I bought Lethal Enforcer so I'd have something besides a pinball machine, something different. However, it wasn't different enough, so I bought After Burner II.
It was less than $500 off e-bay, (not including the $200 shipping charge since it weighs 500 pounds), so I wasn't sure what to expect. For that price it couldn't have been that good.
After he didn't ship the machine for two months, I finally figured it was so cheep because the machine didn't really exist, I had just been ripped off.
But then he managed to dig it out of his warehouse and he shipped it to me. I plugged it in and awaited to be surprised.
And I was surprised, everything seemed to pretty much work. The only problem it had was that the Y direction of the yoke didn't work. So I started taking it apart and cleaning it (I believe him, it really had been setting in the back of a warehouse for a couple of years) and I replaced the wires to the yoke. I found out that it's common for the yoke metal to crush the yoke wires if they aren't placed properly, and that's exactly what had happened, the Y axis wire was broken in two.
Also during the process of cleaning, I found a couple of other wires that were broken. I didn't know what they did, but I went ahead and soldered them back together.
Then the machine suddenly stopped working. It was pure dead. So I tried disconnecting the wires I had reattached, but that didn't make any difference. I tried taking the board to the local amusement vendor, but he said he couldn't check it for problems, so I started searching elsewhere. I figured it was probably a problem with the MPU, so I started searching for a manual so I could start checking that connections were going where they were supposed to be (I have been known to accidentally reattach wires wrong). From Sega's website I found a local distributor and luckily they had a copy of the owner's manual to sell. As it turns out, for some reason the +5 power supply died (Afterburner has three separate power supplies and uses like 9 different voltages), so I got a new 5 volt supply from Happ and it started working again.
Now the problem was getting it inside the house. It had been in my garage this whole time because it was too big to get into the house. So I had to disassemble it into three pieces, first I took off the gondola (the cockpit), then it's braces. But the gondola was still a bit heavy, so I took out the monitor and I enlisted help to move the machine into my game room piece by piece.
Then I discovered I should have taken electricity into account. Afterburner has three circuit breakers in it, the largest one being 15 amps. Unfortunately the bedroom I was using as a game room was also wired as 15 amps. Even more unfortunately still, since it shared an external wall, the outside lights were tacked on to the same circuit. Result, if you played the game at night the outside lights would go dim. And forget about playing Afterburner while someone else was playing one of the pins.
Fortunately, one outlet in the room was on another room's circuit breaker, so I ran a 15 amp extension cord from that outlet to Afterburner, so now Afterburner doesn't affect any lights or other games.
What
makes afterburner such an awesome game is that there's a motor that swings the gondola (cockpit)
left and right as you move the yoke. As I told one of my neighbors,
"let's see your x-box do that!"
By the way, I've seen varying opinions on the internet, but this particular game is the "Commander" version (according to the owners manual). It's also referred to as "Standard" and "Blue". (The three cabinet types are called Up-Right, Standard, and Deluxe).
The only fixes required were re-wiring the yoke (easy enough) and replacing the +5 power supply. Though I didn't experience the problem, a common complaint is Afterburner resetting itself during game play. If this happens to yours, check the yoke wires. The yoke mechanism can cut through the insulation and short out the wires. You'll know this is the problem if it happens predominately when you move the yoke up. I couldn't find an identical power supply, so I had to get a +5 +12 power supply and hook both contacts to the +5. I was a little worried that it might be too much strain on the power supply, but it apparently wasn't. I'm not sure why the game is wired with two terminals for the +5.
Afterburner uses dip switches for it's settings, and while it does have a dip setting for free play, for some reason it doesn't work. It says "free play" on the screen, but you can hit the start button all day and it will just ignore you.
So I went to Radio Shack and bought a momentary switch. I drilled a hole in the plastic faceplate of the coin box and installed the switch there, then just used alligator clips to connect the momentary switch to the wires that are supposed to go to the coin switch.
For some reason the left speaker isn't working. I looked into it briefly, but it's not worth the pain of taking that cover off.