Over the weekend Mason and I zipped down to Dallas to visit my friend Justin. One thing Justin wanted to do was take Mason to Gameworks, located in the Grapevine Mills Mall.
Gameworks is definitely a new school arcade. None of the machine there take quarters or tokens; instead, everything works off of a “game card” that you swipe at each machine. I’ve never been a fan of game card systems as they cause you to overspend and it make it hard to keep track of how much money you have left (which is probably the point).
Justin and Mason jumped right in on some House of the Dead 4 action, blowing away zombies. Mason played a little Beach Head 2002 and he and I took turns on the Star Wars Pod Racing machine. (I only took 4th place. The force was not with me.)
In the middle of the room stood two motion-controlled games (Initial D) which Mason took a go at. All I can say is, it’s a good thing that game has a seat belt.
From there, the three of us headed over to the pinball tables. There weren’t too many to choose from (five or six), but they did have Family Guy, South Park, and the Sopranos, so that was fun.
As far as older games go, there basically weren’t any. I saw one lone Frogger machine in one of the company’s custom conversion retro cabinets. I didn’t get a picture of it, but here’s a picture of the same style of cabinets that I took at the Gameworks in Las Vegas.
Other than Frogger, the next oldest game I saw was Mortal Kombat 4. The place is definitely not geared toward retrogamers. Then again, I have a place dedicated to retrogaming in my backyard, so I really shouldn’t be complaining.
One good thing I should say about Gameworks is that I didn’t see a single broken machine. I didn’t experience a single button or joystick that didn’t work. It looks like they really stay on top of maintenance there.
The second annual Oklahoma Electronic Game Expo (OEGE) took place Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at Oklahoma City Community College. OEGE was actually a weekend-long event for me, as out-of-town friends of mine began trickling in Friday afternoon.
Not to be confused with the similarly named Oklahoma Video Game Expo (OVGE), OEGE is organized and thrown by a local college club/group. While the focus of OVGE is (mostly retro) video games, the theme of OEGE is a little more difficult to discern. It’s definitely different than your run-of-the-mill gaming convention; it’s more like a trade show. The focus really wasn’t on buying and selling old games. (There were only three people there selling video games, and two of them were friends of mine who ended up hanging out at my house Saturday night.) Of the fifteen or so vendors who made it to the show, half of them weren’t selling anything at all.
The coolest stuff for me personally at the show was the retro stuff. Local circuit bending musician TV Death Squad performed live for an hour during the show. When I saw a couple of punks carrying in a bunch of DJ equipment I was fearing for the worst, but TV Death Squad turned out to be really entertaining. Halfway through their set, the DJ handed Mason and Morgan hacked joysticks that played different sounds and samples and let them jam along to the music he was playing.
OEGE 2009 also marked the debut of Earl “Phosphor Dot Fossils” Green’s second PDF DVD. Both PDF volumes (Volume I and Volume II) feature three hours of chronological video game footage, commercials, facts and trivia. If you like footage of old games or enjoy things like Pop-Up Video, you will love these DVDs. If you didn’t pick them up at the show, check out Earl’s site and pick them up there for $20 shipped to anywhere in the US. I think there’s a special two-volume set just around the corner as well.
Fellow author Brett Weiss, author of Classic Home Video Games, 1972-1984: A Complete Reference Guide was also in attendance. Brett’s always a cool guy to catch up with, and along with his books he was also one of the three tables selling old games (along with Phosphor Dot Fossils and fellow game collector 98Pacecar).
And then there was my table. Last year at OVGE I tried doing too many things at once: demonstrating arcade parts, running a Commodore demo, selling a gaggle of video game stuff and (of course) signing and selling books. At OEGE I decided to simplify things and just sell books. Armed with only the bare essentials (including a box of books and two impressive signs printed by Paco over at Action Signs and Design in Norman — seriously, give Paco a call at (405) 364-3879 for all your vinyl sign and banner printing needs and tell him I sent you!) I set up my space and, along with my buddy Jeff, spent the majority of the day making sad puppy dog eyes at college students as they walked by and sneered at “the guy selling books.”
