Repairing A Hacked-Up 1980 Atari WARLORDS Cocktail Arcade Game - What Did They DO??????? 

I repair valve/tube amplifiers for a living and my rule is as follows... 1. Eyes most 2. Hands least 3. Tongue not at all It's nice to see someone have a good look at a unit before just switching on. Really enjoying your videos. Dr. Watts. Senior service engineer for Marshall Amplification.

This takes me back to circa 1975 when I was repairing similar video games for 2 friends who ran a small electronics business, they were “ wizards “ I was just good at building and soldering boards, Williams Defender was one of my faves

This channel satisfies the little kid in me I use to be that would take my sisters transistor radio apart is an attempt to understand how it worked. Never understood it but, always found circuit boards aesthetically pleasing. Good job; nothing beats a win.

21:10 That monitor has a crazy amount of burn-in. You can see the game without the board even being connected.

I remember even after I had a SNES I would still ask my uncle to hook up his Atari so we could play Warlords 4 players with my cousins.

Impressive job! Few things are worse than having to work on something somebody else has already 'worked' on.

Wow, looks like the previous dude half tore the chip out with a pliers and a soldering gun! Pads gone, blackened pcb, traces peeled off; Wrong tools or big rush. Great job on resurrecting from that damage!

Sorry ron i had to laugh over the spider web of destruction on the pcb, i always love your work though , good job on the board ,some people are just not ment to touch boards they make more of a mess and leave it for the next guy to try and figure out i would have been pulling out my hair on that one ,what a mess , you are a magician 👍😁

"What did they do" indeed... Good job on getting all that mess cleaned up, I don't know if I would have the patience to deal with sth like that.

I like the fact that you have credit for the recent connector replacement. Giving credit where it is due. Respect👍🏻

Paint brushes aside, another good thing to clean dust are "acid brushes" a dollar buys a dozen and they are in the plumbing isle of a hardware store. They are smaller and are used to apply PVC welder. You can even cut them down to make them a scrub brush to use with isopropyl.

I wish we (the Brits) had your "can do" attitude. it seems to be a american thing but i know in the UK if a tech looked at that board he would say "its screwed, can't do anything, try and buy a board on ebay" subscribed I have a tabletop 1979 space firebird machine and tabletop 1981 Galaga machine with all original boards. I have no clue what i would do if something went wrong with em.

Well, if repairing a normal board wasn't difficult enough here you are a booby-trapped one. Great job . A pleasure to watch how you solved all issues. It would be interesing to see you repairing one of those "Polybius" machines...

I lived in Boise in the 70s and early 80s. Played this and many others back in the day. I still remember the pizza place had Death Race 2000, Sea Wolf, Carnival, and a Phoenix cocktail. I even remember if you built up static electricity and touched the coin door on Carnival, you got a free game. I wondered if the owner ever figured out why it was played all the time, but little money collected.

Recently came across this channel, (and subbed, obviously) it's great to see someone working on these machines that is actually knowledgable and not just winging it :)

You need a Hakko desolating gun. I finally bit the bullet and bought one a year or so a go and I regretted not doing it years sooner! What a difference! They’re not Jeep but they are so worth it. You’ll never want to see one of those spring loader solder suckers ever again!

I miss the good old days but I sure love the convenience of the internet for a DIYer and experts a like. Excellent job as always.

many years ago when i was a lad, i was given a non working paperboy, no one would even look at it, but now i wish i had it as a project as i know a lot more now 35 years on.. great video btw.

So cool! I grew up with a hand me down 2600 when my older brother got his NES but never saw or heard of this game

You, sir, are a wizard. You have the most powerful magics. :D Nice fix, I bet that was one happy customer.

Warlords was a great game! Had alot of good times playing against my friends.

