project

[German Garage Games]

HELLO

Hello everybody Dennis & Noah here.
A father and son duo that develops and releases Nintendo Nes homebrews, visits F1 races and conventions
I'm Dutch my wife has French roots so it's only natural that we immigrated to Germany
Anyway.. Here in Germany there is a website company that imports containers from the USA ( and the rest of the world ) with old electronics.
My wife found the website when she was looking for a jukebox. I saw that it also sold arcades so i looked at the website from time to time.

MOON ALIEN
Most of the time the cabinets are crazy expensive but a month ago they had massive discounts.
One of the cabinets caught my eye. Moon Alien for 250.
I could pick up the arcade, but i just visited Gamescom with my son and was not looking forward to driving for hours again.
So i had it delivered at our house for 189. So 439 euro damage in total.

WHAT ARE WE WORKING WITH

Well just take a look at the pictures.
We got the original marque , bezel and a control panel from table model it seems.
It was sold as a working model and we saw pictures of it running on the website. But when we turned it on for the first time.
BANG ! a loud bang and smoke. The PSU board smoked liked it was on fire.
So instead of a cleaning and wood repair , what we love to do. We seem to have gotten a full repair on our hands.
That also bought us here, because we found the old forum post from Jon A Tron about his moon alien project.

WE COULD USE SOME HELP

We are noobs when it comes to arcade electronics so we could use some help from this community.
Tomorrow we will post some pictures of the PSU and the inside of the cabinet.
So hopefully people can tell us what the next best step will be.

 

[69er]

A bang ! Not a happy start …
When acquiring machines from another country a mis-match in supply voltage may need attention?
Also transport in hot days with cool nights could encourage condensation to develop .
A hair drier all around the monitor is a good idea get it acclimatised or warm/dry where high voltage can leak off in damp areas,

Smoke may make the damage easy to locate however but you need check all the voltages are ok before you power up again.

 

[Bods]

Welcome Guys,

That's good point Norman, when they showed it working did they use a Stepdown Transformer?

Thought it was these you must be talking about, I was looking at some of the machines they had last year


https://www.blackforest-warehouse.d...utsu-Moon-Alien-Arcade-Videospielautomat.html

They have the remains of a Championship Sprint cab I see, you'd need a lot of parts for that as it's completely stripped and made LCD Multicab but a reasonable shell is a good start

 

[Phils Arcade]

Welcome to the club.

Yeah, not a great start, but hopefully a lot can be learned when this kind of thing happens.

Pics of the inside would help a lot, the actual arcade board, or is it a multi set to boot to a single game.
If the power supply has completely blown, might be worth replacing with a more modern switcher, though might need an adaptor depending on the board itself.

Lots to learn and enjoy in this hobby, but can be an expensive one as well.

Good luck and keep us all informed.

 

[German Garage Games]

Thanks for the support so far everybody.
Here are pictures of the TV, PSU, Board etc.

Fun Fact : when we opened the back we found about 10 old German Marks and a Dog Bone !?
Crazy to find that inside a cabinet

The cabinet has a European power plug. The C12 blew up on the PSU.
So hope these pictures give some clues about what's going on. This is a European power supply cabinet right ?

My son is 15 years old and a didn't grew up with big CRT televisions.
We stripped the cabinet and to my surprise he wanted to remove the monitor. DON'T TOUCH THAT !!
You will get a shocked. No i won't he said, the power is not plugged in. YES you will..
Generation gap there

So anyway could some experienced members give a idea of what happened and how to go from here .
AND some tips and links or youtube video's about starting with multi meters and working on arcade electronics.
Thanks.

 

[Bods]

Welcome to the club.

Yeah, not a great start, but hopefully a lot can be learned when this kind of thing happens.

Pics of the inside would help a lot, the actual arcade board, or is it a multi set to boot to a single game.
If the power supply has completely blown, might be worth replacing with a more modern switcher, though might need an adaptor depending on the board itself.

Lots to learn and enjoy in this hobby, but can be an expensive one as well.

Good luck and keep us all informed.

Pictures in my link to the cab though bit small to see properly and no PSU pics but original board and CRT screen.

The cab looks like real wood, Home Made? or maybe one of those originally build wooden cabs with this game fitted as it's similar to original

 

[TheDaddy]

Ah the big bang , But did you use a stepdown transformer ?? If you imported this from USA it will be 110v and isn't Germany 230v ?? I am not 100% here but that was my first though. That being the case you have chucked 120v more juice than it wants

Get some pics up and lets see the damage, See what we can figure out.

Dave.

 

[big10p]

Pictures in my link to the cab though bit small to see properly and no PSU pics but original board and CRT screen.

The cab looks like real wood, Home Made? or maybe one of those originally build wooden cabs with this game fitted as it's similar to original

The control panel looks like one from a Moon Alien cocktail.

 

[Bods]

The control panel looks like one from a Moon Alien cocktail.

Exactly, it's from Cocktail and CP Angle is wrong but made to fit Cocktail Panel in, a lot of questions of the whole cab though

 

[Phils Arcade]

Exactly, it's from Cocktail and CP Angle is wrong but made to fit Cocktail Panel in, a lot of questions of the whole cab though

Bit of a mish mash of parts, but made into something that works, or at least did

As long as the end user is happy, that's the main thing.

 

[German Garage Games]

Pictures in my link to the cab though bit small to see properly and no PSU pics but original board and CRT screen.

