Polishing balls.

My latest project cabinet is a Missile Command upright, and my plan is to get it looking and working as close to new as I can. Step one: strip it down and get that big black ball rolling smoothly again.

The upright version of Missile Command was one of the few games (along with the first Atari sports releases) to use a massive four and a half inch Atari Trak-Ball. As these things take up a fair chunk of control panel real estate, most cabinets were designed with a smaller 2.25 or 3 inch trackball. Personally, I like the big ones.

PRO TIP: A 4.5 inch trackball is exactly the same size as a candlepin bowling ball, with similar construction. Feel free to swap out your beat up Trak-Ball for a candlepin ball with a skull embedded in it and save yourself a couple hours of polishing time.

PRO TIP: I didn’t even know candlepin bowling existed until last week.

Full story, after the jump »

link love 11-15-08

Once Upon Atari part four and part five are online.

Chasing Ghosts, that other movie about breaking arcade high score records, is finally going to see a release, with several airings on Showtime in December.

Also from Peter Hirschberg, an iPhone version of Adventure!

Check out this beautiful home remodel and arcade.

Couple food blog additions to the local RSS folder: Kristi’s Vegas Musings, and Eating Las Vegas by John Curtas.

Tour the Hammargren House of History

From the Classic Las Vegas Blog, the fine folks committed to making sure they don’t implode every old building locally, comes the reminder that this Sunday is Hammargren tour day. I lived a block away from Lonnie for a couple of years, and always viewed the treasures looming over his back wall with awe and reverence.

You’ve seen the back of the house as you pass by on Sandhill in the Paradise Crest neighborhood. The Space Capsule that peeps over the fence along with the observatory and more! Well, to long-time residents it is known as the home of Dr. Lonnie Hammargren.

Our pal Uncle Jack LeVine calls Dr. Lonnie the Godfather of Preservation in Las Vegas. Dr. Lonnie has been collecting pieces of Las Vegas and Nevada history for years. In addition, he has been an avid collector of American history as well as Internationally. He also collects the arcane and little known artifacts as well. Over the years, Dr. Lonnie’s collection has grown so much that it now fills up two houses and spills out over the yards.

For 364 days a year, a tour of the house is only available by invitation only. But once a year, on the Sunday following Nevada Day, Dr. Lonnie and his wife, Sandy, open the doors and invite everyone to join them in the celebration.

The Annual Hammargren House of History’s Celebration of Nevada Day will be on Sunday, Nov. 2nd from 1:00 - 5:00 pm. This year, to help cover costs of organizing and putting on this wonderful event, the charge will be $5.

Neo-Geo MVS-2-13 restoration

The lack of free space in the garage aside, I’m really enjoying the whole arcade restoration thing. This hobby strikes so many of the right nerves for me: the strong nostalgia kick, the tinkering, the collectibility, and the research and skill acquisition required to go from start to completion.

If you were a gamer in the 80s and if you’ve got the room, I recommend taking on your own project — thanks to the current state of our economy, cabinets are selling for cheap, and with a bit of exploration and patience you could easily wind up with your own personal gaming holy grail sitting in your workspace. There are plenty of small shops out there selling parts and reproduction artwork, and many active online communities to help with the hunt for specific pieces and technical questions.

Anyway, on to the latest.

A Neo-Geo MVS-2-13 – more commonly known as a Neo Mini or Cabaret – was one of my personal picks from the warehouse raid a few weeks back, and my first project from the lot.

Full story, after the jump »

Now you can own the World’s Largest Lite-Brite.

Just stumbled across this while digging around on ebay:

World’s Largest Lite-Brite -DaVinci’s “The Last Supper”

The pegged image itself measures approximately 4′9″ tall by 9′9″ wide and is comprised of exactly 124,418 brand new, original Lite-Brite pegs. After running out of clear/white pegs from my initial bulk peg order from Hasbro, I had to buy out the entire Lite-Brite stock of every Toys-R-Us, Wal*Mart, and Target in a 15 mile radius several times over just to replenish the shortage of pegs in that color.

An actual Lite-Brite toy has a black background which utilizes blank spaces as “black”, but does not have actual black pegs. For artistic and Guinness certification purposes, I was unable to leave blank spaces. What to do? Unused pegs were painted black with several layers of a special glossy paint made specifically for plastics. The result is a strong-bonded paint that doesn’t chip or flake in the slightest.

The pegs are fixed to the “canvas” with 8 layers of glue. Not just any glue, but non-fogging cyano-acrylate (the most expensive and hard-to-find of the super glues). This non-fogging glue was chosen for its unequaled bonding strength and the fact that it wouldn’t discolor the pegs, inhibiting light transmission.

Buy it now for $5000.

Arcade Trailer Raid, Day 2.

It begins.

Here’s where the bulk of the games were located. The facility is one of those places on the edge of town where they rent out shipping containers and trailers; the containers were stacked everywhere, with trailers lined up behind them. Looked like a level out of Rainbow Six or something. Every now and then, F-15s and F-16s from Nellis would scream right over us, close enough to read the numbers.

