arcadebasement

Atari's Akka Arrh? http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6838

As a footnote, a guy from Namco called me back his name was Frank Callistino (I think that was his last name - I didn't quit catch it). He seemed very keen on knowing what the problem was and eager to help - so I called him back and left a lengthy message outlining the issue and the steps I've taken to rectify the buy-in problem. He never called me back. That's the last money Namco Arcade will see from me. Terrible customer service. Prompt to respond sure, but they never followed through and I was always chasing them. I am now resigned to the fact that a machine costing thousands does NOT play like the original DK, and is effectively ruined by a simple programming oversight.

Just watched it via Netflix's Ruko box (just an awesome piece of kit). Despite obvious contrived heavy-handed editing to paint Billy as a - well a twat, it's clear 'weebee' is a real down to earth star who deserves recognition in the gaming world. Twin Galaxies' Walter Day looks like a guy out of his depth though apparently unable to cope with the potential that his 'star' is not what he seems, which given their Guinness status is completely unacceptable. All in all, a great documentary.

DL 20th anniversary cab: Apparently it was an Ultracade cab - according to this site and wiki http://209.85.215.104/search?q=cache:M1Cs7...;cd=1&gl=us But it seems that it's no longer on ultracade's new site (global VR).

I've had a look and can't find anything. I too do seem to remember it - or maybe it was in talks but never got off the ground. Here's a nice idea though - with the death of HD-DVD you can pick up the players for nothing (I paid $99 and got 5 free movies for my A2) and you can get DL on HD-DVD! It wouldn't take a huge amount of jigging to get it to work in a project cab and I'll bet it would look and sound bloody awesome. Just a thought.

Then do what I did - fabricate your own walls. I made the walls in my basement using 2x4s and 8'x4' sheets of 1/4" panels; basic stuff. I added electricity and venting inside them and the beauty is they're modular. I can move them at will or just take them with me. See pics of my place in this thread http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...amp;hl=basement although many of my new toys aren't shown. I'll get some new pics at some point. Took me a day to make all of the walls and paint them. I'm expanding the area and adding a diner with booths in it.

Ah okay - cool. Like the vga input. I was worried it would be standard rca phono composite. Would you say the games are identical - same patterns and so on? Thanks for the feedback on this. Might actually pick one up at some point.

5' 10" would make it inline if not a little taller than regular cabs although the spec lists it as 5' 7 1/2. Interesting. As has been asked how can you possible play Crystal Castles without a trackball though? You need the analogue input to actually play that game. I'm also interested in knowing how the monitor hooked up and what type it is. Is it oriented horizontal? Can't beat the price though - and lighted marquee? Wow.

A nice original pacman would get you $700-$900 on eBay. Upper amount if the cab and monitor is near-mint, lower if there's any major 'warning' signs such as water damage, cigarette burns, coin bolt hole, peeling artwork, worn CPO or burn-in on the monitor. Don't know about the Plus though - instinct is telling me it'd be worth a little less than a pure pacman cab but I may be wrong. Regardless, for the price seems like you got a sweet deal!

Nice find Dave! And can't beat that price - even for an unknown cab but to get a mspacman for $325 notes is bloody marvelous. Interestingly I also paid $325 ($300 for the unit and $25 to have it plopped on my doorstep) for a rather dapper find fairly recently. It's a cabaret Mr Do. Non-jamma and boy it's sweet. The only unoriginal item is the (working) coin box, but I prefer the look on the more modern vertical one to the older horizontal coin anyway. Monitor needed tweaking - the guy thought it was broken, but it was just out of whack on the V-hold and it's bright. I thought I'd need to cap it but it's really good and clean as hell inside. I love these little cabs. I've posted pics of it before - before here it is.

And the frustration continues. Namco called me back and told me where the test button was (I must've been blind to miss it!). Now on my MsPac combo, the continue option is clear - "Buy-in disabled". But I cannot find this option on the DK unit. It has '1 Credit to continue' but when you select that it goes to 2 credits, 3, 4 and then back to 1. No disable this feature option is present. A factory reset does not switch off the continue option. To add to the ridiculousness, the continue y/n appears on your second to last life, not when the game is actually over. which totally ruins the flow. I'm again waiting for Namco to call back. Given that between me and my neighbor we've spent nearly 6 grand with namco products you'd think they just bloody email me a copy of the manual. *edit* They did email me the manual. It says nothing about what the options actually do (although most are self-explanatory) and merely shows the different option screens. I'm at a loss here; the tech support dude went and looked on their in-house machine and came back and said he felt the continue option couldn't be switched off. I pointed out that originally Donkey Kong did not have a continue option and their advertisement that the game was 'just like you remember' was misleading. He agreed - I mean, what more could he say? So what can I do? I think the huge CONTINUE y/n that appears in the middle of a game is bloody awful and has to go - but who do I complain to? I wish there was another member here with this cab.