I was scheduled to give my presentation “Collecting Arcade Games” at 2:30pm, but at exactly 2:30pm there were only three other people besides me in the room, and two of them were my friend Jeff and my son Mason. I waited another ten minutes before starting and at that point there were almost 20 people in the room so I figured that was as good as it was going to get. (Unfortunately my speech was scheduled right during the highlight of the big game tournament, which is where 2/3 of the attendees were by that point in time.) A few other people trickled in late but no one left early, so that was a good sign. As always I started off okay, got really nervous five minutes into the presentation, and calmed down another five minutes later. I’m sure if I saw a video of my presentation (and it was filmed by the college) I’m sure I would hate it, but it felt … well, it didn’t feel like the worst presentation I ever gave, so I guess that’s good. There were no technical difficulties and I was exactly on time so, eh, it was what it was. There were a few people in the crowd smiling and nodding so it felt like I connected with at least a few people.
I connected with a few others during the show. I’m terrible with names but there was the musician kid with the long hair, the kid who I talked to about writing fiction (everybody under 25 is a kid to me these days), and the staff member who I talked to about DOS and old luggable computers and Linux and BBSes. Several years ago at OVGE I found that if I put out modern systems I got a lot of kids standing around playing my stuff all day, and when I put old stuff out I get interesting people to talk to. I also learned that if you put out candy you will have the most popular booth at the show. I skipped the candy this year and played it low key.
As always, my buddy Jeff was indispensable at the show. Jeff helped me run the table, wrangle up Mason, keep an eye on things when I would wander off to take pictures, and basically be “the responsible one”. I could not have done it without him. Again.
Speaking of pictures, I just installed ZenPhoto tonight so I might as well put my OEGE pictures there. Check it out and tell me how it compares to the other (Picasa) albums. I can tell you this — the ZenPhoto album looks like a lot less maintenance when it comes to adding new pictures and I suspect (if it runs okay) I will move everything over to it very shortly.
Thanks to Susan for helping with the house and the party planning. Thanks to everybody who bought a book, came to my presentation, or just stopped by the table to chat. Thanks to Paco for the rush job on the signs, and Drew Stone for doing such a good job on the show. Thanks to Brian, Ginger, Emmy, Darren, Steve, Earl, Charles, Dad, Linda, Doug, and everybody else who came out to the show or hung out at the house this weekend. And finally, extra special thanks to Jeff for putting up with my kookiness and spending his entire Saturday helping me out.
Susan flies out to DC tomorrow; she’ll be gone Monday through Thursday afternoon; Thursday morning, I hit the road for Cleveland. Sometime between now and then, I have to install our new home camera/security system. I’m really looking forward to next weekend, and I’m kind of looking forward to next weekend being over.
For those of you who don’t know, I have a part-time second job. I’m the maintenance guy for a local arcade … that just happens to be located in my backyard.
I know lots of people who think it would be fun to own an arcade game, but most of those people don’t know what kind of work goes in to keeping one up and running. Sure, these beasts were pretty reliable back when they were new, but all of my games are somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five years old, and many of them are getting cantankerous in their old age. It seems like these days I spend a lot more of my time working on my games than playing them.
A few of my out-of-state friends are coming to visit next weekend for OEGE, and I know they’ll want to check out the arcade. One of the things on my mighty to-do list this weekend was to sweep through the arcade and make what repairs I could make given the amount of time available.
It’s no fun playing X-Men when all Wolverine can do is jump. As this four-player game always gets interested players, I spent about an hour testing this machine and swapping out the five bad buttons I found. Wolverine can now punch, jump, and use his mutant power!
A few months ago Make Trax died. This afternoon I pulled it out of the arcade and put it in the garage. Then I pulled Ms. Pac-Man out of the garage and moved it into the arcade. The two briefly met on the front porch of the arcade. It was awkward.
No words were exchanged, and soon Ms. Pac-Man found her way into the arcade. The paint’s a little faded and the machine definitely needs new t-molding, but considering I paid $80 for it and it works perfectly, I have no complaints.
Finally, several of you who have read Invading Spaces have asked to see the final resting place of my Defender cabinet, the one I got that had one perfect side and three rotten ones. The rotten ones went in the trash and the good one was mounted on the door of my arcade. (Yes, the door is now very heavy.)
Hopefully before next Saturday I’ll find time to move either Centipede or 720 out to the arcade. Then she’ll be ready.
Greg Kennedy asks: “I have a question about your MAME cabinet: how much do you play it vs. the other real-deal machines you own? I wonder sometimes if the diversity offered by MAME is a match for dedicated hardware or not [...] I asked because I just got my MAME cab working and was wondering how others’ experience pans out over time.”
