Small story: The first time I had ever seen Space Invaders was at a Sears store at the mall in the city near my home. I was 11 years old... I know this because we were shopping for my birthday where I was turning 12. That was the year I got the bicycle that I had been wanting for what seemed an eternity. The Space Invaders cabinet was set up next to where the Sears automotive department had a waiting area. It was standing all by itself along this long white wall. There were several teenagers standing around it as one of them was playing. The sound was turned up there as well... you could hear the kids playing the game throughout that end of the store. I could only see parts of the screen between the big kids... but oh so wanted to see more. This machine was like magic to me at the time. I had to go with my Mom shopping, but we came back about an hour later and those kids were still playing the game an hour later. We didn't go to the mall often, so that game became a fascination for me for months thereafter. I couldn't stop thinking about it... talking about it with my friends constantly. The next time we went to that mall, the game was apparently not working. Guess those kids played it to death! I had intentionally saved quarters to play it too. 😞 I didn't get to play Space Invaders until another year later when one showed up at the local bowling alley. By its very existence in that Sears store in 1978, this game planted the seed which turned into my obsession with computers and computer games. This game set the stage for my future life long career in computer systems analysis and programming. One moment in time for a young impressionable boy. Thank you for sharing this with us Ron. Great stuff!!

Simple games are so amazingly hard. When that last enemy goes berserk its panic mode. I miss the old days when skill not pay to win was still a thing.

Such a simple game, but so addictive and iconic! The sound of my childhood!

Beautiful looking cab for it's age. Always loved this type of space invader aesthetic. It makes experiencing the game 1st hand so much better than anything newer or emulated.

Back in the day when this game was all the rage, a buddy and I would play this at the local laundromat. There is actually a trick in the game where if you only take 11 shots then get the first ship you get a higher score ( 200 pts) for shooting that ship. After that the count is 15 next shots then hit the ship for the elevated score for that ship (200 pts). So what your friend was to do is keep the count on your shots as you are too engaged with the game to count and RUN!. Also, if you leave most of one row vertically intact the game progresses slower as opposed to clearing to the back row which makes the little guy go FAST! The strategy being, the slower you can keep it going the more spaceships you can shoot thus getting a higher score!

Joe, the level of details you provide about the games, components and history in the videos are amazing. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you for everything you do.

I think your call of M4 was right. Its entirely possible for one section of an op amp chip to fail on its own. The entire chip doesn't have to go bad. Seen it a number of times in PURC 5000 advanced digital paging systems.

I guess this is why later games had sound test screens, so you didn’t have to keep playing over and over just to check a fix! 😅

Sheesh! This takes me back. One of my first jobs out of high school (1979) was repairing the electronics of arcade video games. Sometimes we were really lucky and there was a circuit diagram. Sometimes.

I remember the very first time I saw one of these Space Invaders arcade machines, I was living with my stepmother in Subiaco near Perth in Western Australia, back in 1980 or 1981 if memory serves me right, I was doing my year 6 at Subiaco Primary school at the time and my class got treated to a day at the local Rollerskating Rink, anyway, I had done quite a few laps of the Rollerscating Rink and my legs were starting to feel a bit tired, as well as a bit sore from falling on my knees, so I headed to where there was an opening in the short wall that surrounded the Rink and made my way towards a round white table and chair, while I made my way over to the table and chair I heard a really bassy "Bup...Bup...Bup...Bup" sound and I went to investigate where it was coming from, it turned out to be a Space Invaders arcade game and I thought it was the coolest thing i had ever seen, the sounds it was making were pretty scary, I was probably about 10 or 11 years old at the time, I'm 53 years old now, if my memory serves me right, the Space Invaders arcade game I saw just had a black and white screen on it but looked a lot like the one in this video.

Wherever they programmed the game there was a team of people who played with op amps to make the bleep-bloops. "You know the saucer hit from Space Invaders? I did that. Mislabelled the schematics on it too, then went to work for Commodore, true story." "Oh, this week it's Commodore, last month it was Atari... no one tells stories of the 8-bit days like you though." **roll eyes**

Thanks for sharing. Such memories! Personally I preferred Carnival as a shoot-em-up which was released a bit later, but space invaders was instrumental in cementing the arcade industry. Remember when it came out on the 2600 - played it for ages with my friends.

Man o Man, i blew my paper route money on this game. What a trip back in time. Thanks !!!

