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Gorf Cabaret

Since my wife and son have never let me forget that we onced owned a Gorf that they enjoyed playing(until I SOLD it on them!)... I gladly took a Gorf cabaret shell as part of a trade/cash deal for our Battlezone cabaret back in April of 2010. And when I say shell... that's exactly what I mean... a shell. It was the cabinet, the marquee, and a stripped(and slightly hacked) control panel. Nothing else, no PCBs, no wires, no monitor, no speakers, no brackets... nothing.

Gorf Cabaret - bezel

Even before we took ownership of this little guy, I started hunting down parts since I knew this was going to be a challenging project.

I post a little WTB post over at the KLOV forums and very quickly had leads on a monitor bezel and bare joystick. The bezel was in good shape and only needed a cleaning. The joystick had problems with two of the four opto-switches(which was real nice since it was supposed to have been "working").

I ended up replacing all four opto-switches, all resistors and all capacitors on the controller PCB. I figured I have everything apart so why not?

Gorf Cabaret - control panel

The cabinet itself was in fantastic shape and very clean. Over the next month or so I found a full wiring harness(minus the control panel part which my daughter and I ended up making) and a fully working PCB set.

We also had to come up with some kind of mounting for the audio amplifier/volume PCB since we didn't have the original bracket. A piece of wood worked wonderfully. So good in fact that we also used wood to mount the monitor in place since that bracket was also missing.

Gorf Cabaret - monitor

I also decided to go with a switching power supply instead of an original linear power supply. My daughter and I again made a little harness that plugs into the original harness so it'd take a few minutes to install an original power supply in this thing.

Gorf Cabaret - wiring

This was one of those projects that you think is going to be horrible but ends up not being too bad. The worst thing that happened during it is I tested a switching power supply from another game that turned out to be defective(+24v on the +12v line). Unfortunately both the RAM cards fried along with the speech chip.

Riptor from the KLOV forums repaired the RAM cards for me so we were good to go in no time.

Gorf Cabaret - front
UPDATE: 06-09-2010
Created this page.
UPDATE: 07-31-2010
A few weeks ago I replaced the dull stock lighting behind the marquee with a couple cold-cathode tubes. One white and one blue was used and it really makes the marquee colors "pop"! Then a couple nights ago I installed a cap-kit in the WG K7800 monitor. Imagine that... no more WIGGLE!!!
REPAIRS TO DATE:
(AS OF: 07-31-2010)
  • Installed marquee and replaced marquee lights
  • Installed two brand new speakers
  • Installed replacement bezel
  • Fixed and installed joystick
  • Installed start buttons
  • Made control panel wiring harness(thank you Sophie!!!)
  • Installed main wiring harness
  • Made monitor mounts out of wood and metal brackets
  • Bought and installed 13" monitor
  • Bought PCB cage and installed
  • Bought RGB and driver boards and installed
  • Made switching power supply harness
  • Installed bradn new switching power supply
  • Installed isolation tranformer
  • Replaced old marquee lighting with newer cold-cathode lights
  • Installed cap-kit to WG K7800 monitor

TO BE DONE:
  • Find better condition control panel
  • Refinish coin door
Site maintained by: Jeff
Page created: 06-09-2010
Last update: 07-31-20100