Well here I go again, off on another little HTML adventure. This page will probably be of more use to people than the last webpage was. This is about my growing passion for the arcade games of my youth. Okay, so being only 20 (when I wrote this in 1997) means that technically my youth wasn't too long ago. However, I do remember plunking quarters into Ms. Pac Man, Black Tiger, Q*Bert, and Tempest. My collection, so far, consists of fairly recent games. I’m not sure if I plan on buying any games made before 1987 just yet. :) (Well, except maybe Gyruss)

It all started at the Laundromat, I was playing Galaga with a friend and he mentioned that it would be cool to have and arcade machine at home. After thinking about it for a bit, I figured it wouldn’t be that bad an idea. I started looking through the newspaper the very next day. I wasn’t quite sure if I’d find anything, but after a little looking I found it, my Holy Grail. "Arcade machines, good condition $75 and up." My prayers had been answered. I gleefully dialed the number and asked the gentleman what he had to offer. He said that he didn’t have too much time to talk, but I was welcome to come take a look at his inventory. It didn’t take long for me to call my dad and ask to borrow his truck, call my friend Rick, for a little extra lifting power, and get on the hour or so drive to the garage of arcade machines. When we arrived, we were escorted to the man’s garage; there sat a nice collection of about 20 games that he had either fixed up or was in the process of doing so. I look around for some games that I recognized but oddly enough found nothing familiar. Eventually, I settled on a generic looking vertical shooter named Aero Fighters. Cool, $200 was a good price. However, not wanting to make any hasty decisions, I kept looking. Wouldn't you know it; I found another game that caught my eye, a four player beat-em-up called Vendetta. Price tag: $250. The only logical solution was to buy both. I didn't want to pay $450 for the two of them. So, I tell the guy, I'll give you $400 for both. After talking it over with his wife (Don't ask me why) he says the words that I will remember till the day I die. "Fine $400 it is, but only if you can take them both now." Being as excited as I was, I didn't take the half a second I should have to contemplate that it would mean, loading 2 full size arcade machines into a Ford Ranger. So, we squeezed these two machines into the back of the truck, and they looked a little unstable. I thought to myself shouldn’t be a problem, they are strapped in; I’ll just be sure to drive carefully. Probably should have put more thought into that one!

All right, time to get on our way! I pull out of the driveway and make my way down the street. Surprisingly, they were feeling pretty solid in the back of the truck. That would be, until I took the first turn. * CRASH! * The strap didn’t hold, and I watched through the side mirror as both of my newly purchased machines toppled from the truck and disintegrated on the pavement. They were now in, literally, thousands of pieces on the street. Thankfully, there were no cars in the oncoming lane, two arcade machines through the windshield of an on coming Escort station wagon filled with children would not have been pretty on my driving record. So I "merrily" hop out of the truck and start looking through the rubble. First collecting the most important things, the game boards. Amazingly, amidst the carnage, neither of the two PC boards were damaged beyond repair. So began the task of cleaning up the destruction. We loaded all of the large pieces of pressboard into the back of the truck (which fit much better than the whole machines). Keeping an eye out for remnants of power supplies, monitors, marquees and such. The glass from in front of the monitors was history, but the marquee glass survived. As did the monitor tubes, well, for the most part. A nice woman, from the house on the corner of the street that we just blocked, asked if we were all right. We ended up borrowing a garbage can, broom, and dustpan from her to get all the glass and splinters off the road. I was amazingly calm about the whole thing. Laughing and having a good ole’ time. I guess I just didn’t see the point in getting angry about the whole thing. Rick, on the other hand, was convinced I was going to just lose it and start breaking things. Anyway, we finish cleaning up. The street looked good as new, and we headed for home with our neat and tidy mess in tow. After a lighthearted drive back, we arrive home and start unloading all of the pieces of so-called lumber into the living room of my apartment.

The adventure begins.