Greg, I’m so glad you asked!
The debate between MAME Cabinets and Arcade Cabinets (aka: “dedicated arcade machines” or “real machines”) has raged, I’m guessing, since the day the first MAME cabinet was built and will continue to rage for as long both MAME Cabinets and Arcade Cabinets co-exist. Some people love MAME Cabs and don’t see the point in dedicated machines, while others cling to dedicated machines and detest MAME and emulation. Like most technical discussions, rather than taking a definitive “right” or “wrong” stance, I tend to evaluate the positive and negative points of each and then apply the appropriate solution to an individual’s needs — in other words, I rarely subscribe to “one size fits all” solutions. Questions like “How many megapixels should my next camera have?” and “how big of a hard drive do I need?” can not honestly be answered without finding out additional information, and finding a solution that meets that specific person’s needs. Likewise, MAME vs. Real is a complicated matter and a personal choice that is different for every single person.
There are many reasons why I enjoy, own and collect arcade games. I grew up in the 80s playing real arcade games in real arcades. Just seeing an arcade cabinet up close, even one that’s turned off, brings back memories of those times. For me, the actual videogame itself is such a small part of the enjoyment. I mean, I love my Ms. Pac-Man cabinet; I love the artwork, I love the shape, I love colors and the sounds … but to be honest, I don’t like playing it all that much. I’m no good at it, really. I’m sure there are small children who could beat me at the game, if it were somehow able to keep their attention long enough.
The machines I play the most are my favorites. If you’ve read Invading Spaces you already know most of the stories. I own RoadBlasters because I used to play it at the bowling alley. I own Shinobi because I used to play it up at the neighborhood convenient store. I own Gauntlet because Jeff, Andy and I used to play spent all day playing it. I own Karate Champ because my friend and I used to play it against one another, head-to-head. In fact, I own the actual machine my friend and I used to play on. Ain’t that somethin’.
But more than any one specific machine I like the video and audio chaos created by twenty or thirty machines flashing and bleeping at the same time, all vying for your quarters. That’s something you don’t get from a MAME machine. It’s something you get by owning twenty or thirty machines and turning them on all at the same time. Is that a weird reason to buy twenty or thirty arcade machines? Probably. Maybe even definitely. And maybe I like owning them because I know my kids will never experience arcades the way I experienced them, and I’d like for them to — although, as time goes on, I’m already finding that those were my memories, not theirs. (That’s a topic for another day.)
I have gone on the record as stating that collecting arcade games has got to be one of the dumbest hobbies of all time. Machines are big and heavy; there are logistics involved in moving and storing them. They break down, more than you would think. As a kid I thought these flashing monoliths were indestructible and maybe back then they were; the older I get, the more fragile they appear. They are expensive to buy, to run, and to maintain. They can be financial pitfalls.
MAME, on the other hand, is relatively cheap. Broken arcade games can be picked up for almost nothing. For the price of cheap PC, monitor, some wire and some elbow grease, you can turn that cabinet into a MAME Cabinet. It looks like an arcade cabinet and plays arcade games, but its “guts” are a PC, and the games are emulated. There are technical differences between MAME machines and vintage arcade machines, the most common of which are differences in monitors. Classic arcade monitors work more like television sets than computer monitors (and are completely different than LCD monitors). While “arcade experts” can tell the difference in a second, the average person off the street probably wouldn’t notice and, more than likely, won’t care. I can’t say if it would bother you or not.
The problem (well, one of) with MAME machines is that they play everything. With a joystick and a couple of buttons you can emulate literally thousands of games. Add a trackball and a spinner and a steering wheel and eventually you’ll be able to play essentially everything — of course by that point in time it won’t look much like a real arcade game, and truth told that may be one of the things that vintage collectors have against MAME cabinets. They don’t “look” right, or at least most of them don’t. (Mine is virtually indistinguishable from a real cabinet; in fact, it’s in an unmolested cabinet and I often leave it running a game when people come over just to see if they’ll notice that it’s running MAME).
Pong is, especially when compared to most videogames released over the past twenty-five years, a fairly boring game. The game’s instructions printed on the machine were ridiculously simple (“Avoid missing ball for high score.”). It is something my three-year-old can play and my seven-year-old would quickly tire of, and yet people lined up to play it. I spent hours playing Pong with friends, because that was all we had. I, and maybe you too, have spent hours playing a game that in retrospect wasn’t very good because we only had a few games. Sky Diver for the Atari 2600 seemed pretty fun back in the day when I only had a few games.
