Arcade Crusade

          

Hey gang, I seem to be gaining followers at an alarming rate.  This is lovely, because as of last week, the only follower was my dog.  So thanks.

I figured I might take a break today from the sanding, welding and wiring to do a little housekeeping…

First, a shout-out to the true arcadecrusade.com.  I actually didn’t know of it’s existence when I named this thing, but it’s actually a great website featuring galleries of home arcades that deserves a look.

Second, I’ve added some new pictures to old posts to illustrate a little better. Check it.

WORD.  Let’s talk games, mofos.

I’m a bit younger, you might say, that the majority of arcade collectors out there (I’m just under 30) and games like Robotron 2084 and Missile Command, while of course, awesome, don’t really have the same feeling for me as games from my generation.  When I was younger, games like Street Fighter and Smash TV were what filled arcades - we’re talking 1991-1993.  I feel this wave of games often gets overlooked as a classic leg of the genre.  This era is also when some of the most successful solid-state pinballs were being released - Addams Family, Elvira, Medieval Madness and Twilight Zone come to mind.  This was arguably an era where graphics really got off the ground and before IP based games were total poop.  I’m thinking XMen arcade, Simpsons, TMNT, T2, the list goes on.  These are games that are classics not just for nostalgia purposes, but because they’re well-crafted games.  Those I remember playing most are listed in some form above, but among my other standbys (at least at the three or four arcades I essentially lived in…) were Beast Busters (an over looked horror shooter), Lethal Enforcers (the most violent game ever to feature pink and blue pastel guns), Final Fight, Captain America and the Avengers (possibly better than but very similar to XMen), Punisher, and Sunset Riders (pre-Metal Slug-style Wild West shooter), alongside laserdisc games like Mad Dog McCree, Who Shot Johnny Rock and Dragon’s Lair, which was still an incredible game to play 8 years after its release.  

What really changed the playing field (pun intended) for me was 1992’s Mortal Kombat. The graphics were incredible, it wasn’t filled with lame anime characters (SF2) and needless to say, the gore was jaw-dropping.  In fact, this game was more or less the sole reason I started this entire project - the lack of a decent MK port on any system currently available.  I grew up watching awesome movies like Bloodsport, the Octagon and Enter the Dragon.  Pretty much any movie that involved fighting tournaments run by scary old Asian men.  Mortal Kombat was instantly the most incredible game we’d ever seen, and I was pretty much obsessed with it until the third installment was released.

Part of the majesty of this game was its simplicity.  Special moves were easy to execute, as were fatalities.  Street Fighter was a great game, but I always found it too complex for its own good.  The characters were too cartoony and the game never really hit home with me, perhaps it was too polished and handsome for my tastes.  MK was down and dirty - the digitization of the characters hadn’t been seen outside of that horrible game Pit Fighter, which nobody really gave a shit about anyway, and gave the game realism.  The stages you fought in carried that through as well.  SF2 had you fighting in crowded streets, air force bases and rooms filled with elephants (?)  In this world, if M. Bison accidentally kidney punched Blanka, or Guile fell and broke his thumb, one of those people from the background would stop cheering and make a phone call.  MK, however, was set on this fucked-up island with pits of spikes and monks and all kinds of foreboding shit. There were no civilians cheering you on, there were no onlookers to step in if things got too rough or army planes or colorful bath-houses to ground you in reality - this was a dangerous place where you could be DISEMBOWELED for the pleasure of a creepy old man and never be heard from again.  Where you could be uppercutted into a pit of spikes strewn with severed heads.  I mean really, look at this:

                         

THEN look at this:

                    

I mean, really.  There’s a guy on the top one drinking a beer for crying out loud.  I can count at least 6 dead motherfuckers in that next one. (Please also note that I am aware that the guy in green is not Scorpion.  Google can only be so perfect.)

Of course, this is all a matter of taste - there are some serious street fighter fans out there.  The games are nothing to sneeze at and obviously have been successful.  They just don’t have what the 11 year old in me wants.  

Playing MK on the decent home versions was a lot of fun, but can’t compare to actually saddling up to the cab and playing it that way.  

Which is why, boys and girls, it will be my inaugural run when I get this thing finished.  I’ve been boning up on the holy texts, have you?