The cab looks like real wood, Home Made? or maybe one of those originally build wooden cabs with this game fitted as it's similar to original

The second post in this thread still has to be approved by a moderator. There are more pictures there. This cabinet is wood build with October 1980 stamps all over the wood parts.

 

[German Garage Games]

Bit of a mish mash of parts, but made into something that works, or at least did

As long as the end user is happy, that's the main thing.

Posted 10 more pictures in this thread that still have to be approved by a moderator. The control panel is indeed from a cocktail moon alien 2.
The cabinet is made of wood with October 1980 stamps all over the wooden parts.
Inside was a part2 moon alien instruction manual AND some Moon Cresta operator papers.
Google tells me moon alien is from 1979 and moon cresta is from 1980.
The game board has 1980 on the print.

So our guess is Moon alien 2 board ( that also has moon alien on the title screen and not 2 ? ) with the part 2 cocktail control panel.
Moon alien 1 bezel and marque in a all wood moon cresta 1980 cabinet ?

 

[Bods]

Posted 10 more pictures in this thread that still have to be approved by a moderator. The control panel is indeed from a cocktail moon alien 2.
The cabinet is made of wood with October 1980 stamps all over the wooden parts.
Inside was a part2 moon alien instruction manual AND some Moon Cresta operator papers.
Google tells me moon alien is from 1979 and moon cresta is from 1980.
The game board has 1980 on the print.

So our guess is Moon alien 2 board ( that also has moon alien on the title screen and not 2 ? ) with the part 2 cocktail control panel.
Moon alien 1 bezel and marque in a all wood moon cresta 1980 cabinet ?

So we could say this one wasn't an imported cab then with german marks inside. thats good as Its places like Germany I've seen Solid Wooden cabs before online so that's great news it's got 1980 on it and original old cab

Check whats on side of the Transformer as that should tell you the input voltage and output, hopefully is says 220-230v and that's wired or take a close up photo

 

[Bods]

Old thread on a Project one

https://www.ukvac.com/forum/threads/nichibutsu-moon-alien-project.47788/

 

[German Garage Games]

So we could say this one wasn't an imported cab then with german marks inside. thats good as Its places like Germany I've seen Solid Wooden cabs before online so that's great news it's got 1980 on it and original old cab

Check whats on side of the Transformer as that should tell you the input voltage and output, hopefully is says 220-230v and that's wired or take a close up photo
View attachment 44773

 

[Bods]

Monitors often 120v thats fine

Does it have a label on the other side of that Transformer? assume that wire from other side is going to power the monitor 120V

Looks pretty original in there so I think it's just bad look something has decided to blow, it does happen, one guy was selling a Buggy Boy cab and he powered it up, left it on and said the Power supply set on fire, sometimes things just go like monitors i've switched on go bang, used to repair IBM Monitors, they were terrible for blowing up, we used to wind the power up on a variac so could turn down when you see smoke before they had chance to go bang in ya face

 

[German Garage Games]

Monitors often 120v thats fine

Does it have a label on the other side of that Transformer? assume that wire from other side is going to power the monitor 120V

Looks pretty original in there so I think it's just bad look something has decided to blow, it does happen, one guy was selling a Buggy Boy cab and he powered it up, left it on and said the Power supply set on fire, sometimes things just go like monitors i've switched on go bang, used to repair IBM Monitors, they were terrible for blowing up, we used to wind the power up on a variac so could turn down when you see smoke before they had chance to go bang in ya face

I believe the label on the other side was the same. have to check again.
Found it surprising that the Monitor was made in Canada btw.



The C12 from the Nichibutsu MB-40 power supply blew up. No idea how to figure out what to replace that with .
Can any body help ?

 

[Bods]

https://www.robotron-2084.co.uk/hardware/boardset/nichibutsu-rolling-crashmoon-base-2-in-1-boardset

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/226291355955

 

[German Garage Games]

Update : removed the capacitor
Seems to be an 4.7uf 35 volt , will search eBay for replacement.

 

[Shipwreck Arcade]

HELLO

Hello everybody Dennis & Noah here.
A father and son duo that develops and releases Nintendo Nes homebrews, visits F1 races and conventions
I'm Dutch my wife has French roots so it's only natural that we immigrated to Germany
Anyway.. Here in Germany there is a website company that imports containers from the USA ( and the rest of the world ) with old electronics.
My wife found the website when she was looking for a jukebox. I saw that it also sold arcades so i looked at the website from time to time.

MOON ALIEN
Most of the time the cabinets are crazy expensive but a month ago they had massive discounts.
One of the cabinets caught my eye. Moon Alien for 250.
I could pick up the arcade, but i just visited Gamescom with my son and was not looking forward to driving for hours again.
So i had it delivered at our house for 189. So 439 euro damage in total.

WHAT ARE WE WORKING WITH

Well just take a look at the pictures.
We got the original marque , bezel and a control panel from table model it seems.
It was sold as a working model and we saw pictures of it running on the website. But when we turned it on for the first time.
BANG ! a loud bang and smoke. The PSU board smoked liked it was on fire.
So instead of a cleaning and wood repair , what we love to do. We seem to have gotten a full repair on our hands.
That also bought us here, because we found the old forum post from Jon A Tron about his moon alien project.

WE COULD USE SOME HELP

We are noobs when it comes to arcade electronics so we could use some help from this community.
Tomorrow we will post some pictures of the PSU and the inside of the cabinet.
So hopefully people can tell us what the next best step will be.


View attachment 44733View attachment 44734View attachment 44735

I like the look of that cab, very groovy. Suits the game. Bargain as well, hopefully you'll get it up and running with no more 'bangs!'