Budget Atari and Capcom arcade cabinets to see release this fall!

[MaximRecoil]

On 9/25/2018 at 7:09 PM, PlaysWithWolves said:

It seems Tastemakers recognizes there are problems with early wear-and-tear. They say it's covered under the three month warranty, and that they "are working on a more permanent solution".

 

From that thread, a floor demo unit that prompted the answers:

 

 

You could see premature wear on the control panel overlay in one of the early pre-release video reviews that was linked to in this thread in August 2018 (post #476):

 

 

That's what happens when you ignore established standards. The standard for a control panel overlay is to reverse-print onto a clear, usually textured, sheet of Lexan (polycarbonate), usually about 10 mils thick. Since the ink is on the underside of the Lexan, it can't wear at all without first wearing through the Lexan, which, for all intents and purposes, will never happen. That's why the printing on old arcade machine CPOs is never worn off, no matter how beat up the CPO is, and you can make the colors look like new with a Magic Eraser (which is an abrasive). The stock NES gamepad uses an overlay that is made exactly the same way, which is why the words/letters ("Nintendo," "Select," "Start," "B," and "A") and accompanying graphics never wear off, nor wear at all, no matter how well-used it is.

 

Here's a picture of a Punch-Out control panel with its original CPO that was used for years, if not decades, in commercial arcades. Most of the original texture of the Lexan is worn to a smooth, shiny surface. Also in the picture is a new reproduction, made the same way as the original (I drew the vector graphics file that was used to screen print the reproductions):

 

 

If you just print on top of vinyl like they did with the Arcade1Up CPOs, of course the ink will wear off quickly. It doesn't take a prophet to predict it either.

[128Kgames]

Thanks for the info, but 1Up has addressed this by providing plexiglass deck protectors for the gen 1 cabs and made them stock on all gen 2 cabs.  They also revised their painting / printing procedure on the cabs, especially the control decks.

[MaximRecoil]

30 minutes ago, 128Kgames said:

Thanks for the info, but 1Up has addressed this by providing plexiglass deck protectors for the gen 1 cabs and made them stock on all gen 2 cabs.  They also revised their painting / printing procedure on the cabs, especially the control decks.

That works, but it's a kludge which brings to mind the glut of generic and converted cabinets from the JAMMA era. If you reverse-print onto 10-mil clear Lexan in the first place there's no need for a plexiglass covering, especially in a home-use environment. I suspect that it would also be cheaper to do it right than to print on top of vinyl and also add a control panel-sized piece of plexiglass to it.

 

In any case, I find it bizarre that they didn't see that coming. Reverse-printing onto Lexan isn't even just an arcade machine thing. I already mentioned NES gamepads, but it's also standard procedure for control panel overlays on all sorts of equipment, like the old fast food joint cash registers that had membrane keys (before everyone went to touch-screen LCDs).

[+x=usr(1536)]

1 hour ago, MaximRecoil said:

That works, but it's a kludge which brings to mind the glut of generic and converted cabinets from the JAMMA era. If you reverse-print onto 10-mil clear Lexan in the first place there's no need for a plexiglass covering, especially in a home-use environment. I suspect that it would also be cheaper to do it right than to print on top of vinyl and also add a control panel-sized piece of plexiglass to it.

 

Have to agree.  Always found it odd that the Arcade1UP machines went with a type of CPO print that was practically guaranteed to wear off in seconds. 

 

Speaking as someone who is a 30-year collector of arcade games: I understand why they may have been trying to build to a price point, and particularly so given the casual market they're aiming at.  But when I can see one of these in Wal-Mart after five days on the floor and it looks like it's been on location for five years (much as the ones I saw in the run-up to last Christmas did)...  Better decisions could have been made.

 

Quote

In any case, I find it bizarre that they didn't see that coming. Reverse-printing onto Lexan isn't even just an arcade machine thing. I already mentioned NES gamepads, but it's also standard procedure for control panel overlays on all sorts of equipment, like the old fast food joint cash registers that had membrane keys (before everyone went to touch-screen LCDs).