                                          

Spent a little time painting some parts today, the coin door, the coin slot door, the lower marquee bracket and the coin return ‘baskets’ (where you stick your finger to get your returned coin). For the coin and coin slot doors, I sanded the entire pieces down to the metal…or as close as I could. As you probably imagine when you’re thinking about these parts, the main face of the door is a stucco-like texture - not the easiest things to sand. However, a little dilligence got most of the paint off and scored what wasn’t removed enough to grab new paint. Since it’s metal, font hesiate to use a power sander on these parts, you won’t damage anything. I used a 120 grit paper as this wasn’t exactly detail work. After more-or-less stripping both pieces, I applied a heavy coat of Rustoleum gloss black spraypaint to the front and sides. You’ll notice that it pools in certain areas and reduces the visible texture of the piece (basically, it looks like shit)… But our work is not complete! Take a paper towel and gently dab the textured portion of the door. With even, direct dabs, you can let the texture show through without looking smeared. Both pieces were then allowed to dry for 1 hour.
Up next was the lower marquee bracket. Again, I sanded down the piece (on this particular machine, it’s a 24” piece of steel with a slight lip on the bottom) Now on this piece it’s very important to sand it down to the bare metal - even a small amount of residual paint can show through. If you want, bring out the big guns and use paint stripper followed by a sand, followed by a good wipedown with a damp paper towel. Be sure every trace of that stripper is gone, though, fellas - words to live by. Even with a heavy gloss, this piece may need two coats to look even, so do what you gotta do. Next up was the coin return baskets. This part is totally optional, since you’re probably the only one who will ever notice, but in for a penny, in for a pound, right? I hit ‘em both with some red semigloss spraypaint. Nice. This machine came without any locks to keep these doors shut, so I went to Lowes and picked up what are known as ‘mailbox locks’. They are the exact same thing as arcade locks. I’d suggest bringing the metal doors with you just to be positive of the size… I’ve heard that on some machines, the slot for the locking mechanism is an oddball size, this may be especially true of cabinets from Europe or Canada. I would also suggest you buy the ‘deeper’ locks, ones of perhaps 1.5” in depth, keep in mind the cams of the locks have to clear the lip of the door and an additional 1/4” of steel on the cabinet. These locks both fir perfectly and each ran about 4 bucks. After I had the locks installed in the doors with their fresh paint, they really looked like a piece of a brand new machine. I’ll need to replace the coin return buttons, but the coin mechs work very well. A cool option depending on how nerdy you are is to have custom tokens made for your cabinet… But that’s for another post. Next up is the tough part: getting the cabinet painted in the basement of my condo. We’ll see how that goes!

Once the cabinet was set down in the basement, it was time to start pulling it apart to clean it out and start refinishing.  You’ll notice I never claim to be technically proficient in any way, so you may have better methods of disassembly than I do.  This is a first time project and I’m working with the added benefit of not needing to keep any of the ‘guts’ of the machine as I plan on rewiring it all myself, so other than keeping the parts I plan on reusing relatively organized, it was more of a smash-n-grab effort than anything else.

First was the control panel.  The panels on these Dynamo cabs are meant to be reworked to accept different games.  The actual housing is filled with holes that were not being used for the Tetris configuration so that when Tetris stopped making money, the operator didn’t have to buy a new control panel.  Unfortunately, the layout of the holes in the metal is not configured for my needs, but we’ll get to that later.

Another benefit of these cabinets is that they’re pretty easy to take down, mostly able to be taken apart with a Philips head screwdriver.  In fact, I took the plexiglass front, the marquee and marquee brackets, the light and board behind the marquee, coin door and mechanism, speakers, coin box and T-Molding off with nothing but a screwdriver and my dainty bare hands.

Anyhow, the control panel had a Tetris graphic, a plastic overlay, 2 mismatched joysticks and several sets of old buttons that needed to be removed.  The top of the control panel housing is latched to the underside of the machine with suitcase-style brackets that unclip and allow the entire piece to be tilted forward on a set of hinges so that the controls can be worked on from the front of the machine.  All I had to do was unlatch the top and remove 4 nuts from the hinge mechanism, cut the wires connecting the buttons to the power supply and the entire rig came free.  Nice and easy.

Removing the buttons and joysticks is a snap.  They simply unscrew from the bottom and come out really easily.  The joysticks may require some finessing with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, and are held in place with a spanned washer that can just be (gently) ripped off and replaced later if you want to use the original pieces.  The buttons actually required no tools to remove and are only secured to the underside of the panel with these big, knobby plastic washers.  Once those washers are unscrewed, the buttons just fall out. 

Your average arcade buttons are made of a few different parts, which I’m sure have scientific names, but which I’ll refer to as:

• The pad - the actual part you’re pushing on, which is laid into…
• The button casing - a large plastic tube, with a threaded exterior and a large lip at the top to rest on top of the control panel.
• A spring, which slides into the casing, and holds up the pad.
• Plastic washer - which threads onto the casing and tightens the entire thing onto the control panel.
• The circuit button - the small, usually rectangular button that actually activates the circuit that registers whatever button you pressed.  These are also what run joystick controls and even coin mechanisms.