32:10 Ah! That's better! I was thinking that there was still something wrong with the sound, and there was. It wasn't turned up loud enough! Thanks for the look into schematic errors... Something to keep in mind if you have a problem you just can't figure out…

I find it hilarious that in order to properly debug what was going on, it was necessary to move the spaceship to spot where it wouldn't get immediately destroyed.

wonder who the wizard was at Midway that thought up the semi silvered mirror .. one of my restoration buddies has a tiny upright Taito - completely different look, art, controls, cabinet. the Midway version is light years better / the front bezel art is a masterpiece in itself. anyone playing it in MAME is def missing out. had to sell my upright to pay bills. miss this one. got the Braze upgrade chip ... but the game is stupid hard. could never manage to take advantage of the last row before they get u (doesn’t kill ya thing), since hitting the last invader at that speed. sigh. whatever. classic. awesome of you to isolate the wrong lettering. the analog sounds are an integral piece of the puzzle to what made it a quarter eater.

Thanks, I loved this! Retro-engeneering is often the best way to go!

A time machine! Very interesting situation with mistakes in schematic.

Beautiful cabinet, seeing that backdrop takes me right back!

It's *such* a different mindset from today's systems, that you could build a video game in which different sounds fail independently. Cool video.

Subscribed - I'm amazed by all the descrete logic and analog circuitry that went into making the sounds for Space Invaders, something that today could be accomplished by a microprocessor such as a raspberry pi or even an arduino. I have an old laser that is similar vintage to Space Invaders and it too is full of descrete logic/gates/timers etc. The op-amps tend to blow occasionally when there is a mains surge as they are mesuring B+ of around 100V via a simple voltage divider, and current through a large low value high wattage resistor. There are gates to control safety interlocks, op amps to measure current, voltage, and laser power and timers to sequence all the events that happen during startup, running and shutdown. I keep it original, but you could easily substitute a switching PSU and microprocessor in place of all that stuff, and the power supply or "exciter" would be 1/3 of the size and weight! :)

Cool! I used to wipe off the bottom row and go up by rows. LOL Great video!

I have this exact machine in the basement waiting for me to try to diagnose and put back together.. glad I saw this before tackling this or I'd have been confused with the schematic inconsistencies!

I have the exact same Midway Space Invaders machine. After a few years of ownership I noticed the saucer sound stopped. I had the intention to eventually repair it. Before doing so I ordered the "save game" chip that also included "Space Invaders Deluxe" and a few other games I never heard off. Anyway, After booting up the machine with the new chip I noticed that it fixed the saucer sound problem I had. 2 years later and everything is still good now. g up the machine with the new chip I noticed that it fixed the saucer sound problem I had. 2 years later and everything is still sounding perfectly.

23:38 saw that coming a mile away. LOL Played Space invaders a lot on my grandparent's Ti-84. The first time I saw a Midway cabinet I was a little disappointed by how fancy it was. I thought someone had modded the cabinet or something. Nice work on this one.

That game sounds freaken amazing! Love that bass.

Love this video. The repair was cool, and I had fun watching Joe play Space Invaders! The backlit Midway moon background is really beautiful.

Very entertaining. Love those old analog circuits and sounds. It's like the old Moog synthesizers. Big components, easy to solder and work on. Oscillators, R's and C's....

I see by all of the other comments, this game has changed many peoples lives. I always think about the people that designed these games. This one in particular amazes me. The idea, concept, and execution is pure genius. It was so polar opposite of anything any of us had seen at the time. These were extremely creative people. I am still impressed by this game. As many others have said, this game made tons of money back in the day. You couldn't get near these things. Hordes of people standing around watching somebody else play while they waited. At our local Space Port arcade there were only a couple games that I remember having to be replaced because they were just plain worn out. Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, and Pacman. These three games looked like garbage and were so beat up, the arcade just put a new one in. The entire control panel cigarette burned (buttons and artwork) The screens has a permanent image burned into them.. This thing still makes me tense. LOL

Like the backdrop of moon and space beyond. A mix of old and new.

Hahaha, we need to run the games for a week to make sure its good, code for, this is so cool, ima keep this sucka for a few days 🤣🤣👊

thanks for this video. I have a broken explosion sound. This will help heaps.

First time I played Space Invaders was in a pub in country England in 1980. I was 9 or 10 years old and on holiday with my parents (my dad was working over there). We didn’t have many of them in NZ before that I don’t think. Was table top version. Brings back lots of memories. Thanks for the video.

Great knowledge great video from liverpool England 👍👍

So this cabinet essentially uses the Peppers ghost effect for adding a backdrop, that is awesome, never knew it originally was supposed to be played like that

Watching you play makes me wish I could have figured out the monitor collapse (can't remember if it's vertical or horizontal since the monitor is 'wrong') on my SI Deluxe. Got it in 1986 when I was a sophomore in highschool and only go to play 1/2 a game about a decade ago when I got the monitor to work right for about 2 minutes.