There’s a weird psychological thing that happens to me (and maybe everybody, I don’t know) whenever I get a bunch of stuff all at once. I’ll check out the best of the best and the rest never gets touched, or at least not for a long time. Back in physical-land, this wasn’t such a problem. I’d buy three albums and only listen to two of them. I’d buy five a dozen books and only read a couple of them. We weren’t dealing with the astronomical numbers we have in today’s digital world. Suddenly things like Napster and p2p file sharing and all kinds of wonderful (I mean terrible) things came along. All of a sudden I wasn’t getting three albums; I was getting three hundred. I wasn’t getting five books; I was getting five-thousand. While the number of things I was getting increased exponentially, the amount of things I consumed did not. After downloading 300 albums, I didn’t listen to two-hundred of them — I listened to a dozen or so before the next albums started coming in. This isn’t a new phenomenon. I can remember trading Commodore games with kids at school, bringing home ten disks of games, and only playing a handful of them more than once. And, to be sure, it’s not limited to digital files. If you’ve ever picked up a stack of cheap videogames at a garage sale and found yourself only playing the best of the crop, you know what I’m talking about.
I remember the first time I downloaded and tried an Atari 2600 emulator for my PC. The zip file, which was around 3mb in size, included both an emulator and every single known Atari 2600 game. I don’t remember the actual number, but there were five or six-hundred different games included. Did I play them all? No. Did I play half of them? No. I played about fifteen or twenty of them, and many of those were for less than a minute. As a kid I can remember spending entire rainy days playing Pinball and Asteroids on the 2600; this time around, I only played them for five, ten minutes, tops. The vast majority of the ROMs never got played.
I would be lying if I said part of the reason was because they weren’t the real thing. I love boxes, manuals and artwork. I like to touch the games, feel them in my hands. Is that to day I am anti-emulation? Absolutely not. I think they both have their place. Emulation will never completely replace the feeling of playing a real game on real hardware, but the ease of which ROMs are obtained and played (as compared to buying and maintaining old hardware and software) is, quite frankly, simpler and less expensive. I appreciate both methods of game playing.
Which, somehow, brings us back full circle to MAME cabinets — and specifically, my MAME cabinet.
The biggest mistake I made when building my cabinet was copying every single ROM MAME would play on to my cabinet. I think that’s something around 5,000 ROMs — 5,000 arcade games, sitting in one upright cabinet, waiting to be played. Many of them will be waiting forever. Even as someone who grew up hanging around arcades, there are hundreds — no, thousands — of games I have never heard of in MAME. Some of them are obscure. Some of them are Japanese. Some of them are just plain bad. None of them will ever be played by me, or anyone ever playing my cabinet.
Which begs the question, why are they even on there? For two reasons, mainly. One is for when people say, “Have you ever played game X? You should try it, it’s really fun!” Instead of trying to track down the game, I simply walk to my MAME cabinet and lo and behold the game is waiting there for me. Isn’t that an odd thought? Twenty years ago, someone wrote a game. Ten years ago, someone wrote a program to play that game. Five years ago, I downloaded that game and built a cabinet to play it. Last night, I played it for the first time. What a long, lengthy journey for that little piece of code! The other reason I leave all those games on my MAME machine is because whenever people come over to visit my arcade (not as often as you would think), immediately after seeing my collection of games they say, “Oh my gosh do you have GAME X?” or “I remember playing GAME Y back in the day!” When it’s a game I don’t own, it’s fun to walk over to the MAME machine, punch a few buttons and bring up a slice of their own childhood. Those people do not care about the differences between emulation and dedicated games. They do not care that the resolution is higher on a computer monitor than an arcade monitor. They do not wish to hear that they only think they are playing a classic game when, in reality, they are playing a nearly indistinguishable computer-emulated version said game on a computer piled inside an arcade cabinet. They only care that at that moment, they are playing Joust. They have been swept away to the past, like I am every day, to a simpler time. They smile, and that makes me smile.
