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I started collecting vintage arcades. Do I have the space for vintage arcades in my house? No. Do I seem to care? Another no. I actually started on building my own arcade in late 2007 [album]. This coincided with getting a bit more comfortable with basic woodworking. My first design was extremely basic and consisted of a 21" CRT monitor I bought off Craigslist. The cabinet I built was super boxy and I abandoned that project part-way through building it. I got as far as building the control deck, then lost interest.

After that I had a more successful attempt in 2012 at building what could be described as a cabaret arcade [album]. It runs a game I programmed from scratch called Delivery Mayhem. The game is a bit like Pac-Man, only it's themed after the Wisconsin Uprising of 2010. The object of the game is to collect pizzas around the map and deliver them to the state capitol without getting caught by anti-union thugs. The arcade is complete with a working coin mech and runs on a PC running a modded install of Windows XP that's configured to not show an indication it's actually running Windows. That was a bit of a feat. Though there are still some tell-tale signs it's running on Windows, like when the program crashes!

The first commercial arcade I bought for myself I found on Facebook Marketplace. I found a Ms. Pac-Man cocktail arcade [album]. I ended-up buying it, being a bit of a newbie when it comes to arcades. I soon learned some unfortunate aspects of it. First, it was running a bootleg version of Ms. Pac-Man, so not legal. The arcade also has some maze burn-in and the v-hold on the monitor is a littly flaky. I later found out that the chassis used to be a Space Invaders: Part II arcade. It must have been converted to a Ms. Pac-Man not too long afterwards considering the maze burn-in. I ended-up making the arcade legit by purchasing a Class of '81 PCB and adapting the wiring harness to JAMMA. In testing out the JAMMA wiring I picked-up a 60-in-1 PCB. That's the PCB I currently run, though I stay legit by only enabling the games I own PCBs for. The Class of '81 PCB has Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, and a hidden Pac-Man, so I enabled those three games. I also bought a Mr. Do! PCB so I also enabled that game as well, which is a super fun, Dig Dug like game. To support Galaga and Mr. Do! I needed to restore the control panel a bit. A previous owner of that arcade removed the two-way joysticks of Space Invaders Part II and added 4-way leaf joysticks. Though they also removed the fire buttons. I ended-up re-adding the fire buttons with some HAPP buttons I had from previous DIY arcade projects. Here's a video of that arcade in action with the Class of 1981 board.

The second to latest vintage arcade purchase I made was, hilariously, a Space Invaders: Part II table-top arcade, just like the one I previously bought, only this one is a seemingly all-original survivor. The monitor is in great shape, as is the chassis in general. The only bummers were the coin mech wasn't working properly and it lacked a coin box. The previous arcade also lacked a coin box. I crafted a replacement coin box using premium pine wood, complete with a lock and painted black to match the cabinet as best as I could. I replicated that coin box on this 2nd Taito table top arcade. Works decently and seemed the best route given the coin boxes are hard to find and are priced accordingly. Still, the coin boxes were quite a challenge to get semi-right, especially the lock!

I got my first attempt at making a DIY arcade operational [album]. I did that by buying a Tetris arcade PCB off eBay, making a GBS Control to scale the 15KHz CGA to VGA for the 21" CRT monitor it has, then I added an arcade power supply, rigged-up the coin mech, and also added a coin box, which is a plastic chocolate caramel candy container. Hey, reduce, reuse, recycle, which emphasis on reuse! It works and is a fun game to play, though the cabinet is still unfinished, as it's basically a large, unpainted, MDF box.

My most recent arcade purchase is a Mr. Do! that was converted from a Space Invaders Part II. [album]. It actually came with the coin box! Though I missed that the coin mech was missing the top coin authenticator piece. I ended-up just replacing the whole mech. I also added a lock to the coin box, as that was also missing. I quickly observed that Mr. Do carves through the ground faster than he should. I used another Mr. Do! board I had and determined the board of the set I bought has a speed hacked EEPROM installed. Specifically, EEPROM D2 was the speed hacked chip. I swapped that out and all good. The remaining issue it has is a sometimes shaky image. Not sure what's going on with that. I'm hoping it's not the monitor or video board having issues. Seems like it could be a connection from the PCB to the video board, though might take some more tinkering to try and figure that out. Here's a video of that arcade in action.

I started a practice of "running the basement arcade gauntlet". That is, gathering enough quarters to play each game I have once, enjoying a unique adult beverage, and documenting my scores for each game. Recent results of running the basement arcade gauntlet...

Created by Mike Young on March 11, 2022. Last updated on June 30, 2024.

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