frothmeister
Active member
I've always loved the look of the US Track & Field cab, but getting one over here is near impossible. I just think it looks so much cooler than the UK Taitel version.
I have an Electrocoin Goliath cabinet which has a very easily removable control panel. In fact over the years, I have owned several of these cabs. Many years ago, I even had a proper Track and Field control panel for one which I actually gave away on JAMMA+, thinking I would never want it.
So realising that I had no chance of ever owning a proper US cab without paying a ridiculous amount of money to import one, I had an idea.
First of all I sent a message to Tony (tb2000), who I remembered sending the panel on to, explaining that I had made a big mistake and begging him to let me have it back.
Knowing how he likes to hoard stuff, I was pretty sure he would still have it and wouldn't have done anything with it yet.
It turns out I was right! So many thanks Tony for being a top guy and letting me have it back again.
I think this was probably around 3/4 years ago, that my plan started to take shape.
The control panel had a very tatty overlay on it, that had peeled away in various places and there was a few patches of rust on it too. Unfortunately I don't have any pics of what it looked like at the time, however when it arrived back, it went to live in my loft for a while, until such time that I could find a source of the repro US Track and Field artwork online.
My hope was that I could get the original control panel artwork and then get someone clever to alter it so that it would fit the different sized Goliath control panel. I searched for months, without success. I contacted members on klov who had built complete cabs from scratch, but they had all used original NOS artwork on theirs.
I'm pretty sure it was a guy called scr33n on klov, who eventually replied to one of my posts on there to tell me that there was a place called Phoenix Arcade in the US, that seemingly were exclusively reproducing the control panel artwork for sale via their site.
I had a look and found this image on their site:
This was the best pic I had been able to find in months of searching. The downside was, it was going to cost a fair amount to import a repro from them, and as they did not offer any kind of custom artwork service, they wouldn't be able to alter it for me beforehand either.
So I ummed and ahhed about it a little longer, as I knew by this time there was at last someone in the UK doing repro artwork.
At the first Unigame meet I finally met Olly (Muddymusic), who had already created some lovely repro marquees for me and was now scanning and redesigning arcade artwork and organising regular print runs of his work for members on the forums. Top man
, this is something the UK arcade scene had been crying out for for years.
So I explained my idea of the Track and Field artwork to Olly and he said he would definitely keep an eye out for the art himself and let me know if he came across it.
Several more months down the line, I pestered him again some more about it asking whether he could work from the fairly poor quality pic I'd found on Phoenix Arcade website to recreate it. He said he could, but it would probably take a while to do as he was going to have to basically redraw it from scratch. No problem, I thought, I'd already waited a couple of years or so, so a while longer wouldn't do any harm.
Olly then got busy.
And so did I to be fair, so it was another year or so before I got round to hassling him again about it.
In the meantime, he did produce me a lovely repro of the US marquee, which he adjusted slightly to put the wording more central. For some reason, it was slightly over to the right on the scans he had found online:
A few more months passed by. As this was going to be a time consuming process, Olly was just doing bits on the repro cpo as and when he got the chance to.
Once I got the word, he was underway with the project though - I thought I better get the panel stripped of it's original overlay, sanded and primed, ready for the new artwork to go on.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. I got a PM from Olly saying he had finally managed to finish his work.
A compromise had to be made with the athlete on the front of the panel, as this bit was just impossible for him to redraw and was going to look awful, being made up of a load of jagged lines.
One or two tweaks later though, it finally looks like this and he has it ready to print for me.
(obviously the final one will be without the measurements on, these he has left on there for me to be able to print out a mock up of it, so I could offer it up to my panel and ensure everything fits and is in the correct place before the printing on proper vinyl).
Massive thanks also to Niknak and Johnny Chaos for assisting me with this too.
A special thanks also to Sarj (Silverfox), who has kindly donated me a spare Goliath control panel wiring loom, so I can connect this up to just plug into the molex connectors already in the cab, allowing me to keep the original one connected up to my joysticks/buttons panel in case I ever want to quickly swap that back on to the cab again.
So here it is. Can't wait to get it and finally get it fitted to my cab. Then just got to get my pcbs of both Track and Field and Hyper Sports fixed now so I can actually get down to playing them!
If anybody else fancies a version of the cpo for a Goliath panel, or a repro marquee too then get in touch with Olly and I am sure he can sort you out. The guy is a legend - thanks again mate, I'm so chuffed with it in the end.