When I first began collecting arcade games almost fifteen years ago, I made a mental list of games I wanted to own someday. The list is fluid; it changed a lot in the early days and changes less often today. My initial list was made without any technical knowledge of arcade games or prices. For example, at one point in time I wanted to own a Pole Position cabinet. Everyone Pole Position owner I have ever met falls into one of two categories; those who continually fix theirs, and those who own broken machines. I also wanted to own a Dragon’s Lair cabinet at one time, without knowing that the laserdiscs and laserdisc players that play them are expensive to replace and dying due to old age. The more I learned, the more that list rearranged itself. Over time the real “must own” list formed itself: 720, Gauntlet, Centipede, Commando, Karate Champ, Mortal Kombat, Rampart, Shinobi, Speed Buggy, Super Offroad, Zaxxon, and so on. If that list sounds familiar, it’s because I own them all.
That’s not to say I own every game I ever wanted to own. Some of them, like Elevator Action and Mat Mania, were sold. Others like Star Wars and Scramble, broke and I could never get working. And then there are the ones I haven’t found yet, at least not at a price I’m willing to pay — stuff like Double Dragon, a game I think is worth a hundred bucks and the current market thinks is worth more (I’ll wait ‘em out). Those games, I play in MAME, on my cabinet, and I don’t mind it a bit. No, it is not better than the real thing. Yes, it is better than nothing.
Several years ago, some evil genius created the 48-in-1 JAMMA PCB. Like the name implies, the board plays 48 different games, and fits in one cabinet. The board includes games like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Frogger, and, well, 45 others. And boy, did my wish list of games ever change the day I bought one of those. For around a hundred bucks, I could now play almost fifty classic games in the space of one cabinet!
But something funny happened after buying that 48-in-1. A few months later I bought a Centipede cabinet. Centipede is one of the 48 games included on the board. Since then I’ve picked up Ms. Pac-Man and Zaxxon, two other games included on the 48-in-1 too. What does it all mean? I’m not sure. I can tell you this … all three of those games have classic artwork or vintage styling, something you just don’t get from a generic 48-in-1 cabinet.
So how often do I play my MAME cabinet? Not that much, I guess. At this point there are around ten games I play on it from time to time: Jungle Hunt, Double Dragon, Excitebike, Zoo Keeper … a few others. Chances are before I’m all done with this hobby, I’ll own those too. For the average person, I would say a MAME Cabinet is a pretty sane way to get into the hobby without letting it take over your life. Then again, worrying about what sane people do has never been a big concern of mine.
Behind every collection there is a collector, and behind every collector there is a holy grail that drives him — that one, seemingly unobtainable item that always seems to be just out of reach for one reason or another. For those unfamiliar with the concept, “holy grail” comes from the 1975 comedy “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, and it was also featured in the third Indiana Jones film, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”
There are multiple reasons why grails become grails. The first quantifier is typically the law of supply and demand — in other words, there are fewer items available than there are people who want them. In some cases, this alone is enough to make the item highly desirable. Take the Star Wars Blue Snaggletooth action figure for example. For those who don’t know the story, Kenner made several of its early action figures based on waist-high, black and white photographs of several of the film’s cantina creatures. In the movie Snaggletooth appears (for two seconds) as a short creature in a red jumpsuit, but Kenner mistakenly made their figure as a tall creature in a blue jumpsuit. The Blue Snaggletooth figures ended up in early playsets, but by the time the figure ended up in stores on a card, it had been redesigned to match his appearance in the movie (short/red jumpsuit). Blue Snaggletooths (Snagleteeth?) are an example of something being collectible simply because there aren’t very many of them. No one likes Snaggletooth because of his two seconds of screen time in the Star Wars cantina and nobody needed him to re-enact, well, anything. The blue figures are highly sought simply because there aren’t very many of them. (I have one, of course.)
There are other variables that come in to play as well. A good story never hurts (see: the C-3P0 penis card or the even more offensive R-rated Billy Ripkin Baseball Card). One additional piece of advice my dad always offers about restoring cars, which applies to many other collecting genres, which is: “Before restoring a car, you should make sure it was a good car to begin with.”