 

That's the thing - I don't get it either.  By about 1981 it was really clear that games with with painted or silkscreened CPOs that weren't on the backside of some sort of protective layer would wear out in ten seconds flat on a route.  This isn't arcane knowledge; you just don't do it.  And retrofitting lexan overlays isn't a fix - it's an admission that it wasn't done right to begin with.

Edited October 13, 2019 by x=usr(1536)

[128Kgames]

With the plexi deck protector on, the wear is eliminated.  Plus Walmart shoppers are animals, so take that into account.

[negative1]

I have had my Arcade 1up pac-man for a year now, and before I got the control panel protector,i know i put in 2 weeks of

heavy duty (10+ hours a day), and it still looked brand new. I have a friend with a Street Fighter 2 machine, that he used

heavily for a few weeks before getting his protector. His still looked brand new also.

 

Depends on the person and how they play. I rest my wrists on the panels too.

 

later

-1

[+x=usr(1536)]

57 minutes ago, 128Kgames said:

With the plexi deck protector on, the wear is eliminated.  Plus Walmart shoppers are animals, so take that into account.

 

True on both counts, but the plexi is an afterthought that could have been avoided.  And yep, Wal-Mart shoppers (just like me!) are animals.  But so are younger kids and inebriated man-cave-dwelling adults.  If there are two places outside of Wal-Mart that these units are likely to end up in, it's kids' bedrooms and Dad's Den.  Sure, the wear will show faster in Wal-Mart, but it's still something that will show in HUO machines; the only difference is how long it will take for that to happen, and it still could've been avoided in the first place.

 

Oh, I forgot frathouses.  They'll definitely turn up in there, and I'd expect them to wear faster there than in even the worst Wal-Mart on earth.

[negative1]

Arcade 1up Star Wars review:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=datXs-GCwAI

 

later

-1

[MaximRecoil]

7 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

 

True on both counts, but the plexi is an afterthought that could have been avoided.  And yep, Wal-Mart shoppers (just like me!) are animals.  But so are younger kids and inebriated man-cave-dwelling adults.  If there are two places outside of Wal-Mart that these units are likely to end up in, it's kids' bedrooms and Dad's Den.  Sure, the wear will show faster in Wal-Mart, but it's still something that will show in HUO machines; the only difference is how long it will take for that to happen, and it still could've been avoided in the first place.

 

Oh, I forgot frathouses.  They'll definitely turn up in there, and I'd expect them to wear faster there than in even the worst Wal-Mart on earth.

 

Yeah, definitely an afterthought, and pretty much guaranteed to be costing them more money than to print the CPOs right in the first place. Reverse-printing onto 10-mil clear Lexan may be more expensive than printing onto e.g., 3-mil vinyl (though I doubt the vinyl they use is even that thick), but I doubt highly that it's more expensive than printing on vinyl plus machining out a 2mm (79 mils) thick plexiglass panel complete with button/joystick/speaker/bolt holes to go on top of it.

 

On top of that, reverse-printing onto clear, textured 10-mil Lexan would give the cabinet a touch of authenticity, and it would look and feel way better than thick plexiglass sitting on top of printed vinyl.

[MaximRecoil]

On 10/3/2018 at 3:39 PM, Bill Loguidice said:

 

LOL, please find a supplier of 17" or larger 4:3 LCDs.

Quote

I'll try to explain one last time, because you're clearly not understanding. There is no manufacturer making new 17" (or larger) 4:3 LCD screens. What you're finding are remainder stock of old monitors. Arcade1Up likely bought up one of the few, if perhaps only, leftover mass inventory of 17" 4:3 naked panels from some supplier who still happened to have them in a warehouse.

Quote

Again, your statement is incorrect. There is no new supply of 17" 4:3 monitors, period. That's why Arcade1Up is using older panels. I can't make it any clearer.

