The restoration of a 1980's Williams Defender arcade machine
The boards…
I’ve been a bit quiet about this one, as I’ve struggling on and trying to get things working, but what I thought was going to be the easiest bit of the restoration (*namely getting the boards themselves to work) actually seems to be the hardest by far!
The two main boards, namely the ROM board (stored copy of the game and diagnostic code) and CPU board (the brain) seem to have been manufactured to self-destruct over time and have either been cannibalised for their parts, and/or left for dead.
That combined with the way that eBay sellers describe them, namely “From a working machine” = not working, “May work” = tested and not working, “Good condition but study the pictures carefully” = parts missing so definitely not working, the boards I have are proving a challenge to get working.
Here’s my current contenders for getting working – 3 Red ROM sets and 3 early series CPU boards 🙂
and my current work in progress set doing at least _something_
So now the plan is to get a working set and try and debug some of the non-working ones – or to train myself with a logic probe to see what’s going on!
More as I find out….
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