Namco had licensed DK, DK Jr and Mario Bros for an anniversary cab. They also licensed Missile Command, Quix et al. It isn't a pirate cab. It's a brand new cab just like my anniversary MsPacman/Pacman/Galaga combo cab. http://namcoarcade.com/nai_gamedisplay.asp?gam=dnkykong

Hi all - long time no post (for me). I had a reformat and completely couldn't remember the URL. Duh! Anyway, quick question for anyone with the namco re-release DK, DK Jr, Mario Bros arcade cab. I just got hold of one for my neighbor for a steal ($1900) and whilst it was new it didn't have the manual and I'd like to get into the user options to turn off continue. My MsPacman has a setup button inside but the DK cab does not. I seem to remember that you power on the cab whilst holding a button (1player?) to get into the admin options but nothing's working. namcoarcade.com and google searches proved worthless. Anyone have this cab able to help? Thanks. Hope to post pics of some of my new toys in my arcade soon including an awesome Starship troopers pinball!

Pricey and no pics - but hey it's what you're after. http://cgi.ebay.com/RETURN-OF-THE-JEDI-upr...1QQcmdZViewItem

I think I paid more for the anniversary galaga than you did you're entire game room...

It depends where you live and also whether you're shipping or not. Crazy's got a great eye for bargains and is not afraid to get his hands dirty with the innards. But I think it's fair to say that you'd find it hard to match any of those prices here (Philly). If you're shopping on eBay well you can double what Crazy posted too. IMO

I think the problem was we were using devkits from Japan with a simple step-up power converter. I'm fairly sure the games ran faster but it's been 12 years so my memory's a little hazy as to whether then ran fast or slow. I do remember the timings being out significantly enough on longer challenges that foreign games played had to have a notation placed in the script that they'd not run to speed (so everyone in the gallery would be prepared for a 2 min challenge finishing early etc).

Back on track I found this series of screencaps from the movie - And comparing it to the ebay pic it's radically different in color and gloss, even taking into account flash vs studio lighting etc

Threadjack but I used to live in the UK and years before I moved to London I live in North Wales. A tiny seaside town called Towyn got royally flooded in the very late 80s and all the main promenade arcades were gutted. Thing is, they used it as a reason to revamp the area and strip everything down and throw everything out. So I saw scores of dumpsters full of cabs most of which were not affected as they were on second floor/higher up arcades. . It was just a convenient thing to take advantage of. It makes my gut hurt to think of how many thousands of cabs were destroyed, not by the flood, but by the desire of the arcade owners to cash in their insurance, dispose of 'antique' arcade cabs and upgrade their establishments. The scene was truly horrific!

Well, he kinda does - it's the first sentence. Whilst his subsequent statement of is amibiguous. The 'original prop from movie' is not. I doubt it is the actually one though. Undoubtably, it was painted white for the movie simply because some set designer or the director prefered it white. They would've done it quickly and cheaply (probably with a can of white emulsion) and there's no way it would've survived in tact for 34 years. I think the seller's pulling a fast one.

Alright found some screens - definitely not a real game imo. Also http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?t=51437 Which is proven to be true in the movie's credits http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105629/companycredits Absolute Entertainment made the video game for the movie Toys and also made a game called 'Battle Tank' and "Super Battletank" which looks similar to the fake game they made for the movie. http://games.ign.com/objects/025/025330.html That help any? [edit] beaten by mere seconds...

Any chance of a screenshot of the game?

Do the synchronizers have some extra buffering to allow them to "back out" a few scan lines? Otherwise I would expect you'd have a couple of glitched scan lines on the frozen display, and possibly more (depending upon how cleanly you yank the signal). If you yank synchronized to vblank you should be okay; was that done? For pinball machines, I would think the easiest thing to do would be to wire the timer to the tilt switch. Even on a dot-matrix machine, you should see the player's score once the balls drain. The syncronizer always has a whole frame buffered. Any extra fields before the next vbl would be discarded on yank. You'd always end up with a clean paused frame with interpolated fields. The only problem was some console games used the raster interrupt to update a sprites position/regeneration on death (nintendo games did this a lot- mario would flicker for a while) and so the main character sprite would often be invisible on the held frame depending on the game state. The other problem was the games we used from japan and us ran about 10% faster and buggered up our timings on longer challenges.

I was a producer on Gamemster and Games World which some of you UKers may remember. The way you stop the game after a specific amount of time during a challenge is simple - you *have* to run any video game through a video synchronizer to be able to sync it up with the show's frame rate/refresh rate. Since all synchronizers 'freeze' when the single is lost, and a lot of them have a field interpolated freeze button, all you'd have to do is pull the single from the arcade unit. That sync's channel would then hold on whatever the last frame the synchronizer was on. No fancy cameras or timers... the tech would just pull the system or pause it. Now some games we did have specially altered, as sometimes the score wouldn't be on screen at the crucial moment (pinball games with DMDs were especially guilty of this), but generally that's how it's done.

My advice is to get one that looks like this: We call 'em 'pinball' back in the UK. R34 - Not too worried about repairs my last pin was used and took some jigging to get going. But if I'm paying over two grand I'd like to think it'd be working fine. Can never assume that though. I'll be checking the fuses though! One time I bought an old bike in the uk and when I got it gome the main fuse was wrapped in tin foil.