vector.spectre
Newbie
It's the spring of 1979 and in a factory in Oyama Japan the final touches were being made to a video-game cabinet numbered 790121... Universal was the company and this
particular cocktail cabinet was for export outside of Japan, the game was 'Comic-Guerrilla' which was a variant on the space-invaders theme, some how the cabinet ended
up in the UK and some time later after some good years usage in 2006 i discovered the machine on ebay broken (see image)
It was simply the coin-switch jammed down, the machine just reset upon power-up, but i un-jammed the coin mechanism and it worked.
The game was nice to have and to play for a while, i enjoyed the dedicated cabinet and the aging innards and the general feel of the machine was unique to your average
'Taito formica table-top'
I enjoyed the game for a few years but after i while i got bored of the game, but instead of selling it on or restoring it i thought i could use the cabinet for my
MAME project i had planned, but it was a small cabinet and in the end i made an executive decision to donate the board to a collector and create something new from
old... and extend the life of the machine itself which was nice to behold.. but i had visions for it and using MAME i thought would be the way forward, but i never
really got around to doing it all in one go until recently where i just grasped the nettle so to speak and gave it a go, I wanted to keep the original machine as much
as possible, keeping the sheet metal control-bezels was a must i thought, but the t-molding etc had to be replaced.
So i did some of the ground work previously some years back, but when i sold the mini-PC i had in there to run MAME to a friend i gave up on the idea until i saw those
60-in-1 JAMMA mutli-game boards, but after a bit of researching i found a better solution called 'ArcadeSD' so i aimed to use that as my main board and just update the
cabinet and the artwork, so some previous work was done ages ago... and so i started the artwork...
Which turned out ok...
While that was going on i started to fit out the old cabinet with a new sound amplifier and some speakers, i used an old PC power-supply to get +5v for the board and
start-lamps and +12v for the illuminated buttons and the sound amplifier, i housed the power supply in a make-shift wooden box with a button hole for wires to pass
through and i planned for it to be neat inside then went about sorting out connections and wires etc...
Then i had that moment where i turned it all on for the first time... i had tested the amp and lights previously and it all worked, some buttons needed rewiring etc
but the board setup was ok and easy and i was away with more play testing.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHnrZqrSpbQ
and that's about it... the ArcadeSD is a great multi-board, I'm going to enjoy it, there's an update for it just around the corner which I'm looking forward to.
...which actually just happened while typing this... 2 new games supported and some bug fixes.
"* Elevator Action (Horizontal and Vertical)
* Jungle Hunt (Horizontal and Vertical)
* Jungle King (Horizontal and Vertical)"
-VS
particular cocktail cabinet was for export outside of Japan, the game was 'Comic-Guerrilla' which was a variant on the space-invaders theme, some how the cabinet ended
up in the UK and some time later after some good years usage in 2006 i discovered the machine on ebay broken (see image)
It was simply the coin-switch jammed down, the machine just reset upon power-up, but i un-jammed the coin mechanism and it worked.
The game was nice to have and to play for a while, i enjoyed the dedicated cabinet and the aging innards and the general feel of the machine was unique to your average
'Taito formica table-top'
I enjoyed the game for a few years but after i while i got bored of the game, but instead of selling it on or restoring it i thought i could use the cabinet for my
MAME project i had planned, but it was a small cabinet and in the end i made an executive decision to donate the board to a collector and create something new from
old... and extend the life of the machine itself which was nice to behold.. but i had visions for it and using MAME i thought would be the way forward, but i never
really got around to doing it all in one go until recently where i just grasped the nettle so to speak and gave it a go, I wanted to keep the original machine as much
as possible, keeping the sheet metal control-bezels was a must i thought, but the t-molding etc had to be replaced.
So i did some of the ground work previously some years back, but when i sold the mini-PC i had in there to run MAME to a friend i gave up on the idea until i saw those
60-in-1 JAMMA mutli-game boards, but after a bit of researching i found a better solution called 'ArcadeSD' so i aimed to use that as my main board and just update the
cabinet and the artwork, so some previous work was done ages ago... and so i started the artwork...
Which turned out ok...
While that was going on i started to fit out the old cabinet with a new sound amplifier and some speakers, i used an old PC power-supply to get +5v for the board and
start-lamps and +12v for the illuminated buttons and the sound amplifier, i housed the power supply in a make-shift wooden box with a button hole for wires to pass
through and i planned for it to be neat inside then went about sorting out connections and wires etc...
Then i had that moment where i turned it all on for the first time... i had tested the amp and lights previously and it all worked, some buttons needed rewiring etc
but the board setup was ok and easy and i was away with more play testing.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHnrZqrSpbQ
and that's about it... the ArcadeSD is a great multi-board, I'm going to enjoy it, there's an update for it just around the corner which I'm looking forward to.
...which actually just happened while typing this... 2 new games supported and some bug fixes.
"* Elevator Action (Horizontal and Vertical)
* Jungle Hunt (Horizontal and Vertical)
* Jungle King (Horizontal and Vertical)"
-VS