Great fix, good man📳📳

Yes new video from Ron. Thanks.

"Increase speed, drop down and reverse direction!" - Emperor Lrrr 😅 Love the backdrop on this version!

Nice job on Netflix I love that game also love the background brings me back

Mine is missing a few sounds. I have all the chips needed; I'm just lacking in soldering skill, haha. My first encounter with Space Invaders was at a mall arcade called "Fun Factory" back in the day. I don't remember if I actually got to play that day. There were quarters of people waiting to play lined up across the lip of the monitor bezel. It sure made an impression on me, though.

So basically the way I understand it, each of the sounds that this Space Invaders arcade game is capable of making, are produced by what are essentially analog synthesizer circuits.

Thanks.

As the invader formation gets narrower it has further to go across, plus it also drops fewer bombs and the safe areas for the base are wider. But as the formation gets really tall it gets more dangerous as the bottom is closer. I always narrowed it sideways to 3-4 columns, then tried to get them bottom up. I always liked to get the last two stacked vertically, that makes them easier to hit than if side by side - you can either shoot ahead of the top one or behind the bottom one, but never between them. If side by side and you miss the leader your shot will almost certainly pass between them.

Oh dear, how many Swedish crowns I put into one of these machines.... And I still suck at this game. At least now I don't have to pay anything to play it thanks to FPGA. It's a nice machine Ron, and just as I remembered it back in the day.

I`m still laughing after you called the 1up`s cardboard. Hilarious!

Oscar for sound effects🙃

Hey Ron!!

Also either you're shooting really fast two at a time or you have double blast as well in the sounds I couldn't tell which one. It looks like you might have some more strange magic. :-)

Do you remember the original Galaga that had the software error where the blue and yellow fast moving fleet would come so fast and diagonal in the corner and it was super human speed that you could barely see it was so fast and impossible to get out of the way The company, I think Namco, they issued new eeproms with the corrected code that fixed the glitch I remember when the game came out and I would play it at the local mall in town with my uncle and he would get so angry when it would do that glitch and he would scream at it and say there was no way you could get away from that why would they do that and it was only a short time maybe a couple months before that machine was either replaced or they replaced the eproms in the game I actually think they were ROM chips They were not eprom they were hard coded at the factory with the programming and could not be changed And there was I believe 8 different banks of ships that made up 8K of memory for each of the different screens and components and there was another set of chips that handled specifically The sounds the game made And I thought they actually had separate Giant XT size motherboards that had the sets of chips Maybe some of the original games did have that before the large enough chips were available to be able to put 80k worth of memory chips on a single board I'm 99% sure I've got a memory of watching a machine being fixed where they were pulling out boards And I am 1000% sure that the first digital linked traffic lights had rows of boards that plugged in that each handled something different I remember my town had six traffic lights and they were all the old rotary clock style with the thumb screws and the little mechanical levers and the boxes were very small like 8 in by 11 inches by 6 in deep And the clock wheel would turn and as the set screw would push the metal switch you would have the one side red and the other side green and that lever that it hit would turn on the yellow light circuit and all four hundred Watt bulbs for the four yellows on each side would all come on for one second or two seconds or 3 seconds depending on how far they moved the next thumb screw and as it moved it would hit the next switch lever and at the same time the yellow switch would be pushed to turn off the yellows and the red and green would flip so the green side would go from green to Green and yellow and then the green and yellow would turn off in the red would turn on and on the red side the red would be on and then the yellow would come on so you'd have red and yellow at the same time and then both the red and yellow would turn off in the green would turn on Prior to that design they had an extremely simple alternating red and green so the lever would be flipped and you'd have read on one side and green on the other and as the wheel came around it would flip the switch and the power would be turned on to the other light and turned off to the one that was on Those were dangerous and people wouldn't have any notice it was going to change and that's why they put the yellows in and I remember each change they made but for some reason our little city was chosen to test the first networked traffic lights and we didn't have that much traffic but these silver control boxes were about 8 ft high and 3 ft wide and 3 ft deep like a phone booth with a giant door on the front with smaller doors in the giant door that gave limited access for making the lights go to blink or all red or some other feature But this was in the 1970s I think 77 and it was way ahead of its time and they had the boards that were almost 3 ft wide and 3 ft deep and they had chips and relays and capacitors and coils and all sorts of parts and they had an edge connector on the back that was almost the whole length of the board and it plugged in to the back of the case that had all of these connectors and those were mounted horizontal and on the bottom there were other boards that were mounted vertical. And each board handled a different function and there was a networking board and it was I think either 2 25 pin or 1 50 pin connector and a giant fat cable that connected the two networking cards linking the one box to the other box and it was only a half a city block between the two lights but it would change the lights at the same exact time and I didn't understand why they didn't just wire one control box to the two sets of lights since they were changing at exactly the same time but they were prototypes for what would become the traffic control grid that cities rely on now to maintain traffic flow smoothly throughout the entire city and county and State I remember the counters that each time a car drove over the embedded antenna in each lane on each Street it would click and count how many cars there were and they could set how many cars they wanted before the light would be tripped and how long to wait after that number was reached and how long to wait if that number wasn't reached so if there was just one or two cars how long did they have to wait before the lights would change I remember the chips that were used in video games some of them were considered National Security because the simulations could be used for real life applications like traffic control or military tracking and guidance It seems funny now looking back at how primitive it was but the games ability to try to shoot down your ship was the start of AI And that software really was used and improved on by the military I got to watch one night when a test was being done on laser communication from the ground to a satellite using a self-tracking satellite dish on the ground and it would acquire The satellites pilot conventional signal that most satellites have that identify what satellite it is basically its name like a VIN number on a car and this thing acquired the satellite and the modem sent standard handshake protocols into the laser transmitter and we were wearing special goggles and we saw the beam on the dish on the ground turn on and we could hear the handshakes and the two-way Communications and we could see the beam that was the analog sounds being converted to digital light pulses and once it had handshake and established the connection it transmitted continuously as it tracked the satellite from one horizon to the other horizon until it was just about to go below the horizon and it knew it's elevation and disconnected and the beam stopped Nowadays this is how a lot of signals are sent especially for satellite to satellite they use laser beams but back then it was something right out of Star Trek I watched The Big bang theory and the episode where they were bouncing the laser signal off the Moon I remember a bunch of guys at the college doing that from the roof of the particle accelerator building We also used to bounce shortwave radio signals off the Moon And there is a whole group of ham radio operators that use micro meteorites that constantly disintegrate as they hit the Earth's atmosphere and they are able to bounce signals off of those and I still don't understand how they do that but I've seen it done The VHF ham band now has all of these digital chirps where they are using their Android phones hooked into aprs I think is what it's called on the ham radios and they're able to transmit very short messages basically their call sign and the call sign of the other station they're trying to communicate with and the GPS location and a few other characters, but it allows the app on the phone to show the actual current GPS location on the map of where all of the ham radio operators are that are transmitting this data It's pretty cool and to think they were doing this before there were smartphones before it became commonplace and easy to do Anyways I've ranted long enough

