Tron-Sector: Forums (I/O Tower)

Yep, welcome to THE sector Scucci.

Congrats on acquiring such a well-preserved TRON videogame cabinet... Judging from the image, you may have a hard time making the side art look like the original, but it's in a good condition overall (can't say the same for the inside until you post some pics).

Now, please excuse me for asking this but I believe it's important in order to be of any help...

Just to clarify some things first, you say this is the first time you do something like this, but what I really want to know is if you're an electronics engineer or studied a related career... Do you have some experience tampering with electronics? How much experience do you have flashing eproms? Why do you think you need to or want to flash the arcade's eproms? Is that the room you're going to keep the video arcade? Because if it is, it's a very very bad idea to work on what looks like the carpet my friend! Another thing... you don't say if it's working fine... Does Two Tigers play alright? If it's not working, does it come with the 3 main boards? You need to have the 3 board stack.

Okay, for starters, lemme tell you this: The manual included with the coin-op wasn't meant to help you on something like this AND There is no such thing as an 'official' TRON arcade eprom flashing manual.

In the second place, I have a responsibility to say this: forget completely about 'flashing' your eproms. That's not the best option you have. You'd first want to try eprom swaps but not eprom flashing. Even a pro would try getting and replacing a working PBC set first. Why's this? Because "tricky as hell" is a complete understatement. You do something wrong, you fry the damned eproms. The first time, if you're not a pro, it's impossible NOT to do something wrong. Believe me.

You'll want to sell the PCBs you posess for whatever you can and use that little money to help you buy a working set... Those you can easily find for under $50 bucks at eBay. The TRON arcade's a VERY COMMON coin-up videogame.

Hope I convinced you already.

If, however, you still insist you want to try this and experience the pride of achieving a TRON arcade 'resurrection', by all means, my friend, you need to start from the beginning and proceed one pace at a time, that is, from the general stuff to the particular stuff... In other words you need to check out first things first: YOU NEED to understand the 'piece of machinery' you have in your hands...

DON'T TRY FLASHING EPROMS if you don't first understand what a Bally Midway MCR System is.

Once you can clearly explain that in this forum, we can continue with the next step...