Nice to see arcades being saved like this I can just imagine how many could've been fixed

Man...and I thought watching Steve eat rotten MRE’s from WWII was awesome. And the addicting thrill of My Mechanics turning vintage, rusted garbage into perfectly restored museum pieces is always satisfying. But my GOD, seeing Joe’s breathe life back into these legendary monuments to my childhood is a stratum of gratification I can’t even begin to describe! It’s the epitome of nerd porn. Geek heroin. Dweeb meth. It makes me want to turn the spare bedroom into a game room lined with his arcade machines. Who needs guests anyway when you can have your own Gorf & Bubbles cabinets? Plus, they’re only one state away and not as expensive as I thought. Finding this channel might be dangerous for me! 😳

My favorite memory of the 2600 was four player warlords with paddle controllers (the losers would get dead armed by the remaining players), had no idea there was ever an arcade unit of the game.

Thanks for the memories. I remember playing this at the local pizza shop when I was a kid.

I freakin' loved this game. It was perfect for the cocktail cabinet format. I even tried to write a version for my Sinclair ZX81, but discovered that like sex, it's not really the same doing it on your own.

The suicidal CPU opponents on the 2600 version inspired me to play by alternate rules: The first to get 5 points LOSES! This was my favorite way to play solo or with humans. Some game variations allowed you to command two castles, so you could do some interesting ricochet shots to help damage both of your castles. And even when you did successfully blow yourself up, you could still control invisible ghosts to tweak the ball trajectory, which was sort of an Easter egg that you could capitalize on. Try it out the next time you play!

Great saving that board ! Wow , what a mess when you showed all the wires and jumpers .. holy moly ! Nice work !

I can only imagine how many hours were invested to bring this old game to life. Great job and thanks for sharing :)

I don't know what's more satisfying watching your excellent video repairs, or watching your subscribers go up and views per video, top quality mate.

Whoa, that's a pretty sweet game, going to fire that up over the weekend and play with the kids! Loving your repair videos, always nice to see a true craftsman do their thing.

Great job, re-doing all those traces was a labour of love! Too fiddly for me, I'll stick to jukeboxes haha. Regarding that sensing circuit on the power supply, the bypass mod seems like a safer idea. What if the 5 volt line to the game board is fine, but the sense line back to the regulator had some resistance, due to a dirty edge connector or something? Presumably that could cause the power supply to ramp up the voltage to over 5 volts into the game board, potentially doing all kinds of damage! Better to have not enough voltage getting to it than too much... :)

An excellent repair... If I was given that board, I would have written it off... WELL DONE!!! 10/10

Love a good trouble-shoot and repair, nicely done!

Joe thanks for saving those Awesome video games & kindly posting them for all of us to enjoy!!

I don't know if anyone has had the same idea yet, but modding out the sense circuit seems to name itself: The Senseless Mod! That being said, I completely understand it could be necessary or beneficial to perform the mod.

Never seen it in uk but look cool to play .😀 did great job fixing it

Great vid. There appeared to be some issues with focus and lighting during closeup shots e.g. could not read the close up of he schematic, burnt component. A downloadable copy of the schematic to follow along would be useful. Thanks for sharing this repair. 👍👍👍👍👍

Alien facehugger on PCB confirmed.

Great job! Yeah I remember me and my brother and my cousins playing this at a milk bar in Chifley Canberra Australia for 40 cents a game. No 20 cent coins were safe from our keen eyes.

Excited to see a Warlords Cocktail video by you Ron! Just the fact that you have a video of it means by default that it will end up fixed, as you have stated several times that you don't post videos if you can't fix it LOL. But yeah - that board was messed up! ... I would bet that most people probably wouldn't have been able to figure that one out - This is why you guys are in business! When you play, you need to hold down that button to "catch" the fireball ... You can then release the button with your shield in a different position so that you can send that fireball where you want it to go! Don't hold the button down for too long though - holding the fireball will slowly damage your own castle. Lastly - The upright Warlords arcade game still had four castles, but only two are playable by people - the top two were always played by the computer ... as a result, the upright is not as desirable as the cocktail - The upright did however, have the funky - reflected mirror 3D effect Atari used in Asteroids Deluxe. :)

Wow. Great job. Going to arcades since early 80s and I don't think I've ever even seen this game in coin-op.