That night, I had a friend of mine, Daren, came over to look at the mess I'd made. We spent the next 8 or so hours milling over the miscellaneous bits. Most of our time was spent assessing the damage, and planning the repairs. Starting with the PC boards, we inspected the Vendetta game and found it to be without flaw. The Aero Fighters board had seen better days though. The first thing we noticed was a chunk of plastic missing from one of the chips on the board, not too big a deal, turned out to be entirely cosmetic. Further investigations lead us to the discovery of a shattered resistor strip. Searching through Daren’s magical "tackle box o’ components" we found eight resistors of the exact value we needed, problem solved. After which we turned our attention to, what we could only assume was, the bottom of the Vendetta cabinet. Confusion filled the room. Looking back, I doubt what we found looked better before the wreck. (Warning: mild "geek speak" ahead) There was a standard Peter Chou power supply hooked up, that was supplying the 5 volts needed, then there was an odd looking 12 volt supply made by SEGA that was hooked up as well. There was an Isolation transformer that wasn’t really isolating anything, since everything, including the power supplies, was hooked up to it. Can we say Fire Hazard? This thing was clearly the work of a MacGuyver wannabe on crack. Anyway, we ended up disassembling the entire power circuit, and just figured it out from scratch. We eliminated the second power supply, and hooked the isolation transformer up so that it was actually electrically isolating the monitor, as it should have been. Oddly enough, the Aero Fighters power circuit was very clean, even had a power filter and decent ground plate; to top it off everything was protected by fuses. Needless to say, we left it alone and moved on.

Little history here, Arcade boards, since like 1988 or so, have adhered to a standard called JAMMA. This allows game boards to be swapped from machine to machine with no problem. Before the standard was set, every game had its own special way of hooking up to the power supplies, joysticks, and monitors. Moving a game from one cabinet to another was basically hell. I, like most of you, had never heard of this either. Imagine a 4-inch long edge connector with 52 wires coming out of it. Sounds like a mess, right? Right. Now keep in mind that neither Daren, nor I, had ever seen the inside of an arcade machine. So, there we were, removing the wires that hadn’t been ripped off the connector. Trying to keep track of what went where (yeah right). When, luckily, we discovered that there were actually instruction manuals for the games stapled to some of the wreckage. Ah ha! A wiring diagram for the JAMMA edge connector! We have been shown the light. We neatly soldered all of the wires back on to the connector and were ready for our first test! Going for the minimalist approach, plugged the Aero Fighters board into the connector, twisted the wires on to the speaker, and attached the power supply. We had tested our power supplies with a voltmeter, so we were pretty sure we weren’t going to fry the board. However, just in case, I was standing by with my trusty fire extinguisher, pin pulled and ready to foam! A flip of the switch later and the room was filled with the familiar synthetic tones of digital guitars and drums. Success! We were feeling pretty good about now, so we decided to plug the Vendetta board into our newly working contraption. We were then rewarded with, nothing. Absolutely nothing. Knocked us off our high horse, right quick. So, we did the only logical thing to do in the face of defeat, we left the board alone and moved on to other things.

Monitors. Monitors scare me. I know there is a lot of voltage in a monitor, and I know what discharging a fly-back into a person can do. As much as I love corn and potatoes, I don’t want to join them on the vegetable stand. Daren, on the other hand, showed no fear. He will be dearly missed. Kidding! Anyway, the hardware for both monitors looked okay. No damage to either frame or PC board. The tubes were a different story. The picture tube from the Vendetta cabinet was a lost cause, broken off at the neck; there was no coming back. The Aero Fighters tube looked okay though. No cracks, no chips, it appeared to be completely intact. So, what the hell, we got it set up to turn on. We didn’t hook the board or any other input to it, we just wanted to see what happened when we powered it up. Having complete faith in our ability to determine that this monitor was okay, I let Daren plug it in while I firmly clutched my sacred fire extinguisher. What followed was the most horrendously painful squeal I’d ever heard. It was like a choir of 30 fingernails dragging down a chalkboard. "For the love of all that’s pure and holy! TURN IT OFF!" Damn. Upon further diagnosis, we discovered that the small nipple on the back of the monitor had been broken off. The tube was no longer a vacuum, and we had just popped every fuse on the PC board of the monitor. Live and learn. How were we going to check these boards for video? Well, we needed something that could take Red, Green, Blue, Sync, and Ground signals and turn them into a picture. Sounded just like a computer monitor to us. So, that’s what we used. We took an old computer monitor, cut the cable, twisted the wires together and fired it up. It worked, kind of. Computer (VGA) monitors and Arcade (RGB) monitors don’t exactly work alike. There is quite the issue of how the sync signal is handled, but I’m not going to get into that now. Let’s just say, that we could almost see what was going on through the endless screen flipping and flickering. But, though all of the onscreen mess, we found that we were getting a video signal from both boards! To top it off, there was nothing wrong with the Vendetta board, other than the sound being turned off in the game’s settings. Do the dance of joy! I eventually ended up going to a small "Mom and Pop" TV repair shop and having them cross-reference the model numbers of the broken tubes with used tubes they had laying around. I ended paying about 50 dollars per tube, but it beats buying new monitors. Here is a hint for people replacing tubes, do what ever you can to get them to leave the yoke (wire wrapped cone on the back of the tube) and the convergence rings (little black circles around the back of the yoke) on the tube you are buying. I’m not going to get into it too much here, but needless to say, moving them from one tube to another and getting the picture to look right when you have no idea what you’re doing is NOT and easy task!

