I finished up work on the Donkey Kong last night.  I re-capped the monitor, hooked up the coin door, and rebuilt the original joystick.  Nintendo joysticks are definitely odd beasts.  The joystick that came with the DK was rusted out and pretty much beyond repair.  Luckily I had two Nintendo VS joysticks that I pulled out of another cab.  They were similar enough that I was able to combine the nicest parts from all three to make one good DK stick.

So now my Donkey Kong is pretty much back to her original 1981 glory.  Every single piece of her is either from an original DK machine, or using exact replica parts.  I still have a few odds and ends I need to work on, but I’m to the point now where she’s 100% playable.

Finished cleaning up the inside of the DK cabinet this weekend.  She was stinky, but thanks to some advice on the KLOV forums I managed to get it under control with some Clorox Clean-Up.  After giving her a few hours to dry off I stuck on the new side art that came with the cabinet.  All she needs now is some new t-molding and a DK marquee and she’ll be a Donkey Kong again!

Cleaned up the Donkey Kong last night.  Used a heat gun to take off the side art and only had to do a little scrubbing with some Goo Gone to get the adhesive residue off.  Magic Erasers are awesome.  Made cleaning her up way easier that I thought it would be.  Scrubbed the whole thing down afterward with Simple Green and she’s looking pretty nice.  There’s some fading on the cabinet and you can definitely tell where the old side art was, but the new side art should disguise that pretty well.

Next up, gutting the inside of the cabinet.  Gonna tear everything out, clean up the insides, then put in an original Donkey Kong board, power supply, and wiring harness.

My Christmas present came a little earlier than expected.  A Donkey Kong cabinet!  I was supposed to go pick it up on Sunday, but the guy was making a trip to Lincoln and was nice enough to bring it along.  She’s in very good shape for a 28 year old machine.  Right now it’s got some crappy Data East game in it, but the guy gave me almost everything I need to turn it back into a Donkey Kong, including new side art,  a control panel, and a monitor bezel.

She’s really dirty and full of mouse nests, but should clean up nicely.  Gonna try to take the old Nintendo VS side art off tonight and get the outside of the cab cleaned up.

I finished up my Multi-Williams cab just before Thanksgiving, so I thought I’d post a couple pictures of the finished product.

I got the marquee and control panel from arcadeoverlays.com.  The monitor bezel is from arcadeshop.com.  You can’t tell in the pictures, but the buttons are translucent.  I put LEDs under the control panel so all the buttons glow when the machine is on, which looks pretty cool.

Other than Joust and Defender, I hadn’t really played many Williams horizontal games before.  Bubbles and Splat didn’t do much for me, but Stargate, Sinistar, and Robotron are all great.  Robotron in particular really has me shoveling the tokens into the machine.  I’m also becoming quite the Defender addict.  It was always way too hard as a kid, but as an adult I can navigate it’s crazy button layout without as much trouble.

I spent the last three days doing a little arcade restoration work.  I don’t have enough room in Lincoln to store them all (up to 9 machines now), so I tend to wait for a long weekend to do any major repairs.  The ones that aren’t at my house are in my brother’s shed in Hampton, which has plenty of spare room for me to work.

This weekend I focused my attention on gutting and repainting a Midway and a Williams cabinet.  Both machines had been converted at some point in the past.  The Midway was a Final Fight by the time I got it.  The Williams was converted to a Robocop.  Both were in working order, but pretty beat up.

Step one of the restoration process was gutting the cabinets.  I removed all the electronics, monitors and wiring, then removed the t-molding and anything that was bolted or screwed onto the cab.

Once I was down to just the wooden frames I attacked them with a random orbital sander.  I was very surprised (and saddened) to find the original arcade stenciling was still intact on each of these cabinets under several coats of paint.  Of course, once someone paints over a stencil, there’s not much you can do.  Still, I wouldn’t touch an original Pacman or Sinistar if I ever came across them in the wild, even if they were a little dinged up.

After I had both cabs down to bare wood I used bondo to fill in any major imperfections.  These cabs were originally put into service in the early 80s, so they had quite a few battle scars to patch up.  The Pacman had some significant water damage to the top of the cab, and the base of the Sinistar was pretty banged up.  The bondo worked wonders, though, and after a finishing pass with the sander it was time to paint.

I put on two coats of Kilz primer, then a top coat of Rustoleum satin black.  While using a spray gun would be the optimal method, I don’t have access to an air compressor with enough volume to do a whole cabinet in one go.  Instead I just used a foam roller brush.  This gives a slightly textured surface instead of a smooth one, but it’s a big improvement over their original condition.

After a day to dry I put on some new t-molding and both cabs are ready for the electronics to go back in.  The Pacman will be getting a 48-in-1 board that I’ve had sitting around for a while.  The Sinistar will be getting a multi-Williams board.  So in a roundabout way, they’ll be a Pacman and Sinistar again!