I'm no fan of LCDs; in fact, I probably hate them more than anyone else on Earth does. I'd rather not play a video game at all than play one on an LCD. To me the difference between a low-end and high-end LCD is the same as the difference between a turd and a polished turd. But regardless of that, 4:3 LCDs are certainly still being manufactured, ones specifically made for arcade machines no less. Longtime arcade monitor manufacturer Wells Gardner makes them (both 17" and 19" versions), and there is the 19" Happ Vision Pro as well (albeit a disgrace to the name; the original Happ Vision Pro, last manufactured in the late 2000s, was a beautiful standard-resolution RGB CRT arcade monitor; I bought 3 of them new just before they and everyone else stopped manufacturing CRTs):

 

http://www.arcadeshop.com/i/479/19-vp-lcd-monitor.htm

 

https://www.wellsgardner.com/product-category/lcd-monitors/

Edited October 13, 2019 by MaximRecoil

[MaximRecoil]

On 10/4/2018 at 9:20 AM, youxia said:

To achieve 0 or super low latency you'd need a FPGA board or a strong PC combined with a decent panel. That would hike the price very considerably.

There's no such thing as super low latency, let alone zero latency, when using an LCD or any other type of digital display. The best digital displays have about 1 millisecond of display lag, while CRTs render the video signal in what is effectively real-time, i.e., at the speed that electricity travels through its circuitry, which might be a ~nanosecond. That means that, at best, a digital display has about a million times more latency than a CRT (1 ms = 1,000,000 ns), and that's clearly because of "progress."

 

You won't consciously notice say, 1 ms of lag, but it can still negatively affect your gameplay because it inherently narrows your various windows for success in the game. For example, suppose you are playing a video game on a CRT and you just barely avoid an object that can kill you, i.e., you were at the very edge of the window for successfully avoiding the object. But what if it had been an LCD with its at least 1 ms (and usually more than that) of lag? That could be enough to put you outside the window, making the object hit you instead of you avoiding it by the skin of your teeth. Human senses aren't precise enough to parse time in 1-ms increments, so you'd probably chalk the death up to you being too slow, but in reality, it was the digital display's fault.

[JeffVav]

4 hours ago, MaximRecoil said:

There's no such thing as super low latency, let alone zero latency, when using an LCD or any other type of digital display. The best digital displays have about 1 millisecond of display lag, while CRTs render the video signal in what is effectively real-time, i.e., at the speed that electricity travels through its circuitry, which might be a ~nanosecond. That means that, at best, a digital display has about a million times more latency than a CRT (1 ms = 1,000,000 ns), and that's clearly because of "progress."

 

You won't consciously notice say, 1 ms of lag, but it can still negatively affect your gameplay because it inherently narrows your various windows for success in the game. For example, suppose you are playing a video game on a CRT and you just barely avoid an object that can kill you, i.e., you were at the very edge of the window for successfully avoiding the object. But what if it had been an LCD with its at least 1 ms (and usually more than that) of lag? That could be enough to put you outside the window, making the object hit you instead of you avoiding it by the skin of your teeth. Human senses aren't precise enough to parse time in 1-ms increments, so you'd probably chalk the death up to you being too slow, but in reality, it was the digital display's fault.

 

While it's technically true that you'd have a 1ms smaller window, it's practically at the level of sigma noise.  Most games evolve their logic once per 60Hz frame interval (i.e. 60FPS).  That's 16.7ms between your inputs even being read.  1ms is subframe, specifically 6% of the frame interval.  So given a flat random distribution, there's a 94% chance that a 1ms delay will have absolutely no effect whatsoever, let alone a consequential one.

 

In practice there are much more significant contributors to latency than LCDs.  For example, because an emulator is effectively reconstructing the CRT response, synthesising it to a frame buffer (typically a back buffer) and then flipping it, you will have at minimum a whole frame's worth of delay (16.7ms) simply because it can't flip the buffer to present it until construction is finished.  Worrying about 1ms LCD response in that context is philosophically equivalent to having a Diet Coke with your 2nd slice of cheesecake.