That was definitely a ton of work to get this warlords cocktail up and running again :D such a cool game

The hardest tongue twister I believe is Red Leather, Yellow Leather. Sounds easy but try it fast a few times!

Awesome classic. I remember playing on the 2600 back in the day. Would love an original in my collection. Tough to beat the cool factor on this one.

PFWR is the read/write toggle signal for the ram. Can't have the processor and ram chips driving the data lines at the same time, or you end up with a bunch of E's on the screen. Looks like an awesome game. I don't remember ever seeing it in the arcades.

That was some uuiuuuugly bodgery you ripped out there! Now personally, I’m the sort to make up a custom little daughter board to fix such issues but you did a great job.

I miss this game - Thank you for the work you do!

I've just stumbled apon your channel and are already loving it. I'm now going to work my way through the whole lot 👍. A massive hello from the UK 👋

Well done, congrats! That's a tough boardset to work on. You owe that guy on UK Vac a beer!

You just got yourself a new subscriber. I've watched a few of your videos and quite enjoy watching you repair these vintage arcade boards, very interesting watching you work from beginning to end to solve problems, reading schematics and testing, etc. Even crazy messed-up previous repair attempts like these. Keep up the good work and I'll get to watching the rest of your videos!

Now that has gotta put a smile on your face !!

Such a great game. Your videos are exceptionally fun to watch especially for those of who crew up at the heights of the video game parlor. Thanks!

I've never seen this game it looks like a lot of fun.

Those jumper cable work almost looks like my handy work 😅.

Awesome! Really outstanding! Thanks

2:30 - made me think of Jeff Foxworthy... "What we gonna do is: Saw the top o' yor head off, root around in there with a stick, and see if we can't find that dadburned clot."

That game looks fun to play

I played this at one of the Classic Gaming Expos in Las Vegas. 2012 I think it was. Some games were just normal, but then later games turned "Vegas". $1 got you a seat, 4 players, winner takes all :-)

Nice work. God I hate people messing with things especially when they don’t know how to use a soldering iron. I personally love soldering but not so much fixing broken traces 🙄

I've never seen this one til your vid, pretty cool, Liked

Warlords, so much fun. Neat repair video. I didn't get to play it back in the day. But, i played it at PRGE once and it's good.

I wish I had a dollar for every G07-CB0 flyback I replaced back in the old days! Lots of CPUs too, many Pac-Man boards. I miss those days. Coin op games were more enjoyable than the casino stuff I do now. P.S. you CAN test those audio amps (typically TDA-2002 if memory serves me). Take a long screwdriver, carefully touch the bare tip to the audio input and touch with your finger. You will hear the stray 60hz from your body amplified through the speaker as a hum.

The fuse probably was taken out by the bulbs when one of them went out. Often those sort of bulbs fail with a nice flash of plasma inside which takes out the fuse, thus protecting the PSU. I personally would not do the Sense Mod, reason for that is it is part of the regulation and if the edge connector is dirty, causing voltage issues, it could cause issues elsewhere with the bad connections. Just my personal opinion :) I figure it's better just to get all the connections clean and solid so it works as Atari intended.

I remember this game! They had one in Holy Moley's donut shop.

Nice job. It's a great game too - important to keep these great old games going. :) I think the upright version is up for 1 or 2 players though - the cocktail is definitely the best version. Only played the 2600 version of this. There is a Pong variant called Quadrapong for 4 players where each player guards their own goal - that's probably the predecessor of Warlords.

Nice fix. Looking forward to more videos in 2020!

Great job! Nice video and awesome game. I was 20 in the '80 when this came out. I remember it. You do good investigation. That was impressive. I have subscribed. All good wishes for 2020, Sir!