The reason all 3 of those early manuals are wrong is because they were just copied :). No one bothered to check if the original was correct. Come on people .... lol :) Space Invaders is such a classic. Thanks for showing this one off.

"We got a loose screw here." I think we all know what that is 🤐 I admit I've never seen a version with that backdrop in it, but it definitely pops.

He's hooked, he's hooked, his brain is cooked!

was there a differnece between the Taito games and the Midway? Great video, bought back memories

Fun fact! The increasing falling speed of the invaders was never intended, but as the CPU had less to draw, it could update the animations more frequently!

Wish I would have known this in the 90s when I owned a SI cabinet....😳😝

Just thought I’d add Ron, that the part marked as 4006 is the same chip as the 4016, (marked N5,J5) there are four switches in a pack and there’s just one on the board… The CD4006 is a counter it’s here on the board but it’s just makes the white noise sounds, along with s9me EX OR gates. More errors :)

I think my first direct encounter with the arcade Space Invaders was with a cocktail model at the local Pizza Hut. But of course the Atari 2600 cartridge was a huge hit in 1980 and I played that incessantly. That's different enough from the original game that Taito doesn't like it, so it doesn't show up in licensed compilations and such. But to me, that's the iconic version.

The first game to captivate and turn me into an arcade bum until the age 17. What a quick improvement from this to PacMan and then defender just two years later.

That my method of playing, The pro's though have it figured out that the invaders don't shoot at you on the last level before death. So they set it up go get them all the way down there and systemiticly wipe out the screen. Probably can be you tubed searched for the method. Get crazy scores!!! If you have 8 hrs or longer lol

I was watching my favourite 80s tv show 'Only fools and horses' the other day and they have a space invaders arcade machine sat proudly in the corner of the pub. Different design on the side of it though, maybe its not midway version?

I miss playing gauntlet. No one else ever ported it out to any worthy format.

thx for the video ! You seem to have a bad strategy🙂 First shoot the lower ships, and work yourself through to the upper ships 🙂

I think the Saucer Sound circuit has to be working in a way cause if it wasn't, then by logic you wouldn't be hearing any Saucer Sounds at all, that's assuming that the Saucer Sound circuit produces all the Saucer Sounds.

what a Classic

Shoot the saucer with your 22nd shot first in each frame, then shoot it with your 11th shot thereafter to get 300 points for each saucer.