After seeing the Coca-Cola Breakdancers way back in 1984, I decided I wanted to be a professional breakdancer when I grew up. This faded when, after seeing Enter the Ninja, I decided I wanted to instead be a professional ninja. That career path also fell by the wayside around 1985/86 when professional skateboarding re-exploded. Seemingly from out of nowhere, skateboarding was reborn. The first thing I remember seeing was the OP Vert Skateboarding Championships on ESPN. I remember thinking at the time, “I can’t believe they are showing skateboarding on ESPN!” (My, how times have changed!) Pretty soon I had a Variflex skateboard (the only brand they sold at Wal-Mart, I think). It sucked; the wheels didn’t roll well, the wood sagged, and the whole thing was so heavy I couldn’t do any tricks on it (at least what’s what I blamed it on). A few months later I bought my first “real” board. a blue on pink G&S Neil Blender, and that Christmas I got my first new board, an Alva Fred Smith III complete with Tracker trucks and Slimeball wheels. And yeah, with these boards I could skate (at least a little) better. Louis Lents was my main skating buddy and since the two of us both had motorcycles and skateboards we would cruise around, looking for sweet skate spots. Andy and Jeff and I skated quite a bit together, too. For at least a little while, it seemed like everybody skated. Skating continued to grow in popularity with films like 1986′s Thrashin’ and 1987′s Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol.
Also in 1986, Atari released one of my favorite arcade games of all time: 720, named for a seemingly impossible trick (two full rotations in the air). In 1984, Mike McGill pulled off the first 540 spin (called a “McTwist”, after McGill). For a year and a half the McTwist was THE trick to learn until, in late 1985, Tony Hawk pulled off the first 720. 720 (the game, from hereon in) was named for that trick as it was considered to be one of the hardest tricks of all time. (It took Hawk another 14 years to add another 180 degree turn and pull off a 900, which he finally did at the 1999 X-Games).
So anyway, back to 720. In the game you play a skateboard punk in Skate City. The goal is to work your way through four levels of four parks, earning as many points as possible throughout your adventure. You have a pre-determined amount of time to get from park to park; take too long, and a swarm of bees will come buzzing for you, along with an ominous warning spoken in that classic mid-80s Atari speech-synthesis voice: “SKATE OR DIE!”
.
So, getting back to what makes things like arcade games a holy grail. For one, 720 was and is one of my favorite arcade games of all time. It hit me at a time when I loved skateboarding and I loved arcade games and 720 was an awesome combination of the two. Unlike many other companies that joined the growing trend of using more generic and interchangeable cabinets and parts, 720 cabinets are completely unique, complete with a giant “ghetto-blaster” marquee sitting atop the cab. Along with the cabinets unique design was its unique joystick, a strange combination of joystick and paddle that no other game has ever used. There weren’t, I don’t think, that many 720 cabinets around. Although I haven’t been able to find exact production numbers, the 720 Registry page lists serial numbers starting at #1005 (they probably started numbering at #1000) and the highest one is #3262, which would mean 2,257 cabinets. (Even if they started numbering at #0001, that would still be less than 3,500 cabinets.)
I bought my first arcade cabinet way back in 1994, and as I began acquiring more machines I began making a mental list of “games I would like to eventually own.” That list changed rapidly in my early days of collecting. The more I learned about the hobby, the more I adjusted my list. For example, simple JAMMA games in non-unique cabinets moved down the list while classic, unique, and harder-to-find games quickly rose to the top. Other things affected my list as well; for example, early on, Pole Position was on the list. Over the years I’ve met a lot of gifted arcade technicians and almost all of them own or have owned a non-working Pole Position. That game is notoriously difficult to get running and keep running. Same thing with TRON. I love the way TRON cabinets look and I like the game, but I’ve played TRON on three different cabinets recently and after two or three games, I’ve had my fill. I can’t justify the prices a TRON cabinet demands for something I don’t truly love. TRON started high on the list, but worked its way down slightly.
But 720 weathered the the storm, starting near the top of the list and working its way to the number one position. In 1995 I began attending arcade auctions, always keeping one eye open for a 720 machine, but one never appeared. For over ten years I’ve been searching for one. I marked other machines off the list one by one. Karate Champ, check. Road Blasters, check. Q*Bert, check. Some of the other games took longer to acquire, mostly due to my own self-imposed price ceiling. I only recently picked up Centipede and Ms. Pac-Man cabinets, but now I can mark them off the list too.
Still, 720 eluded me. That is, until this past weekend.
While talking to Troy (a fellow collector) the other night, Troy informed me that Dean (another collector) said that Mike (another collector) had just picked up a 720 cabinet. Now over the years I have seen two 720 cabinets sell on eBay. I know what they sell for. I bid $500 for one that was in Denver, a twelve-hour (one way) drive from here. The other one I almost had went for over a thousand bucks (and was in New Mexico). When I heard that one was for sale locally, I moved quickly. I found out about the cabinet Thursday. I knew it would not make it through the weekend unsold.
