I got sick over the weekend. I’m not sure with what but I suspect salmonella. But before I started to get sick I made a trip to Radio Shack and bought a Cold Heat wireless soldering tool and some solder with the intent of fixing my Arcade Tron Cocktail‘s player 1 joystick.

For a long time now, I’ve been the only one that can get the high score on the machine partly due to the fact that the trigger on the player one joystick is completely worn out. It took a certain finesse to get the stick to respond properly. The difficulty with the cocktail version of Tron is that the parts are just not readily available. Especially the unique joystick. There are very few machines that share the short, Pac-Man style stick with a trigger on the front. Machines that I know of that share this type of joystick are:

• Tron (Cocktail)
• Satan’s Hollow (Cocktail)
• Solar Fox (Cabaret and Cocktail)

I recently scoured the internet again looking for parts and was lucky enough to find a set of Satan’s Hollow control panels for a cocktail machine! Ironically, they were at Quarter Arcade, which is where I scored the original Tron cocktail arcade control panels 5 years ago.

The Satan’s Hollow control panel is slightly different than a tron control panel It has no spinner, in it’s place there is a single yellow arcade button and its joysticks only move right and left. I didn’t need the whole mechanism–just the stick with the trigger. I had the joystick off the Satan’s Hollow and onto the Tron control panel in minutes. My new soldering iron worked like a champ too! Now the Tron is almost 100%. The only thing I need now is a replacement battery for the motherboard. I think I’ll try and get that done this week. As for the game play, I look forward to my friends now being able to play without complaining about the player one side being an issue.