very cool! i absolutely love my pole position. i got lucky and my repair wasnt too technical. good luck!

[my pole position II lives!]

my pole position II lives!

at first, i just thought i'd wait for adam's ppclone project to be done, but i finally had some time to spend poking around on the boards... luckily, all my edge connectors were in great shape. i replaced a socket on the CPU board that had corroded pins and cleaned up some acid damage from the battery and she fired up! cosmetically, i did some painting of the coin doors and pedal, cleaned and rebuilt the steering and shifter. i also replaced the cracked t-molding and added more "grippy" no-slip tape to the pedal. now, i just need to make another monitor shroud to replace the ripped/crushed one. i also plan on doing the "bullet proof" mod...... eventually.

all-in-all, very happy to now have a working pole position in my collection! a BIG thanks to all the folks here who gave me pointers when i needed 'em!

we've been recently snowed-in here in louisville the last couple of days, so i've had some time to work on the ali pinball... replaced the connectors, the rectifier board and thanks to my buddy edward who tracked me down a new transformer, the ali LIVES again!!



very fun game!  and, like ali, the play is very fast!

haha i hear ya... yeah, luckily he was good dude; an old guy with integrity.

as far as selling for a 'better' pinball machine, this one is pretty much a pinnacle pinball machine for me... i'm a huge muhammad ali fan, and a collector of ali memorabilia, so this is probably the best ali collector's piece an arcade junkie like me could own.

also, ali is from my home city, louisville, so demand for his stuff is pretty high here which is probably what drove the guy posting the "wanted" ad trying to entice me to sell.  ;)

yeah, power supplies are testing good... looks like a board issue. 

oh well, it will be a good time to do the power modification too.

thanks! yeah, totally lucked out on this one... i'd been using john's craigslist arcade search string and just randomly decided to try the pinball one and saw the ad had just been posted 40 minutes before i searched. i wasn't in the market to get a new pinball, or even a new project since i now have a ms pac man and a pole position in line, but at that price i decided to roll the dice and called the guy. luckily i was the first caller because by the time i was finally able to make the drive to the guy's house the next day, he said that people had been blowing up his phone. "i had no idea these things were so popular" he said. luckily he was a man of his word and didn't just sell it to the first one to show up and honored my "first caller" dibs.

i got even more of a chuckle to look on craigslist and find this last night:



nope. sorry, pal... even at that price, i ain't sellin'! 

yeah, same result in test too. thanks for the input, guys.

[a 1980 stern's ALI]

a 1980 stern's ALI



owned by an elderly gentleman who had the machine about 20 years; he said it worked great until a few years ago when it "just stopped turning on". since then, it's just been sitting taking up space and he was ready for it to go.

got it home, opened it up and saw this:


 
ANOTHER project to the pile!   

thanks! i'm elbows deep in a ms pac man restore currently but i definitely welcome the challenge a pole position may offer! 
i will keep you guys updated.

hi! thanks for the info!

[beatnikdaddio]

xbox = beatnikdaddio

just send me a note that you're from john's arcade, i get a lot of random requests. thanks!

i was at a friend's birthday party saturday and was getting a beer from the cooler in the garage when i saw a familiar silhouette under a tarp in the corner. curiosity got the best of me and i lifted the tarp to see it was a pole position 2 cabinet. while i LOVED PP as a kid, i never added a PP cabinet to my collection because of their notorious dependability issues. i asked our host about it and he said it was his brother's and that he'd stored there about 10 years ago when he went into the military but never picked it back up. "it doesn't work, so he told me to get rid of it a couple years ago, but i've been too lazy... you want it?" he asked. "yes" i said without thinking. i mean, i couldn't beat it at that price, right? 

so i went back and picked it up on sunday. here it is right off the truck... i haven't really had much time but to unload it and power it on, the monitor looks pretty good, nice and bright and i don't see too much of the usual "game over" burn-in i see on most of them. so, ANOTHER project to the pile!

1.)
2.) donkey kong
3.) tron
4.) donkey kong jr.
5.) ms pac man

honorable mention: black widow

doh! forgot to mention my elvis pinball too!

thank you. thankyouverymuch.

my name's jason, i've been in the hobby for about 15 years now... it all started with a donkey kong junior machine i was given by someone who just wanted it gone from their garage and that has snowballed into my desire to collect as many childhood favorites as my basement will fit. over the years, i have double-donkey-kong'd that original DK jr cabinet, restored a (with ESB kit), found and restored a tron sitting out for junk pick-up, an asteroids cabaret, a centipede/millipede/missile command combo and am currently in the middle of a ms pac man restore.

my basement's space is running out and my wife's patience is running thin, but i love my games so it's nice to join-up with another community of like-minded folks.