After a chance visit to an old, run-down warehouse on the outskirts of Lincoln, I’m back in the arcade building/restoration business.  My first trip didn’t yield anything except a pair of completely stripped Lost Tomb and Express Raider cabinets.  However, the guy having the sale turned out to be a treasure trove of old and abused arcade hardware.  After several trips between his house and my brother’s barn, I now have three Bally/Midway cabinets and a Neo Geo, all in complete working order.

The three Midway cabinets will all become 48-in-1/60-in-1 machines.  I’m keeping one for myself and restoring it to look like a Galaga machine.  The other two will go to my brothers, who will each be deciding the level of effort/expense they’d like to put into the restoration.  The Neo Geo needs almost no work at all, and will also be going into my personal collection after it gets cleaned up a bit.  The two “junk” cabinets will be used to test restoration methods (painting, sanding, etc) and might turn into working machines to be sold off at a later date.

Stay tuned for some step-by-step details of the restoration process.  In the meantime, here are some crappy camera phone pics of what I have to work with.

This week I started the process of adding a M.A.M.E. PC to my cocktail arcade cabinet. The PC is a 3.33GHz Celeron D with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive. Probably a little overboard for a MAME PC, but I wanted some room to grow if I need it. I also wanted to make sure I had adequate horsepower to play games like Street Fighter II and the Metal Slug series, which can be problematic on slower MAME machines. The whole PC was under $300, but I also had to buy an ArcadeVGA card and a J-PAC from Ultimarc so that I could interface the PC with my vintage-spec arcade cabinet.

I decided to use Windows XP as the OS. I considered both Linux and DOS, but XP ended up being the best fit for my needs. I also installed a VNC client, an FTP server, and a wi-fi card on the box so I can administer and configure the machine remotely. That way I don’t end up elbow deep in arcade guts every time I need to make a simple software change. The arcade screen looks great with MAME, but using XP with a 640×480 interlaced screen is a nightmare…that’s where VNC comes in handy.

Finally, to handle sound I got a little unconventional and decided to modify a small car amplifier and an ATX power supply to drive the four 4″ speakers in my arcade cab. Most MAME builders just modify an existing set of PC speakers, but I wanted to try something a little different. Modding the ATX supply to work with the car amp was a lot easier than I expected and my bench test with a pair of junk speakers and a CD player sounded great.

Right now all I need to do is install the amp and tidy up the wiring and I’m done. I’ll post some pictures of the guts when it’s finished.

I thought I’d do a quick review of the company I purchased my cocktail cabinet kit from, arcade depot.

Packaging

Packaging was excellent. Everything was bubble wrapped and the outside edges of the box were lined with plywood to prevent any damage. Everything arrived without a scratch.

Quality

This definitely isn’t your average piece of Wal-Mart furniture. The plywood is very high quality and the staining and sealing is excellent. Everything fits together perfectly and has perfect right angles. Most arcade cabinets sold on the internet are MDF with a fake wood-like veneer. The arcade depot cabinets use real wood veneer over high quality plywood, which looks better and will probably hold up to more abuse than an MDF cabinet would.

Assembly

If you can put together flat-pack furniture from a big box retailer, you can build this cocktail cabinet. The instructions were fairly easy to follow, but there are a few things left to your own ingenuity and imagination. I would definitely recommend doing a dry run before gluing each part to make sure you know where everything goes. I would also recommend having some clamps, as there is quite a bit of gluing involved. I was able to assemble everything except the table top and vertical control panels in one evening.

I ran into a few snags with the Ultimarc joysticks I used, but that isn’t arcade depot’s fault. The mag-sticks fit in the vertical panels just fine, but they were too long for the horizontal panel. I ended up using a hole saw to put 2″ holes all the way through the bottom of the panel. The holes won’t be visible (unless someone happens to be lying on the floor) and the joysticks work fine.

Turnaround

For a product that is made-to-order I thought the turnaround was very good. I placed my order on March 15th and my shipment arrived on April 4th. A 3 week turnaround isn’t bad considering they built the whole thing from scratch, including staining and sealing the wood and installing the T-molding.

Communication

This is the one place I feel that arcade depot fell a little short. arcade depot is an online company and email is the only way to reach them. Unfortunately, they weren’t very quick in responding to my email inquiries. Most emails were returned within two or three days, but there were two emails that took almost an entire week and one email never received a response at all. I also didn’t receive a tracking number for my package, even though I requested one and got an email from arcade depot saying they would send it.

Maybe I’m impatient, but two or three days is pretty sad and a week is just unacceptable. My perception may be skewed because I work in IT and I’d probably be fired if I didn’t respond to an email the same day I received it.

Conclusion

Over all, I thought my experience with arcade depot was very good. I would definitely order from them again. It also doesn’t hurt that they’re the only game in town for cocktail kits that aren’t made of crappy MDF. If they improved communication a little I don’t think I’d have a single bad thing to say about them.

The first phase of my cocktail cabinet project is complete. I’ve got everything wired up and working with my 48 in 1 arcade board. The next step is to build a MAME computer so I can play horizontal arcade games. So far it’s been a lot of fun to play and the cocktail format is great for sitting down to some 2-player Pac-man or Galaga.