Epic Epoch TV Block MB

Say that with a mouthful of spaghetti!

I have been to eBay! I bought some fings!

Here is one of them - a 1979 Japanese Breakout & Pinball console -

“Epoch TV Block MB”

JUST LOOOOOK AT IT. It’s ok, we’ll wait while you gaze upon it’s splendour.

Finished? Good - It even came in a reasonable condition box.

This lovely gaming item is actually a clone of Atari’s Video Pinball C380 (sexy title, Atari *not*). Epoch purchased ‘games on a chip’ from Atari and made their own versions of the console. Epoch improved upon Atari’s design a bit, by piping the bleeps and bloops to the TV, rather than having an internal speaker. This variant is one of two different ‘Block’ games. The other is known as just ‘TV Block’ and has slightly different game on it.

Games

• Flipper Pinball 1

• Racket Pinball 1

• Flipper Pinball 2

• Racket Pinball 2

• Basketball Game

• Block Breaker 1

• Block Breaker 2

The controller is a variable resistor, or potentiometer attached to a large dial (almost all bat and ball tv games use this system of movement). This console also has two large bumper buttons at the sides, rather like a pinball machine. The buttons on the machine are (from left to right) RESET / GAME SELECT / LEVEL and the large one is SERVE. The two large bumper buttons are for the flippers for the pinball type games.

This was a complete steal in my opinion, but do you know what was even better than getting this console?

Oh yes -

The boxes are a little beaten, with one more worse for wear than the other, but I am totally happy with them and the actual games are in really good condition. Japanese kids really knew how to look after their toys!

The boxes both included everything that was originally sold back in the 70s.

Including -

• Main console

• Mains adapter - 100v AC adapter to 9VDC - Centre Pin Negative. The console can also run on 6 huge batteries!

• RF TV Selector box GAME / TV

• RF Cable ‘hard wired’ to the console

• Smol Instruction manual

  

If you have met me before or read my rants opinions on RF, you’ll know I’m not a fan.

Also, this would run on a JNTSC RF television, of which I have ZERO in my collection of about thirty plus CRT TVs / monitors. So, these things will need to be modified into good old composite video and audio. No HDMI here, madam.

This thing wasn’t as easy as with one of my earlier Tinkering blogs, where I modded a ‘Super TV Boy’ in about eight minutes. This will need some parts removing and a small pre-made pcb for the video and a home made vero board circuit for the sound. Luckily a very smart person on the Atari Age Forum had already done the work. He’d even done some other composite mods for two other Japanese consoles that I own. They will be made playable in due course…

Andy (marauder666) sold me some of his pre made pcbs, which needed a few components soldering to them, as they are actually composite mod boards for an Atari 2600. He also guided me through making a small circuit on copper track vero board and where to fit the circuits to the main game pcb. It all went quite swimmingly and I was block breaking and pin balling in no time.

Inside the machine was very simple and very easy to work on. Old Japanese electronics seems to be on another level in build quality. Just look at the thickness of wire they used back then and actual aluminium parts holding the buttons in place!

And look what I found - EVIDENCE!!!

More Mods Required

(and I don’t mean any of those Parka wearing reprobates from Quadraphenia)

I have noticed on just about ALL the bat ‘n’ ball TV games, whether it be an Atari Super Pong, a Grandstand back & white ‘sports’ thing to this Japanese number - the pot controllers are just wrong. When you turn the dial counter clockwise on this machine, the ‘bat’ goes off the left hand side of the screen (past the screen boundary line graphic). It also goes off WAY to far the opposite direction. I think my bat ended up somewhere in Scunthorpe. The movement was also ‘scratchy’ and erratic.

This bothered me somewhat.

The potentiometer on this game is a 250k ohms version. I had a few spare pots and tried a few out. They just didn't work properly. Some game just half the range of movement you’d need and some made the bat disappear completely - I learned later on this is because that graphic is made using the hardware (the pot itself). I asked Andy on Atari Age if this could be fixed with a different value potentiometer and he hadn’t had much joy with differing value pots either. He did suggest I took the pot apart and clean the inside track, which helped quite a lot, as well as swapping out the wires for shielded ones.

I decided to take it one step further and would try and limit the radial range of movement on the pot knob mechanically. Mechanically is more about what I do (rather than electronically or via black magic). I set about designing a small collar to sit under the nut on the potentiometer with some screw holes and a radial slot, which would limit the range of movement. Above this and attached to the pot would be a reproduction knob, with a hidden hole and pin on the underside, to ride inside the radial slot. I did some calculations with a vernier caliper and an engineering protractor and somehow managed to hit the sweet spot first time! I even 3D printed a quick mock up just in case and to not waste filament if it were wrong. In fact, I stupidly printed the first one with the hole on the wrong side, that’s why this one has two holes. Looks happy to have this two holes, though!

The collar without the fastening screws.

Here is video evidence of me making something that works! I’m using the proto-knob and a drill as the 3mm pin.

It took me ages to draw the reproduction knob as a 3D model. My CAD CAM software makes it difficult to make radial tapered parts. Curse it, but I prevailed!

Mine is the clean white one, the original, the Murray Mint coloured one…

That’s about all the modding and restoring that needed doing. The breakout game is pretty authentic to the Atari arcade game, the pinball games are quite fun (for 1979) and the basketball game is just plain odd.

Here is the finished article. I’m in two minds whether to do away with the composite cables hanging out the back and hard wired to the pcb VS drilling holes in the unit and adding composite sockets. Hmmm. At the moment, I could put this thing back to stock, but I don’t think anyone in Japan will be using it on an RF TV anytime soon…

NEAT AND TIDY!