I wasn’t forward-thinking enough to bring sunscreen, but thankfully the worst of the summer heat had already passed; the temperature was a comparably balmy mid-90 degrees or so.

Okay, pictures!

Thank God for the forklift.

Ray takes a ride while the seller drives. Loose gravel added excitement to the day, as every now and then the forklift would spin out or get stuck, scaring the hell out of whoever was stabilizing the load.

There was a nice selection of laser disc games, all in decent shape. M.A.C.H. 3, an upright and cockpit Interstellar Laser Fantasy, and an Astron Belt cockpit. Additionally, we pulled out an upright and cockpit Firefox, both of which the seller unfortunately kept.

Two Star Trek cockpits. One went to Pete, one back home with Ray. Behind em to the left is the Firefox cockpit.

Here’s the upright Interstellar, and the only cabinet I personally claimed from the day.

Mappys! Adam Isgreen is now the proud owner of the one on the right.

Two Turket Shoots. What a strange collection of games in this trailer.

Ray poses with the loot.

And finally…

That’s not a farmer’s tan, that’s dirt.

Okay you can stop checking out my feet now. Here’s the final tally:

Games I’m keeping
I, Robot (Choplifter converted)
Interstellar Laser Fantasy
Xevious
Neo Geo MVS-2-13 cabaret & a 6slot mobo

Games I’m cleaning up to sell
Zombie Raid
Paperboy
Super Monaco GP
Nintendo VS Dualsystem upright (Super Mario & Dr. Mario)

Arcade Trailer Raid, Day 1.

This year I decided to focus most of my game-playing time on classics, great games of previous generations that for one reason or another I’d missed.

Last weekend I took that to its extreme.

There are two things every arcade game nerd should do: attend an auction, and participate in a warehouse raid, the finding of an old stash of arcade cabinets, usually belonging to a former operator, and the retrieval adventure that follows. Visiting an auction is something one can plan, but warehouse raids requires luck, timing, and persistence. Fortunately, I stumbled across someone who had all three, and I got to ride along.

It begins.

The cabinets were split up between two places, which made for a bit of a logistics puzzle. The smaller lot was a group of about a 10-15 cabinets in storage units, so we took care of those during the evening and night of the first day.

Out of this group, Ray (the one who got this whole thing rolling) took home a Star Wars cockpit, Q-bert, Ms Pac-Man, Mappy, Track n Field cocktail, Make Trax, the Pole Position cockpit, and a handful of others. There was also a Road Riot 2-player cockpit that a former coworker came by to pick up the next day.

I took home a Xevious, the Neo MVS-2-13, and a Choplifter-in-an-I, Robot (missing the hall effect stick and boards, unfortunately). A Zombie Raid, Paperboy, Nintendo VS (Super Mario and Dr Mario), and Super Monaco GP are also in my garage waiting to be cleaned up and sold.

After a bit of cleaning and rebuilding the guns, this Zombie Raid turned out to be in beautiful shape. A few cosmetic blemishes, but the guns work great and the monitor is bright and clear:

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it, but I am a very tall person.

Day two tomorrow.

link love 09-09-08

Let’s start things off with another great racketboy guide: Playing Neo-Geo on your DS.

The fine folks at TV-Nihon have been subtitling and releasing episodes of the wonderful Japanese television show GameCenter CX. At this point, all the challenges from the first season are available, alongside a few special episodes and the first few of season two.

Preach on, brotha.

Someone is auctioning a prototype wireless Atari 2700.

Video game sheet music for violin is difficult to find. Thankfully, InfinityEX has been busy transcribing, and is offering up a bunch of em on his site. Of the songs I’ve downloaded, the only one I have any hope of being able to play at this stage is Final Fantasy X’s “To Zanarkand.”

The Complete History of Nintendo [via slashdot]

link love 08-29-08

All Tron and link love, the new driph.com. Let’s see what we’ve got for you today…

Brandon digs up a whole bunch of old video game patents.

The new Surface Tension arcade table. Excellent WAF on this one. More background on the BYOAC forums.

Dearest GameStop Girl…

Kill a few hours with Steve Fulton’s extensive history of Atari: 1971-1977, and 1978-1981.

And finally, Duelling Computer Spaces - A Stellar Barn Find. Here’s the epic original KLOV thread.

link love 08-15-08

Arcade Mania, the new book on the Japanese arcade scene by Brian Ashcraft and Jean Snow, is now available for pre-order, at a very reasonable fourteen bucks. There’s also a Flickr group.

Jason Scott shares some neat Karateka trivia. I have no idea if the trick worked on the Atari 8-bit version, but then again I never tried putting the disk in upside-down.

Multiwinia trailer!

Also from Dtoid, Games time forgot: Space Ace. Poe’s Pizza, the place we’d trek to and burn our allowance on, had Space Ace in it’s lineup for quite some time. Still, for a kid on a limited budget, laserdisc titles were several places down the preferability list, as playtime could be painfully brief until you mastered the game.

Hey wow, SEGA discovered a roomfull of games, from back when SEGA games were good. /TEAR 9-9-99 NEVER FORGET