EDIT:
Here are the finished pieces that Olly has available. I forgot to mention that he's also done the UK Electrocoin marquee too, which also looks very cool, but I'll be sticking with the US style one on my cab.
frothmeister2015-07-27 21:55:51
I have an Electrocoin Goliath cabinet which has a very easily removable control panel. In fact over the years, I have owned several of these cabs. Many years ago, I even had a proper Track and Field control panel for one which I actually gave away on JAMMA+, thinking I would never want it.
So realising that I had no chance of ever owning a proper US cab without paying a ridiculous amount of money to import one, I had an idea.
First of all I sent a message to Tony (tb2000), who I remembered sending the panel on to, explaining that I had made a big mistake and begging him to let me have it back.
It turns out I was right! So many thanks Tony for being a top guy and letting me have it back again.
I think this was probably around 3/4 years ago, that my plan started to take shape.
The control panel had a very tatty overlay on it, that had peeled away in various places and there was a few patches of rust on it too. Unfortunately I don't have any pics of what it looked like at the time, however when it arrived back, it went to live in my loft for a while, until such time that I could find a source of the repro US Track and Field artwork online.
My hope was that I could get the original control panel artwork and then get someone clever to alter it so that it would fit the different sized Goliath control panel. I searched for months, without success. I contacted members on klov who had built complete cabs from scratch, but they had all used original NOS artwork on theirs.
I'm pretty sure it was a guy called scr33n on klov, who eventually replied to one of my posts on there to tell me that there was a place called Phoenix Arcade in the US, that seemingly were exclusively reproducing the control panel artwork for sale via their site.
I had a look and found this image on their site:
This was the best pic I had been able to find in months of searching. The downside was, it was going to cost a fair amount to import a repro from them, and as they did not offer any kind of custom artwork service, they wouldn't be able to alter it for me beforehand either.
So I ummed and ahhed about it a little longer, as I knew by this time there was at last someone in the UK doing repro artwork.
At the first Unigame meet I finally met Olly (Muddymusic), who had already created some lovely repro marquees for me and was now scanning and redesigning arcade artwork and organising regular print runs of his work for members on the forums. Top man
So I explained my idea of the Track and Field artwork to Olly and he said he would definitely keep an eye out for the art himself and let me know if he came across it.
Several more months down the line, I pestered him again some more about it asking whether he could work from the fairly poor quality pic I'd found on Phoenix Arcade website to recreate it. He said he could, but it would probably take a while to do as he was going to have to basically redraw it from scratch. No problem, I thought, I'd already waited a couple of years or so, so a while longer wouldn't do any harm.
Olly then got busy.
In the meantime, he did produce me a lovely repro of the US marquee, which he adjusted slightly to put the wording more central. For some reason, it was slightly over to the right on the scans he had found online:
A few more months passed by. As this was going to be a time consuming process, Olly was just doing bits on the repro cpo as and when he got the chance to.
Once I got the word, he was underway with the project though - I thought I better get the panel stripped of it's original overlay, sanded and primed, ready for the new artwork to go on.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. I got a PM from Olly saying he had finally managed to finish his work.
One or two tweaks later though, it finally looks like this and he has it ready to print for me.
(obviously the final one will be without the measurements on, these he has left on there for me to be able to print out a mock up of it, so I could offer it up to my panel and ensure everything fits and is in the correct place before the printing on proper vinyl).
Massive thanks also to Niknak and Johnny Chaos for assisting me with this too.
A special thanks also to Sarj (Silverfox), who has kindly donated me a spare Goliath control panel wiring loom, so I can connect this up to just plug into the molex connectors already in the cab, allowing me to keep the original one connected up to my joysticks/buttons panel in case I ever want to quickly swap that back on to the cab again.
So here it is. Can't wait to get it and finally get it fitted to my cab. Then just got to get my pcbs of both Track and Field and Hyper Sports fixed now so I can actually get down to playing them!
If anybody else fancies a version of the cpo for a Goliath panel, or a repro marquee too then get in touch with Olly and I am sure he can sort you out. The guy is a legend - thanks again mate, I'm so chuffed with it in the end.
EDIT:
Here are the finished pieces that Olly has available. I forgot to mention that he's also done the UK Electrocoin marquee too, which also looks very cool, but I'll be sticking with the US style one on my cab.
frothmeister2015-07-27 21:55:51
