This machine came out really nice. The marquee is near perfect and only needed a new fluorescent bulb. The monitor glass was in good condition but it had some pretty heavy scratching on the back. Fortunately, almost all of the scratches were in the black portion of the art. Using model paint and a fine paintbrush, I touched it all up and now it looks great.

The side art is mostly intact. The top of the left sticker and the bottom of the right sticker had  been peeled off. Using a razor knife I cut the damaged portions off as cleanly as possible. The end result is not perfect but it's perfectly acceptable.

Before

After

The control panel had a Willis replacement overlay on it. It was in ok condition but it was ugly. In my search for a new overlay I discovered that there were several different reproduction overlays made. These different CPOs can be seen on my Q*bert Control Panel Overlays page.

I eventually found a NOS (new-old-stock) CPO that was in perfect condition. Before installing it I had to remove the old CPO and prepare the control panel's surface. I started by peeling off the old CPO. This left a layer of glue all over the control panel. I soaked the panel in paint thinner and then scraped the glue off with a razor knife. It took a long time and a lot of work, but I was able to get it nice and clean.

I then sprayed primer over the whole control panel and sanded out any dust-bumps. I was going to put the new CPO right on top of the primer, but when I did my test alignment I noticed that the gray primer could be seen around the edge of the center joystick hole. So I  painted the control panel black and when it was dry I installed the CPO.

I finished it off with new translucent-red leaf-switch buttons and attached it to the machine with stainless-steel carriage bolts. The end result is awesome!

But before I made the cabinet look good I had to get the machine to work. The first thing I noticed inside this machine was that there were 3 resistors on the power supply board that were charred. I assumed that they were bad, but testing showed that they were ok and that the power supply was putting out proper voltages. But after running for a while those resistors got *really* hot, so on general principals I replaced them with 5-watt ceramic resistors.

I was fortunate that the machine came with two main processor boards. A quick swap proved that neither board worked, but at least I had some spare parts. The second board, which actually appeared in worse condition than the first, booted up when installed, but the screen was filled with garbage. Checking the socketed chips revealed that one of the RAM chips had a leg broken off. Why someone would intentionally put a broken chip back in it's socket is beyond me. I swapped the chip with one from the other board. Now, when powered up, the background image appeared and the game played, but the foreground characters were messed up. I put the machine into test mode and ran the ROM checksum test. The EPROMs on the other board had the ROM checksum hand-written on each chip, and the checksums that I was seeing on this board did not match. So I swapped in the EPROMs from the other board, powered it up and the game played and all the graphics were correct.

Now, with the game working, it was clear to see that the monitor was in desperate need of a cap kit. All the colors were bleeding and muddy. Fortunately, this machine uses a Wells-Gardner 4952 monitor which is quite common and very easy to get parts for. I ordered the cap-kit from Bob Roberts. Once installed and the monitor was properly adjusted, the colors were bright and the graphics crisp.

Q*bert's are notorious for sound problems, and this one was no different. Pushing the test button on the sound board produced a tone, proving that the audio amp was working, but there were no game sounds. It turned out that several chips on both the sound board and on the main CPU board were bad.

One of the bad chips was the Votrax voice synthesizer chip - the chip that gives Q*bert his garbled speech. I had recently won a Q*bert sound board on eBay, but the board was so badly damaged that it was beyond repair. Fortunately, however, the Votrax chip on it was good. Once all the defective chips were replaced the sound worked great.

I had become quite familiar with the problems associated with Q*bert sound and have since helped several other collectors repair their Q*bert's sound problems. I realized that others may benefit from this information, so I've created a Q*bert Sound Troubleshooting Flowchart that covers the most common problems found with Q*bert sound. Also, included on the troubleshooting page is a tip that will make your Q*bert sound less likely to fail in the future.