The Sega G80 Connection

12/26/2025

I hope everyone is having a Merry Christmas today! 🎄 This Star Trek ornament from Hallmark is not only perfect for my tree but is very well done in every detail. The sounds are 💯 accurate and the artwork on the cabinet is fantastic for its tiny size. Anybody know who was involved in the project? 🧐

11/01/2025

Andy Ducay (sadly deceased) signed nearly every service bulletin from Midway in the late 70s and early 80s. I bet he never would have envisioned me using this pinout bulletin for the Midway Universal Tester over 40 years later to repair a hacked up audio and video harness. Thanks to those who scanned and archived these online, too. It saved me a ton of time compared to guessing and checking.

10/17/2025

Having a great time at the 2025 Pinball Expo so far! The weekend is just beginning and it sure is nice to see some rare classics among all the new pins and other technology. While the Sega G80 platform is my true love, I’ve always been an undercover pinball fan of games from the 1980s and earlier. EM games are a marvel of engineering prior to solid state electronics. They may be slow and simple but still very enjoyable even today. More to explore but here are a few preliminary photos of my favorites this year. That high score on Lucky Hand was pure luck indeed! 😜

10/07/2025

It’s been a while since I posted! Recently moved into a new work space and finally ready to get back to some fun projects. Let’s start off with an Eagle Eye trivia question.

Im harvesting some spare connectors to repair a wiring harness for a commercial test rack used to troubleshoot logic cards. I don’t have any new connectors or the special tool to properly crimp them. So I’ll be splicing these stubs to longer runs of wire to find a happy medium.

Can anybody identify this type of connector pin? It’s gold plated with a small rotating silver ring in the middle. This allows extraction of the pin from the housing without damaging it. Hence why I’m able to reuse it.

Hint 1: The test rack is completely unrelated to the G80 platform.
Hint 2: The connector pin is not Molex or AMP although the dimensions are similar.

01/19/2025

🛸👽 Space Fury Logic Set with Warranty 👽🛸

“So… a creature for my amusement. Prepare for battle!” If you played Space Fury at least once you can hear the alien’s voice in your mind as you read that first sentence. You know it’s true. 🙃 This set is very clean and will instantly enhance your G80 collection. Features include:

✅Authentic Digital Speech - Enjoy the lifelike and accurate accents of the SP0250 Orator chip. Cutting edge for the early 1980s.
✅True Analog Sound - No emulation here. The elusive Battlestar sound board is chocked full of varying capacitors, resistors, timers and op amps arranged in cascading chains with a white noise generator for booming explosions.
✅Security Free ROMs - Replaced the G80 security ASIC with a DIP shunt and burned a set of security free ROMs for long term reliability.
✅Fully Rebuilt - Replaced electrolytic capacitors across all four DC power rails with long life Nichicon for smooth and stable supply voltages.
✅One Year Warranty - Should anything fail under normal operating conditions your subsequent repair is on the house for one full year from date of purchase.

Price: $675 with free US shipping
Payment: PP F&F

10/19/2024

What a pleasant surprise! I was honored as a guest speaker by Rob Berk, Brigitt Berk, Todd Friedman, and Walter Day at the Pinball Expo! This has been a fantastic show so far. If you’re in the Chicago area, stop by today or tonight! There’s something for everyone including a massive room of games all on free play. 🕹️🤩

09/28/2024

🥣🛸🚀Quaker Halfsies G08🚀🛸🥣

Wow, what a special treat! A collector delivered the entire G08 monitor from his Quaker Halfsies Star Trek to rebuild as the picture was fading in and out. The monitor had very low mileage and was never previously dismantled. The silicone had to be cut to remove the neck board. Since the game spent most of its life in someone’s home I was astonished by how well preserved the solder was in general. There were cracks along the Molex headers as usual but the photo of the neck board shows just how brilliant the 80/20 solder remained after more than 40 years.