Saturday night, after spending 3x more than I have spent on any other arcade cabinet other, Jeff and I unloaded the 400lb behemoth out of the back of the Avalanche and into my garage. The cabinet is near perfect, missing only the side art. Dean helped me replace one of the buttons and gave me a few spares for the others that I’ll swap in sometime this week.
The game is as fun as I’d remembered. I’ve played it on the computer and it was included in the Midway Arcade Treasure collection, but without that unique cabinet and controller, it just wasn’t the same.
My holy grail, acquired. Mission accomplished. A winner is me.
Man, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Three days in a row, three resolutions achieved. I’m like a resolution machine (watch me get down, watch me get down …)
It’s been too cold to do any real gaming out in the arcade this week so instead I’ve been working on a couple of my “garage” projects, one of which is my Ms. Pac-Man cabinet. I paid $80 for this cabinet at an estate sale and let me tell you, other than my fully-working Q*Bert that I got for $100 at a garage sale (thanks again for the tip, Tim-Dog), this Ms. Pac-Man cabinet may go down in history as my luckiest arcade find yet. Although the cabinet wasn’t “quite” working due to some graphical problems, the game powered up and displayed “something”, which is 95% of the battle.
Between some of my online friends and some research I did on the net we figured out that my Ms. Pac-Man had some bad RAM. I tried to fix it myself and CRACK POW OKAY WOW WELL THAT WENT BAD REAL QUICK. At that point it was determined that I needed a replacement board, at least for parts. For another $80 I ended up getting a refurbished board off of eBay. When I got home from work today the board was waiting for me on the front porch. After the kids went to bed I snuck out to the garage and installed the new board. Success!
By the way, this is how a redneck tests a board …
Tomorrow if I get some time I’ll remove the old (non-working) board and set it aside for repairs … that is, if I can quit playing Ms. Pac-Man long enough to get anything done! Right now the game needs some new t-molding (the black plastic that runs around the edges; you can see in the first picture that much of it is missing) and some touch up paint, but other than that, this thing is ready to move out of the garage and into the arcade!
Pac-Man was a great game … and a great Saturday Morning Cartoon! P-P-P-P-P-Pac-Power!
I get this question a lot: “How do I open an arcade game that I don’t have the keys to?” The answer is, “You drill it out.” It’s one of those things that’s easier to show than explain, so, here you go.
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.
For as long as I can remember I have associated specific songs with specific memories, and for me, an arcade wouldn’t be an arcade without the music. All of my old arcade memories including a backing soundtrack of 80s music. Different arcades had different playlists: family friendly arcades like Le Mans and Tilt pumped in 80s pop music, while seedier arcades like Cactus Jack’s and the Bowling Alley delivered a constant stream of 70s arena rock and 80s hair metal.
When my backyard shed begin to make the transition from “collection of arcade machines in a shed” to “backyard arcade”, having music playing was one of my very first considerations. My first plan was to gut an old jukebox, stick a computer inside it, and set it up to play MP3s around the clock. I got as far as picking up the broken jukebox — turns out, shoehorning a PC inside an old jukebox takes a lot of work. Additionally, old jukeboxes are really big, taking up valuable real estate in an already crowded backyard shed. After giving up on that project, I went with the much simpler approach — sticking a PC out there, connecting some really big speakers, and having the thing play MP3s in random order.
In the early 90s, Le Mans Arcade added a music video jukebox to their arcade. The large screen was a panel of televisions, and the jukebox played music videos constantly. That wall of monitors made an impression on me, and as I started putting together a PC for playing music out in the arcade, I thought it would be a neat idea to get it to play videos as well. Through the newsgroups I found alt.binaries.videos.music and I downloaded away. One video turned into ten, one gig turned into ten, then twenty, and so on. By the time I was done I had amassed 20 DVDs full of music videos — approximately 80 gig. I should mention that the criteria for what I downloaded and what I didn’t is fairly specific; to make the collection, the videos had to be of songs I liked, and the videos/songs had to be family friendly. While “family friendly” is fairly subjective, the idea was that I wouldn’t include anything that might be offensive if kids (mine or someone else’s) were out in the arcade.
