Invaders must die
Bof's story below reminded me of being a teenager armed with a screwdriver and just enough knowledge to be dangerous..

A friend of the family had given me one of those cocktail cabinet style Space Invaders Revenge machines, the sort you used to get in the early 80's in pubs that you could sit down at and put your drink on. It wasn't in its original cabinet, but had been fitted with doorbell instead of a coinslot so instead of continually feeding it 10p's you'd just press the button for that one more go.. Some people might get nostalgic for that game reading this, but even at the time if you had endless free play it got boring pretty quick to be honest, so once everyone from school had been round to marvel at how I had my own arcade machine it rapidly gathered dust.

Curiosity took the better of me one day and I found the cabinet had been fitted with hinges for easy access to the circuit board. I had hours of fun looking at the PCB and taking the little black boxes with silver leg things out (I later found out these were called 'microchips'), and generally removing anything in a socket. (As a side note,I also found at the same time that it wasn't really in colour either, they just stuck coloured strips of sticky back plastic across the black and white screen, which probably left me feeling cheated). Which was fine, until I realised I had just lined all the (pretty much identical to the uninitiated) bits I'd removed in a random row and not marked where any of it had come from. One completely useless cabinet down the dump later...

My only saving grace is that it wasn't the original cabinet as it would probably be worth a small fortune now in terms of rarity.

What do I do now? I'm an electronic engineer, and still not a very good one at that..
( DeadEyeDick, Thu 24 Jun 2010, 15:22, 5 replies)

My brother was exactly the same
took his Big Trak apart as a child, couldnt put it back together again. Blew up his Spectrum 48K wiring in a proper keyboard.

He's a BEng, MEng now, and specialised in computer & electrical engineering.
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Thu 24 Jun 2010, 15:26, closed)

Blew my Spectrum up too
Trying to reset it using a paperclip instead of just switching it on and off at the mains. Many other electronic things of mine broken throughout history through creative experimentation, absolutely no successes...
( DeadEyeDick, Thu 24 Jun 2010, 15:29, closed)

cocktail table Space Invaders?
Last one I saw went for £300.
( finnbar has officially retired, Fri 25 Jun 2010, 6:49, closed)

Well that makes me feel a lot better..

( DeadEyeDick, Fri 25 Jun 2010, 12:04, closed)

I had a go on one of those once
in a student union bar. It was shit. Once you got bored of the games and just wanted to drink beer and smoke tabs, you'd get menaced by a queue of geekboys all desperate to get a high score. They'd menace you until they shooed you away from a perfectly good bar table, so you lost your seats.
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Fri 25 Jun 2010, 11:46, closed)