Pat finished his work on my Time Soldiers Arcade Game. I think it’s completed and ready to sell! It has the original decals and game board, on a Dig-Dug cabinet. I took some pictures.

Edit 12/1/2005:
Now for sale!

My car has dash lights galore!

Check Engine Light – shows when I brake on the freeway… I’m not sure why. I call it my car’s rebellion to traffic.
Flashing Sports Mode Light – it’s like the car doesn’t know if it wants to go “Sporty” or “Regular”
Broken/Intermittently Broken Speedometer – do you know any other 1990 Honda Accords that can go 0-80 in 0.5 seconds?
Broken Tripometer and Odometer (when the above doesn’t work) – what a better way to limit milage than to have it not track!
Rear Lamp Light Out – I know it’s not out, my car knows it’s not out… but my car doesn’t know that I know that it knows it’s not out!

Yes, this is a can of Albertson’s “Fancy Cut Green Beans”.
Yes, that is not “Fancy Cut Green Beans” inside the can.

I purchased a 200GB Maxtor 6Y200P0 hard drive for $45 after rebate about a year and a half ago. It had been working fine as a backup hard drive on my FreeBSD server. However, it recently failed on me. Directly after a power outage, I was receiving the following message:

FAILURE-READ_DMA status=51 error=40 LBA=135486975 mount = /dev/ad0s1d

Doing fsck -y /dev/ad0s1d, the check would complete without errors. But trying to mount the drive as rw would give me the following error:

mount: /dev/ad0s1d: Input/output error

I was able to mount it read-only to retrieve the data, but I really wanted to have it fixed so I could write to it again.

I tried to follow the FreeBSD handbook guide to reformatting the drive, but that did not complete, giving read/write errors.

It was suggested by cperciva@layeredtech that I

Overwrite that partition with zeroes (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0s1d) and then newfs and mount (newfs /dev/ad0s1d && mount /dev/ad0s1d)

While that series of commands didn’t work (same input/output errors), doing effectively the same thing with the Maxtor diagnostics tool worked.

I went to Maxtor.com, and selected my model # (which seems to only work on IE…), went to Diagnostics, then downloaded PowerMax and put it on a floppy. Running a Basic Quick Test (90 Second) passed, but an Advanced Test (Full Read Scan) failed fairly early on. I was given two error codes, which are supposedly internal for Maxtor, and I guess are used for RMA processing. The codes were dea46771 and dea46761, which mean nothing to me.

So I then performed a Low Level Format (Quick) and Low Level Format (Full). This took the better part of 2 hours. After doing this, the Advanced Test completed. I was then able to format and partition the drive via the FreeBSD Handbook: Adding Disks section.

I have no doubt that the reason the hard drive was failing was the heat inside. I have two 200 GB hard drives and 1 40 GB hard drive all practically laying on top of each other in the hard drive bay. I’m just squeezing as much life as I can out of this old system. Next system, hard drive coolers, video card coolers, {insert third term to match form} coolers, Oh my!

I received a Time Soldiers Arcade Game from one of Pat’s friends for doing some computer work.

I’ll post photos of the arcade cabinet soon.

I was hoping to use it for my MAME project, but I don’t think it will work out. It has an awkward display, and extremely awkward joysticks. The joystick type is called “8-way Rotary”, meaning that not only does it have the standard 8 directions, but also can rotate, so you have control over which way the unit is facing. It’s the only game I’ve seen with that kind of joystick, and frankly I doubt I’d want it in the long run. Also, the game is 2 player, which is OK if I can’t find a 4 player, but I’d much prefer the 4 player.

So I’m still looking for a used/destroyed 4 player arcade cabinet for cheap. I’m going to keep my eyes open on Craig’s List, and maybe one will show up.