......... phew............
What an awesome weekend! Very stressed Friday afternoon/evening and a bit on Saturday morning but lots to laugh about looking back. Amazing event, great turnout, great to talk to loads of members and make some new friends.
Best comedy moment for us was TRON.......
Anyone who's into arcade collecting etc knows that games like Star Wars, GORF, TRON, Pole Position, Asteroids etc can be some of the most flaky games on the planet to get working let alone run for 2 days straight right.
We'd burn tested every cab that was coming for the last 2 weeks before carefully packing down cables and loading onto the truck (that blocked the road outside the unit btw).
We started to fire things up Saturday morning and got to TRON which wouldn't start up. Dammit!!!!!
DaveO stuck his head around the back and kindly offered me some out of order flyers and then said what's up? So he started to look into the cab and found that the switcher was getting power and giving out +5, +12 etc as should and was going to the MCR adaptor board and getting nowhere else...
So we left it for the day.
Come to 6pm and the public gets chucked out and we're itching to take screwdrivers, soldering irons etc to the thing to get it going.
Dave proceeds to check parts, trace wiring etc and we can't figure out whats wrong...
I say, "when I popped the cables out, one had got twisted around some other wires in transit so it could be i've dislodged a feed or something".... more toiling over power brick.
Eventually we turn our attention to why the monitor isn't coming on either and then Dave says, what about the lights etc - well, nothing at all is working.
I stand up to scour the back light behind the monitor and without really looking for it notice the dust on the top of the machine and an obscure looking indentation....
Have you guessed what was wrong at this point.....?
The obscure indentation - when I stood on tips of my toes turns out to be "the secret ON button".
Me: "Dave, I think I might know what the problem is"
Dave: "Whats that?"
..... click .....
TRON lives!
A good giggle later and we're happy its working but gutted for the visitors on Saturday who didn't get the chance.
So the moral of the story is..... you need someone Oliver's height to spot hidden switches on cabs on your crew!
That or get your base technician not to turn them off like that (we just throw the isolator switches generally).
Much love was given to the game on day 2 for sure.
Hehehe. Hope everyone had a great weekend and enjoyed the event. My Mrs wants an Austin Powers pinball now but only if it comes with all the tent and lights and music.
Andy has taken tons of pictures and I noticed a few of the "lesser seen James playing a game" shots (maybe that's a competition in future - count how many games I actually get to play at an event lol).
I've shot video which had guest commentators, it'll emerge later this week, i've to go back to day job land now for a few days.
To slam 2015!!!!
RGP2014-04-22 00:42:06
