Restoration 101

On top of a vintage Microvision, Matt also ordered three old baseball games off EBAY, two of which I used to have (I think, one for sure), Entex games, and one Coleco head to head! They came yesterday. I’ll definitely be turning the kitchen into a game museum!

The older Entex didn’t work. It is all mechanical! So we took it apart (of course) and re-soldered on a wire for the pitcher’s LED. Then batting didn’t work. So we looked at it, and looked at it. We figured out how it was supposed to work, then matt guessed the spring tooth was supposed to press the rocker on the moving arm. I looked and sure enough, the end of the spring was sheared. So some pliers and unravelling the spring one round, we had the game back up and running.

Very cool, essentially it is a spinning wheel with three white LEDs, one every third. When you cock the game, it loads a spring. “Pitching” unloads the spring, causing the batting arm to move forwards. This causes the pitching mechanism to come down the plate. It also spins the wheel with the three lights. If the pitch was to be a strike (pitcher chooses) and the batter bats at the right time, the rocker on the batting arm is thrown, which causes the lights on the wheel to illuminate.

These lights, as they spin, match up with little glass tubes that are curved upwards to the game surface. Hence the players see flashing lights. The fielder, when he presses his button, causes the wheel to stop prematurely. Whatever tube the light was aligned with when the wheel stopped determines the outcome of the play, an out or some sort of hit.

You then slide switches manually to score that, like an out, or if it was a hit, three switches illuminate people on first, second or third to mark their positions.

So a totally mechanical game, with lights, from 1979. Rock on!