The journey continues.

Cabinets, oh my lovely cabinets, where do I begin? Arcade machines, in their entire splendor, are really not built that well. They use cheap particleboard, and fasten the cheap wood together with glue and staples. Needless to say, these materials don’t hold up well on impact with asphalt. Beginning the task of recreating the cabinets was going to be an uphill battle. Imagine, if you will, putting together a puzzle. Once you have finished the puzzle, you then take a pair of scissors and cut the puzzle into random shapes. After you’ve finished that, you now disconnect any remaining interlocked pieces, and try to completely reassemble the puzzle. You have now completed the task we accomplished.

I’m going to make this section as quick and painless as possible. We began with the Aero Fighters cabinet. This cabinet started its life as a Dig-Dug cabinet. It had a small tag stapled to the inside, stating so, and provided an identifying serial number. In hindsight, I should have kept the tag for nostalgic purposes. Anyway, preparations commenced with a quick trip to Builder Square. Quite a few sheets of 3/4 inch BC plywood, couple 2x4, 2 boxes of 2 inch deck screws, and 3 bottles of wood glue later, we were ready. At this point we had already loaded all of the scrap wood from my apartment into Daren’s trailer and toted the entire mess over to my parent’s basement. This was an absolutely necessary step, as the neighbors in my apartment complex probably wouldn’t have appreciated the sounds of table saws, circular saws, palm sanders, and screw guns at 1:00 in the morning. Oddly enough, these sounds did not bother my parents. Go figure. Construction began when we took a broken side panel from the old cabinet, temporarily pieced it back together, laid it out on a piece of plywood and meticulously traced around it with a pencil. This was the standard practice for every single piece that we made. The original cabinet had used small 1x1 pieces of wood in the corners to brace the sides. Again, going for strength, we doubled this, cutting the 2x4 in half and using the resulting 2x2 studs as corner supports. The whole process went rather quickly; we had the first machine assembled and ready in around 3 or 4 nights.

We had assumed that the Vendetta cabinet construction would be just as smooth. I don’t believe I have ever been so wrong. This cabinet originally housed the wonderful world of Gauntlet, which had been converted to some unknown 4-player Data East game, before it became Vendetta. While being a fan of Gauntlet, I’ve never been a fan of its cabinet. The control panel put players one and four at a 90 degree angle to the screen, which leads to the players eventually getting a stiff neck. This was what changed everything. I wanted to change how the control panel was laid out, as this would be the machine that I played a good 80% of my games on. And so it starts. The first thing I changed was the number of buttons, Gauntlet only had 2 buttons per player, so I decided that player one and player two would need more than that. 1 and 2, got 6 buttons laid out in the classic Street Fighter 2 configurations (3 over 3) and 3 and 4 got a single row of 3 buttons. I placed player 1 and 2 in the center of the cabinet and 3 and 4 on the outer edges. The panel was widened by a whopping 2 feet to give the extra players a little more room; we also moved their location to more of a 30 degree angle to the screen. Imagine wings on an arcade machine and you’re heading in the right direction. This change also gave us the perfect location for our stereo speakers, giving the panel a bit of vibration, almost a primitive force feedback. Daren came up with the idea of using polycarbonate as the surface of the panel. I was a little leery of bolting the joysticks and buttons to a sheet of 1/8 inch plastic, but after taking a few swings at this material with a pickaxe and sledgehammer, and still not being able to crack it, I was convinced. About a month from the day we started, we were done with the cabinet.

All in all, it was a great adventure. I would say that I had just as much fun building them back up as I have playing them now. Daren probably doesn’t share this opinion. Oh well, no one said life was fair. All I know, is that these machine, built from the ground up, by hand, will definitely stand up a little better to being dropped off a truck by some novice arcade machine collector who really has no idea what he’s doing.