I dismantled the entire monitor, did my usual rebuild process and it came to life without a hitch. I was also flabbergasted by the near perfect geometry on what is a 100% analog device. If you look closely at the text you can see crisp 90 degree corners and very little overshoot where the vector starts and ends. I’ve repaired hundreds of monitors and while I can get them dialed in pretty dang good this one definitely tops the cake.

Enjoy some photos of the final product!

07/20/2024

🎤 Southern Fried Gaming Expo Speaker 🎤

Today is the day! If you are at this year, swing by Room 102 in the Cobb Galleria at 11:30 am. We’ll have a great time talking about the G08 monitor and what to do when you find one in the wild. What’s SFGE? Visit www.gameatl.com to find out! 🕹️👽💥

07/07/2024

🎤 Southern Fried Gaming Expo Speaker 🎤

If you plan on going to SFGE this year, be sure to stop by my 60 minute session on Saturday to say hello! I’ll be speaking about how to bring up a G08 without causing a smoke plume along with other fun and interesting Sega stuff. 🤓🕹️

SFGE 2023 will host a bevy of industry leaders, celebrity guests, content creators, musicians, performers, and more!

07/04/2024

🧐🚨Rare Game Wednesday🚨🧐

Don’t be fooled! It’s not a Sega G80 game but it’s a card rack game nonetheless! Everyone knows the Deco game Astro Fighter (licensed to Gremlin in the US)…or maybe you don’t. 😜

What you *don’t* see everyday is a Deco Mad Rider (aka Mad Alien) in a lowboy cabinet! The epoxy blob has me worried. At least the switching power supply was completely DOA when I found it, so over voltage may not be an issue. I’m going to do the usual rework on the cards, rebuild the switching power supply and see what we get. More pics and updates hopefully soon!

06/30/2024

🛸🚀 Star Trek Logic Set with Warranty 🚀🛸

***SOLD***

Be the Captain of the Star Trek Enterprise! Complete with the Universal sound board, you’re armed and ready to fight those vectorized Klingons. Features include:

✅Authentic Digital Speech - Enjoy the lifelike and accurate accents of the SP0250 Orator chip. Cutting edge for the early 1980s.
✅True Analog Sound - No emulation here. Nine independently controlled DACs with a white noise generator for booming explosions.
✅Fully Rebuilt - New capacitors across all power rails for low ESR enjoyment and burn in tested for several days to ensure stability.
✅One Year Warranty - Should anything fail under normal operating conditions your subsequent repair is on the house for one full year from date of purchase.

Price: $525 with free US shipping
Payment: PP F&F

06/09/2024

🔥The China Syndrome🔥

Remember that movie? It’s really good. For those in the know, the fictitious nuclear reactor came close to a total meltdown. Its theatrical release just a few weeks before the Three Mile Island incident cemented a bad reputation for the nuclear industry for decades. Why do I mention it?

I received a set of Star Trek boards for repair that were subjected to what I’d consider close to a total meltdown. When putting the wiring harnesses back together again in the Captain’s Chair, a critical error resulted in line voltage being sent to a couple voltage rails of the logic cage. I thought the entire thing would have been toast. But I gave it a shot, particularly since this was the same set I worked on a little while ago with Clay Cowgill’s multi kit.

Thankfully the error was isolated to the 12V rails and not the 5V, as far as I can tell. Nearly every op amp and other analog or CMOS device that used 12V was bad. Like melted down internally with 0 ohms from 12V to ground bad. Thus began desoldering all these parts en masse. You can even see the gnarly smoke cloud inside the 2708, which uses three voltages to run.

Thankfully nothing happed to the multi kit (huge relief) but I will say I don’t want to sit through hours of this kind of work for quite some time. Believe it or not, everything is working 💯 including the speech synthesizer IC. After an extended burn-in test these boards will go back to the customer and hopefully live a very uneventful life under the seat of the chair. 🫣