Today I got home from work a tad early to drop off some groceries before picking up the kids. Adam was already home, and had the Tron machine playfield-up, a sure sign he's tinkering. He told me his LED order had come in.
He was busy, so I brought home the kids and made dinner while he worked. After dinner, I helped him install some of the remaining lights. I discovered something cool; on the newer games, like Tron, you don't have to do nearly as much unscrewing of sockets. The sockets are now plastic, and 2-piece, and the actual socket piece comes in and out just by squeezing the two edges together. Nice improvement, Stern.
Anyway, we changed out all the lights, including the flasher inside the miniature Tron arcade machine. Evidently it had burned out at some point. We didn't have the white flasher you're supposed to put there, so we put a red one in instead. It looks sweet, which is lucky because it was a pain in the ARSE to get into that little arcade machine! We turned on the game and just WOW. The lights are super cool as LEDs, dramatically different. I think if a purist were to approve of any machine having LEDs vs. incandescent bulbs, it'd be for Tron (given the subject matter, it seems fitting).
Then Adam said I could have first play to test out the flashers and so forth. I noticed very quickly that the flashers seemed to not only be extra LED-bright, but they seemed to be coming from all over the place. Even the carpet was lighting up! I kept saying, "Did you see that? Those lights are so bright they are shining outside the machine!" He said he wasn't sure what I meant.
After questioning whether or not he had gone BLIND, and several exclamations, he finally admitted that he'd bought an under-machine lighting kit and wired it in to fire in concert with certain flashers (he has the best poker face, and I'm gullible. NOT a good combination). It's amazing. Talk about a light show! I do think our Tron needs a seizure warning now though.
The next thing we need to do is see about getting the disc spinner motor replaced, though. It's loud. I mean REALLY loud. So I just took some video of that, and the whole tape (primarily gameplay of our LED'd out Shadow) is loading into my computer as I type this.
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