I wonder why they went to such effort to ensure the board was getting a precise +5V via a feedback sense line, it seems more like something you'd find in instrumentation/medical. Something to do with the analog control inputs using V+ as a reference rail for R-C timing and it being easier/cheaper to do it on the power supply rather than having a separate reference on the board maybe? 1980 seems well into the standard TTL/CMOS era where the logic V+ tolerances were at least 10%, not like 70s LSI where you might need weird and very specific voltages.

Wow Atari made some great games, what an amazing cocktail, very jealous.

You really have to have a proper desoldering station when working on PCBs like this. A 25 watt soldering iron and solder pump just won't cut it.

Nice save! Looks like the last guy needed a temperature controlled iron and some flux. If you want to get close to this game at home, "Medieval Mayhem" is an excellent homebrew port on the Atari 2600, big hit at parties.

Two diodes. One diode is half-wave rectification, and four is full-wave. Two diodes are often used for full-wave rectification, but only if you use a center-tapped transformer twice the voltage of what you need. The center is common and the other two lines each get their own diode, both turned the same way.

Nice vid! BTW RW means READ/WRITE. It is a RAM chip, so you can read and also write ;) I think order usually tells about high/low voltage (that way you select the operation type).

Best video yet! Thanks AGAIN for making these videos. They are so helpful for learning this stuff!

THANK YOU, FOR SHARING THIS INSIGHTFUL VIDEO!

Very nice video sir. You are a Wizard at repair. Thank you.

Nicely done! Great video.

I’ve only ever seen one 4 player Warlords, and that was at Game Galaxy in TN.

The phrase you were looking for at 13:40 was voltage feedback circuit..

awsome arcade up there with the 4 player wizards of war and 4 player track infield cocktail

Buy an inexpensive set of monitor adjustment tools here: amzn.to/2u39J1M ANYTHING! you buy on Amazon after clicking that link doesn't raise your prices but gives us a referral tip, thank you!

This game looks incredibly fun

This is awesome bro! Great work

OMG what a nightmare on that board haha! Great video and great job on this resurrection! Man Atari made beautiful cocktail games! Thanks! :)

Just realized you guys are in SC, I moved to Ladson last weekend.

15:30 ive just split beer everywhere

Warlords is one of my all time favorite games. I would love to find a cocktail. The only way I'll be able to get close to getting one without paying a fortune, is if I make my own using an Atari 800 computer and The Homebrew game castle crisis

with a bit of time some tape and a silver crafts pen you can remake those thin traces, it used to be a trick to modify amd thunderbirds for overclocking back in the day.

Good game I still have my Atari 2600 version. It was pretty bad though. Still got lots of action back in the day though. I played the upright one at a local arcade called Funway Freeway in Kansas city Mo at Antioch mall.

One time I had a job like that I ended up piggy backing an lifting the W/R leg an liking that with a jumper some 30 years back I remember needed to use just 4 jumper wires. Crappy solder work is always back I liked to spray WD 40 ann more lead solder them cut bad chip off an pull pins one by one. No damage then to PCB but will take a long time say 6 min at the most quick work is bad work.

yikes yea got to be careful with old boards, easy to lift traces. 38:50 I'm sure you know but it's good to remember: if the board has multiple of same chip that are socketed and it's suspected either one of them are bad or their sockets/traces are bad.. swap them around. if the problem changes then it's the chips, if it doesn't then it's (more likely) the board. 55:10 wha.. hey those are my initials 😀

Nice work! Darth Vader would be proud! Actually, all four of them...

That was awesome. You Sir have gained a new subscriber!

第一次看到這種遊戲呢！修理的人好強啊，越舊的越難搞…

First played the cocktail table game at Pizza Hut in Red Oak, IA in the early 80s.

Great video again Joe

Wow. Great job sorting out that mostrosity! o_O I somehow haven't ever come across this game before, despite spending large chunks of the 80's in arcades. it looks like it would be a wonderfully frantic 4 player experience! :D

Great uploads👍👍 i am a new suscriber & ENJOY these videos Thanks👍😇

yes !! thank you guys ,been waiting for this !! ;) x