I’ve owned my Q*Bert cabinet for three or four years now. When I bought it the cabinet looked great and the game itself fired up, but it had a few minor problems that I never got around to fixing. One, the bottom 1/3 of the monitor was blurry. Two, the coin slots didn’t seem to work, so dropping a quarter into the machine didn’t start the game. And three, the front of the cabinet was locked, so I couldn’t open the coin door

I’ve read about drilling locks before, I’ve watched people do it before but never actually done it myself. The concept is pretty simple — get a drill and drill directly into the lock. If you go about halfway in you can drill out the lock’s tumblers, which will allow it to turn freely. I decided to give it a try with my new drill, and to my surprise it was as simple as it appeared. I used a medium-sized drill bit and drilled right through the tumblers in about ten seconds. I couldn’t get the lock to turn, so then I switched to a slightly bigger drill bit and drilled right through the back of the lock. The whole process took less than a minute and when I was finished the back of the lock simply fell off.

With the lock gone I was able to open the coin door, which is where I discovered the next problem. The game has no coin mechs. The front of the coin door is there but there’s nothing on the back side. Quarters dropped into the machine were simply falling directly into the coin bucket. For the time being I flipped the jumpers on the board enabling free play. Problem solved.

With that it was on to the monitor. I pulled the front glass up to find another layer of smoked glass. I pulled that up and noticed that the glass looked … blurry. Not only that, but it looked like some of it had rubbed off on to the monitor. Licking my finger, I wiped it across the monitor and a dark layer of “something” came off. A few minutes of Windex later and the monitor looks like new.

You might be thinking, “I can’t believe it took him four years to perform thirty minutes of repairs,” but that’s not quite true. It took me four years to build up enough knowledge to be able to troubleshoot and fix games within thirty minutes.