The pieces all fit together so nicely and obviously, it’s like a work of art.  Anyhow, I removed all the wiring and tossed it - again, I’m not planning on reusing any of the guts.  I then removed all of the buttons and joysticks.  The buttons were actually in good shape save a few that had been burned, perhaps by a short circuit somewhere along the life of the machine, and had brown marks on them.  Those went in the recycler.  The other buttons were pretty nice, and after removing the spring, went into the dishwasher. They came out looking brand new.  Of course, the circuit buttons are a bit more fragile and did not go in the dishwasher.  All of the pieces of the joysticks and buttons went into a separate box for the time being…what I was more focused on was the steel control panel itself.

The artwork on it was probably about 20 years old and was looking a bit nasty.  Since I was making this into a MAME unit and not a Tetris unit, it had to go!  First, the plexiglass was removed from the top and tossed - it was filthy, cracked and yellowed with age.  I’ll have to get a new piece milled, but we’ll get to that later. Underneath the plexi was the artwork - when they cover these things in artwork, they then cover it again with this evil plastic laminate that after 20 years of cigarette smoke, spilled drinks, skin oils, dirt, dust and grime turns into something more akin to cement than plastic and is quite a challenge to remove.

I was able to pull a few pieces up by hand, but that wasn’t really working very well.  I tried paint stripper and Goof-Off on the plastic laminate, and it simply was not coming off.  I figured the best bet was my trusty blowtorch.  Using the torch to heat the back of the metal, the plastic melted right off.  I was even able to take the bottom side of the panels laminate off in about 5 minutes.  Be sure to handle the panel with a Kevlar glove (I used an Ove-Glove) as steel is known to carry heat well.  As always with the torch - safety first and keep a spray bottle of water handy to cool the metal after you remove the plastic.  It’s steel but can still warp with enough heat.  

After removing the plastic laminate, you’re left with a messy, grungy paper/adhesive mix that has been aged and now melted into a substance quite a bit like tar.  No problem, though, I found that a sprayable paint stripper does the job nicely.  For this, get the real-deal caustic paint stripper.  Don’t bother with that fake citrus or natural crap - this is steel we’re working with here and we want results, not to have to goof around with the scraper for too long because we wanted to protect the ozone.

A healthy dose of stripper did the trick (doesn’t it always) with the control panel.  After letting it sit for about 15 minutes, the majority of the grum came right off with a paint scraper.  2 more sessions with the stripper and it was totally clean.  Since I’m a completist, I wanted to have it look like it just came from the machine shop.  I took my orbital sander, attached some 120 grit paper to it and went to town.  The amount of crap that came off this thing with the sander was amazing.  After about 20 minutes, the piece was perfectly clean and sanded.  I wiped it down with a wet rag and then hit it very lightly with the blowtorch to get rid of any excess moisture (compressed air could also be used for this).

Remember all those holes that I had no use for?  My concept for a control scheme is the simply Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat 2 layout - 2 joysticks, each with 2 rows of 3 buttons next to them.  Most of the games I plan on emulating use less than 6 buttons, but none use more.  There’s no room on the cabinet for a trackball, unfortunately, so Capcom Bowling and Food Fight won’t be as satisfying to play, but such is way of things.

Next step is finishing up the controls (for now) and getting the cabinet torn down.

After doing a bit of digging around locally at some arcades, turns out first-tier operators (those who work exclusively in arcade, EM and pinball) aren’t willing to part with old machines, as they can be usually reconditioned to use with other games.  Also, most second-tier operators (bowling alleys, bars, etc.) only lease their machines from companies like Betson, and don’t keep any older titles in stock, because believe it or not, Street Fighter just isn’t the draw it was 20 years ago.  Who’d imagine that?

So, knowing I did not want, nor have the talent to, build a machine from scratch wood and MDF, I checked on eBay.  Turns out, eBay should really be at the bottom of the list for something of this size and weight.  Oh, they’re on there - but most offer only local pickup as an option and are (for whatever reason) very expensive.  The best deal I could really find on eBay was a broken Arkanoid for pickup in PA for 300 dollars.  Pass.

So Craigslist was the next step and was certainly the way to go.  Even in the Northeast, where true arcades are few and far between (Funspot excepted, of course!) I was able to find several hits right away.  A few lightgun style games (not what I was looking for, but cool anyhow - maybe next time), some pinballs, and a few working classic games - a pristine Mortal Kombat, to be exact - HOLD IT!  This would be a time to mention a rule I set out to follow while building this project.  Using a working game of any quality was not an option.  Only actual broken/fried games were to be used, as the cabinet was really the only thing I needed.  It would truly be a crime to purchase a perfectly good Deathrace or Zaxxon only to butcher it. 

