About a year ago, I started casually looking at the machine. For such a beautiful cabinet – boy, was it a mess. It had been converted to a Pole Position knock-off called Top Racer, and not in a good way. The monitor was replaced with a G07, harness replaced, power supply cut up and replaced by multiple switchers, control panel hacked, shifter panel hacked, and just basically messed up. They went so far as to throw large Pole Position stickers over the sides – which, wow, not good. Where to begin? The work broke down into (roughly) 11 parts:
- Deconversion
- Monitor
- Harness
- Shifter Assembly
- Pedal Assembly
- Coin Door
- Steering Assembly
- PCB
- Power Supply
- Cabinet
- Testing
This website is intended to provide some insight and detail as to how this project went – in part for those that run across a Night Driver cockpit machine that they’d like to restore, in part because the process and journey are informative more broadly for those that are looking to restore games, and finally in part because I just needed somewhere to document this and wanted to share with others who might care.