 

Anyway, just try https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime for fun and see what having 1ms less time would mean.

[MaximRecoil]

58 minutes ago, JeffVav said:

 

While it's technically true that you'd have a 1ms smaller window, it's practically at the level of sigma noise.  Most games evolve their logic once per 60Hz frame interval (i.e. 60FPS).  That's 16.7ms between your inputs even being read.  1ms is subframe, specifically 6% of the frame interval.  So given a flat random distribution, there's a 94% chance that a 1ms delay will have absolutely no effect whatsoever, let alone a consequential one.

 

In practice there are much more significant contributors to latency than LCDs.  For example, because an emulator is effectively reconstructing the CRT response, synthesising it to a frame buffer (typically a back buffer) and then flipping it, you will have at minimum a whole frame's worth of delay (16.7ms) simply because it can't flip the buffer to present it until construction is finished.  Worrying about 1ms LCD response in that context is philosophically equivalent to having a Diet Coke with your 2nd slice of cheesecake.

 

Anyway, just try https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime for fun and see what having 1ms less time would mean.

Correction to my previous post: the best case scenario is for an LCD is 1 ms response time, but as it turns out, response time isn't the same thing as display input lag, though I guess LCD marketing departments would like you to think they are the same thing. See here:

 

https://displaylag.com/exposed-input-lag-vs-response-time/

 

And a chart from the same site:

 

https://displaylag.com/display-database/

 

The best that I see on there for 2018 (which is the most recent year on the chart) is 9 ms of display lag; about 9 million times more display lag than a CRT. Combining that with the latency of emulation makes that worse of course.

[Tanooki]

Surprised you're quoting a year old post.  I know the basics of a cabaret vs full size, I own a full size (neo geo) as it is.  I remember the little ones from that location and random other places as I've played Klax on one before I remember, Pac-Man too.

[negative1]

Here's a review of the Street fighter 2  cocktail table :

http://nicole.express/2019/review-arcade1up-street-fighter-table.html

 

later
-1

Edited October 14, 2019 by negative1

[MaximRecoil]

On 11/26/2018 at 7:42 PM, 4300 said:

Had some time over the holiday to work in this thing some more. Put on done green t-molding and started on the backlit marquee. Need to finish the molding around the controls and get some brackets for the marquee yet. For those wondering, I'm up to about 30 bucks on this project.

That's a huge improvement. If one of those fell into my lap for free I'd do the same thing, but I wouldn't stop there. The side panels are already 1/2" thick, which is marginal, but adequate for a cabaret-size cabinet, but from what I've read, other panels (like the kick panel) are thin, like 1/8" fiberboard or something. I'd replace those with 1/2" MDF panels, plus I'd add blocking inside the cabinet (strips of 1x1s) and screw & wood glue all the panels together. Doing those things would greatly increase its rigidity and probably double its weight, which would give it more stability. I'd also replace the controls with real arcade controls and put a de-cased 17" CRT PC monitor in there, which would add even more weight (and have WAY better picture quality, including perfectly black blacks, zero color shift regardless of the viewing angle, no display lag, no potential for dead or stuck pixels, and a thick glass screen that isn't easily scratched/damaged). I'm guessing it would be up to at least 150 pounds at that point, which is more in the neighborhood of what real arcade cabaret machines weigh.

 

A standard-resolution (~15 KHz) CRT arcade monitor instead of a high-resolution PC monitor would be ideal, but the Arcade1Up's hardware wouldn't be able to sync to it, plus a 19" one would probably be too big for that cabinet. Also, old 17" CRT PC monitors are free or cheap and easy to find, whereas arcade monitors typically aren't any of those things. If I were building a cabinet from scratch, or restoring/refurbishing an original arcade machine, it would get a real CRT arcade monitor, no question about it, but for cheap upgrades to something like an Arcade1Up cabinet, a CRT PC monitor is good enough, and a drastic improvement over any LCD in existence.