That being said - I did come across a listing for a bunch of machines locally going for various prices.  A Mortal Kombat 2, Dragon Spirit, Asteroids, and a few others, all for between 100-300 dollars.  I figured this might be a good shot and decided I could bend the rules a little bit if the right machine came along.

I contacted the seller, and met him at his home nearby.  The guy, we’ll call him Bill, was a true gaming lifer.  In addition to his basement filled with working classic games, including the rare and much-coveted Discs of Tron Environmental game (pics below), Bill had a garage filled with games in various states of repair, most of which worked, but simply didn’t fit in the basement.  However, after explaining my politics and plans with Bill, he said he had the perfect cab for me.

Turns out our friend Bill purchased the entire stock of a failing arcade in NH, and wound up with over 200 games - about 170 of which were in a separate storage unit awaiting Bill’s repair as we speak.  If I ever get out there, I’ll be sure to post some photos.  We did get to root through Bills boxes of Marquees and Bezels which he ‘seriously had no use for’ and we could just ‘take what we wanted’.  Sweet!  We scored a bunch of really cool marquees for Pengo and Tapper and even got an original Space invaders painted bezel among other neat little things. 

After helping him move a few monitors around, he pulled out the cab - a Tetris Dynamo Cab, with intact controls, marquees and assembly pieces - just no monitor or chipset.  Perfect! Dynamo cabs are known for their interchangeability, which we’ll get into a bit later.  They’re also known for their available smaller size cabs: about 27” wide, as opposed to the more traditional 30”.  A nice feature for someone who lives in the city.  The company is now owned by American Vending, and currently makes mostly ticket redemption games, but still offers dedicated arcade cabinets as well.  Good for them.  Anyhow, I paid Bill 100 dollars for the cabinet and a ton of little toys.  Usually, you can find a non-working cabinet for between 50-100 dollars in the Northeast, but you can generally find them for way less if you live on the west coast.  I’ve heard of non-working machines going for as low as twenty bones at some of the trade shows outside LA.  Working cabs can be all over the map, cost-wise, but since I hope you’ll follow my rules for cabinet repurposement, this should not be an issue for you…right?

A cabinet without a monitor in it doesn’t really weigh too much - we figured the Tetris cab to weigh about 100 lbs.  However, if you plan on moving a cabinet, here is what you will definitely need:

• a van or large pickup truck (8’ bed)
• a heavy-duty dolly
• ratchet straps
• Another person who can help you carry and move the cab (thanks, Pete!)

Be sure to measure all doors and stairways to be sure the machine will fit.  I know, this seems like silly advice, but I’m usually the guy who doesn’t and then gets all pissed when I get home and can’t fit my new Ikea shit inside the house!

The van trip was relatively uneventful, these machines are built to last and don’t offer much in the way of little pieces rattling around or wobbling around - which is kind of nice in a time where things are only made to break (see Ikea above). 

Loading into the basement of my condo was pretty quick, we just rolled the machine off the van, strapped it down to the dolly and wheeled it into the basement.  Not too shabby.  Next up, we’ll go over the beginning steps to turning this hulk of MDF and wires into a working cornerstone of your home electronics collection - which will fit perfeclty next to your home skeeball machine or your home mechanical bull. 

Here are some shots from opening day:

This is bills garage.  There are about 12 games in here, including an MK2, a Skull and Crossbones, Asteroids, NBA Jam, 2 Pac Man units, and a few others.  Also in the garage were about a dozen ROM boards, monitors and hundreds of marquees, unused sideart and bezels from the 70’s and 80’s.  If Bill would let me, I’d just live out there.  Also, see that screen above the first Pac Man, there?  Yup, that’s an Amiga.  “Sure it works,” says Bill.

This is my incredibly patient wife enjoying a round of Discs in the amazing Environmental cabinet.  Often taken apart to make more room for other games, this machine is incredible to play - easily the loudest machine ever, but really unique and a real treat.  How he got it into his basement is a mystery to me.

Here she is, all the way home.  As you can see, the monitor is missing, but the rest of the cab in in decent shape.  I plan on doing a complete overhaul in the months to come, but the cabinet itself is very sturdy and I feel it is up to the challenge!

UP NEXT…

This thing came apart…

Hello, all five of you who may ever possibly read this… This particular blog is a step-by-step account of creating a working (hopefully) emulator-based arcade cabinet. I’ll detail the various steps for hardware and software acquisition, setup and costs as I go. The project officially began this past weekend and I hope to have it up and running by September, 2010. A caveat, however: I am a complete technical, mechanical and …computeral (?) idiot. I have little to no experience working with electronics, power tools, chemicals, complex operating systems, land-or-air-based weapons guidance systems or philosophy on classical control schematics. What I do know is that I loves me some arcade games and have a little bit of free time, so join me and hopefully, if you’re thinking about starting a similar project, I can offer some help. To be continued…