While not particularly important to the story (not that that would ever stop me), I should note that I wrote my own software to run out in the arcade. The software is called Jukebox Zero (a play on the song “Jukebox Hero), as is the machine it runs on. The program launches with Windows, scans a pre-determined directory (and sub-directories), and plays the contained MP3 and video files contained within. To be honest there are a zillion other PC-based jukebox programs out there, most of them better than mine, but none of them seemed to do exactly what I wanted. Sometimes, writing your own is simpler, so that’s what I did. I don’t think I ever publicly released Jukebox Zero because, frankly, it’s so specific that I can’t imagine anyone else ever wanting a copy.
Back to the problem at hand, which has been moving of the 80 gigs of videos from my house (where I downloaded them) to Jukebox Hero, which sits out in the arcade. Jukebox Zero (the PC) is old and crappy, a 600mhz machine with a CD-Rom drive and two (funky) USB ports that cancel each other out when they’re used at the same time. In the beginning, videos were transferred out to the machine a few at a time via USB memory sticks. As the video collection grew and was moved to DVD, I lost track of which videos had been moved to Jukebox Zero and which ones had not. I really wanted to have the machine filled with videos before all my friends came over to visit the weekend of OEGE, and so I did something foolish and deleted all the videos off of Jukebox Zero, with the intention of moving them back over … somehow.
With help from an external USB DVD drive, my first plan involved copying the DVDs one at a time to Jukebox Zero. This proved to be much more of a pain in the ass than it might sound. Each DVD was taking over an hour to copy over — too long to stand there and watch, but short enough that I didn’t feel like I had enough time to go do anything else. After one or two DVDs, I gave up on this plan. (I should mention that out in the arcade there is no comfortable place to sit. Standing and watching files copy makes one feel stupid(er).)
The next plan involved setting up a wireless network out in the arcade and copying the files wirelessly to Jukebox Zero. This turned out to be a monumental waste of time that took me at least a week to decide was pointless. Here are the highlights: I installed a wireless card into Jukebox Zero, but could not get a strong enough signal to connect to my home network — this is despite the fact that from the exact same location, I could connect to my home network using my laptop. This led me to believe that, for whatever reason, the wireless card in my laptop had more power than the wireless card I installed in Jukebox Zero. I still had my old wireless router lying around, so I then decided to install that out in the arcade, physically connect Jukebox Zero to it, and connect to that network wirelessly from the house. This created another huge network mess, since both routers are hard set to exist in the same IP space (192.168.1.x) so switching back and forth was screwing up my routing tables and causing me to continually reboot. When I DID finally get everything working, I found I could copy about three videos before the wireless signal would drop (which, oddly enough, is why I bought a new router in the first place …). The best part of this whole adventure was troubleshooting the wireless router out in the arcade, which cost me several dozen trips back and forth from the house in the middle of the night while testing. What a pain in the ass.
After giving up on the network I decided to copy all the music DVDs to an external USB hard drive, take the hard drive out to the arcade, connect it to Jukebox Zero and copy the files that way. This is friggin’ foolproof … or so I thought. I copied all the music DVDs to my 300 gig external hard drive, carried it out to the arcade, connected it and started the files copying. The next morning when I went out to check on the progress, I found that it again had copied less than a dozen files before dying. “I/O error” was all Windows offered. Since I/O means “input/output,” I found the error accurate although not particularly helpful. The problem turned out to be my external hard drive, which picked THAT MOMENT to die. Further inspection determined that it was actually the enclosures power supply and not the drive itself that died. The drive was transplanted into a new enclosure and the whole process was repeated. This time I got through almost 5 DVDs of videos before the machine locked up. THIS SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD.
Since I can connect to the machine still via wireless, I’m going to connect to the machine today and attempt to copy the DVD directories one at a time — sneaking up on the project, so to speak. Should that fail I’m going to take an axe to the whole god damn pile of electronics and set up a VCR full of old music videos and call it good.
This past Saturday I attended SuperAuctions’ arcade auction in Mesquite, Texas. I have a detailed review of the auction posted on my mail blog so I won’t re-cover that ground here. Since this is a technical blog, I will instead begin detailing my repairs and such here. My website does have an arcade section, and after repairs are completed these blogs will be archived there in hopes that someone, somewhere might also find the information useful.
This weekend I purchased an Ivan Ironman Stewart Off-Road (3 player), Scramble, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Sunset Riders, and Buster Bros. Buster Bros. didn’t work at the auction; looks like a power supply issue (hopefully). Scramble and UMK3 were both working at the auction, but aren’t working now. After shooting 0 for 3, I didn’t even try the other two.
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