[MaximRecoil]

On 11/28/2018 at 4:30 PM, negative1 said:

OT: One last time, ONE LAST TIME, he yells, shaking his fists at the sky.

Insert text here.

Actually Mr. Mullet, that is still not the problem. You can reply to multiple people quite easily, as you have shown in your screenshot.

Insert text here.

The main ISSUE, is replying to one of those people, when you have to split their response into several smaller subdivided responses, when they make multiple points.

Insert text here.

All that happens, when you hit the quote reply, is it indents your quote 1 level below the original, instead of breaking the quote out to 2 levels to the parent post, thus making it clearer to see that you are responding to that.

Insert text here.

What happens, is that the quotes get nested further and further, and becomes illegible.

The forum software here is among the worst I've ever encountered. The more they try to improve forum software, the worse it gets. Fortunately, KLOV and various other forums I frequent still use forum software that hasn't changed in many years, so when you click reply you don't get an annoying previewed BBCode format, you just get raw BBCode, and it wraps the text automatically for you as you type. It's perfect.

 

In any case, there is a workaround for the issue you're talking about here. As you can see, I broke your quote into multiple quotes and added my own text between them, and I did it in the standard reply box. What you do is: select all of the text in the single quote except for the first excerpt that you want to reply to, and then cut and paste it back in below the quote. Now you can reply to the first excerpt which is now enclosed in a quote box by itself, and then manually type in quote tags for the rest of the now-plain-text that you pasted below the quote, and it will look like my example above when you post it.

[Goochman]

On 10/3/2019 at 9:51 AM, 128Kgames said:

Black Series cocktail tables:

 

https://arcade1up.com/collections/cabinets-for-sale/products/blackseries-pacman

 

 

 

 

Swap Pac Man for Ms Pac Man and Id have one on preorder

 

Are these cocktail cabinets "regular size" or are they smaller like the standup units?

 

[negative1]

25 minutes ago, Goochman said:

Swap Pac Man for Ms Pac Man and Id have one on preorder

 

Are these cocktail cabinets "regular size" or are they smaller like the standup units?

 

ms pac man will never likely be included, and wouldn't look good in black.

these are much smaller scale tables, compared to normal ones, as you can see from the picture

and review videos.

 

later

-1

[Flojomojo]

Preorders for Star Wars via Walmart and GameStop seem to have closed. Do you think these will be hard to find? I would think the $500 price would scare people away. 

[simbalion]

I hope they aren't hard to find as Star Wars is the ONE machine from 1UP I have been waiting for. I wanted to see reviews before letting go of my hard-earned money though. Of course, TMNT is a nice runner up!

[128Kgames]

20 minutes ago, simbalion said:

I hope they aren't hard to find as Star Wars is the ONE machine from 1UP I have been waiting for. I wanted to see reviews before letting go of my hard-earned money though. Of course, TMNT is a nice runner up!

Better to have pre-ordered Star Wars from Walmart as you can always return it.  As my favorite president always says "It's gonna be huge!"

[negative1]

7 hours ago, Flojomojo said:

Preorders for Star Wars via Walmart and GameStop seem to have closed. Do you think these will be hard to find? I would think the $500 price would scare people away. 

not if you want that controller, lighted marquee, and custom riser included with some of them.

 

later

-1

[+thanatos]

Gamestop website says "Available now!"

 

Except my pre-order from August says "Waiting for availability."

 

:(

[simbalion]

Well, if by some chance they aren't available, I guess I won't have one and 1Up won't be getting any money from me in any case. I'll just put it back for something else in the future or for something that I actually need. I don't like doing pre-orders and like I said before, I wanted to see how these actually reviewed before plunking my hard earned money done, seeing the issues the initial batch of games had last year. I've done the whole 'Hurry! Hurry!' thing over the years and it just gets old.

 

P.S. I am fine doing pre-orders on things such as books and DVDs, but not on something like this!