Dam traces you can see with your eyes and resistors the size of school buses 😂

I've seen this happen before due to them forgetting to update the included schematics when they went from prototype to production boards.

1 OR 2PLAYERS BUTTON / 1PLAYER BUTTON - you'd think they would have fixed that by adding a space.

The UFO blowup sound was commonly known to not work, even brand new.

JOE CLASSIC, What would the Antistatic tape be used and to fix what problem?

Opportunity missed! “There’s a loose screw somewhere…” “My brother has a channel called My Brother Donnie…”

I'm going to have to watch this in detail as I recently picked up a Space Invaders the board was working and then when I rebuilt the monitor the board stopped working. It's like these old things have a mind of Their Own. Heck I would rather have a Pneumatic electromechanical than this thing

How did they make the "shields" green on this version of the game? If my memory is correct isn't it just piece of green plastic.

28:35 In a video about repairing a 44 year old video game, of course there's a loose screw somewhere.

"There's a loose screw somewhere" 😄

Very good troubleshooting and schematic reading skills. Second to none on KZfaq!

21:25 just a question here is there a "Notes" section on the schematic? They might have sent a updated sheet with a note about the schematic being wrong and what the correct locations are.

"there's a loose screw somewhere", yeah I've been meaning to say something for a while now.

"Just ONE MORE GAME...!"

Something sounds different about the sound when you shoot the invaders but I don't know if that's Midway specific or not. play another version of the game if you have it and you'll hear what I'm talking about.

Bigfoot could sue for the side art. I see giant cutouts of a thin metal bigfoot for sale at a flea market and a Space Invaders monster cutout like the side art needs to happen.

Ozama wars...I never seen a review..1978 too.

We used to cal the UFO Hoolio.

Never seen a symbol for a cmos contact look like this. Maybe it should have been 4066 instead of 4006, it’s the same as a 4016 just better.

c mon now people fix those diagrams ! dig dug is valling btw 😁

A couple of Easter eggs to report: The earliest version of this game -- Taito's first release -- reportedly had an Easter egg where "something" happened if you destroyed an alien from the bottom row, last. Some reports said it worked with an alien from the second-from-the-bottom row as well. I never saw one to try it out myself; everything I ran into back then was a Midway version. (I'm not really surprised, since Taito's release was in Japan and they licensed the game to Midway for its worldwide release. I've never been to Japan, much to my disappointment.) The second Easter egg was in the Atari game system console (Atari 2600) version of Space Invaders. In that game, which had a variety of modes you could play, if you put the cartridge into the system, held the reset button down, and then turned on the console, you would start in a version of the game that gave you two shots on the screen at one time instead of just one. I had that game and it worked as advertised. Not an Easter egg, but some people think it is one: True randomness is impossible with computers, so they simulate it. The simulated "random" score for the UFO wasn't very sophisticated. You would score 300 points instead of 100 points if you hit the UFO with your 55th shot. After the 55th shot, count 15 and repeat. (So with shot 55, 70, 85, 100, 115, etc. Start over with each level.) For those who want to know more about this game, I offer this link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders

Does anyone remember a space invaders cabinet that had a physical tank center front that turned left and right, and the invaders were projections of red lights along the back wall?

this is common knowledge. I wrote some years about in an german forum.

Should it not be the ZILOG Z80A CPU, it would been kind of cool if they had written it for the ZILOG Z800 processor which would made it run faster as there would have native UMUL,MULS,UDIV and DIVS there would be no need to write the multiply and divide routines.

I also collect old Japanese game consoles.

To score 300 on the mystery saucer every time, fire 21 shots, hit the saucer with the 22. Then for the rest of the round it's 14 shots, hit the saucer with the 15th shot. It's been a long time I could be off by one but I think that's right.

I owned a "Space Invaders 2" played it to death until I got that good I could never died and just play until I got bored !?

The biggest glitch this game does is the dotted lines....

A separate circuit for each sound? How inefficient they were in those days.

The only different between the Taito and Midway version, is the sound, has different sounds Mame has only the sound for the Taito version Fixing this bug, the sounds now is more accurated and how can be sound really now

Hey I have a TKG4 Donkey Kong PCB, graphical glitch starts and hangs can u guys fix it for me? :) I thinks it's a ram problem.

I thought there was like sounds when it was dropping the bombs I could be thinking of Galaga

Watching this makes me want to fire up mame and play this game