Arcade Posters

If collecting rare Japanese arcade posters wasn't expensive enough, trying to frame them for hanging will surely put you in the poor house. The problem is two fold, Japanese B1 poster size is larger than American B1 poster size, and no store in America carries pre-made frames larger than B1. This leaves you with two options, trim the poster to fit American B1 size (unthinkable by most!) or have a custom frame built.

Custom framing is great business in the US with huge markups because you have no where else to go. I've priced a custom frame with the cheapest frame border, and cheapest/thinnest plexiglass at Michael's Art Supply which came out to $275! That price does NOT include mounting or anything, just the metal frame, backing, and plexi front. Unbelievable! Of course the sales person said "for this week only" there was a $99 off custom frames over $200...so the price would have dropped to $176. No thanks.

Since I was very reluctant to trim these rare posters, I decided to try and make my own frames. Since I'm no carpenter, have no woodworking tools, I didn't feel like making 50 pound wood/glass frames from homedepot (so not sure what that would cost total). What I did was visit a local plastics store called Tap Plastics. There, I ordered a 1/8 thick plexiglass square cut to 40"1/2 x 28"3/4 size (thats Japanese B1) for $30, then a 1/8 think foam-core backing of the same size for $15. My ghetto solution for holding the pieces together were small office binder clips (19mm in size) found in Walmart for $0.79 a box of 12. After clipping the backing to the plexi (with poster sandwiched in the middle) I removed the front side metal wing-tabs on the clips. To hang the poster, Tap Plastics had this very cool Uniframe 40" kit for $10. So total cost of my custom frame came out to about $55.

Notice the two foam-core blocks I taped to the back, these were instructions that the Uniframe kit gave to give the frame better support. Two simple picture frame nails is all that is needed to hang via the plastic parts just below the supports. Since the entire thing is pretty light weight (about 5 lbs), nothing would be damaged if it happened to come off the wall (never happened yet).

The true test of this design was fitting a similar frame for my Espgaluda II poster, which is a double B1 size of 79" x 28"3/4! Price for the plexi and foam-core obviously came out to twice as much ($90) but there was no framing system suitable for this extremely long length. So again, I went ghetto, headed back to Walmart, and bought several more boxes of those small size binder clips. This time, I didn't use any framing system and just used the single side of the binder clip tab-wing to attach to the wall via small poster nails. The result was perfectly secure to the wall! Since hanging all my extra large posters this way, I've since seen some new internet framing shops in the UK that offer > 40" custom frames around this same price, but I'm not sure what the shipping costs would be on such large pieces of plexiglass overseas. I don't have the link handy, but its been mentioned in several of the poster threads on the shmups message board.

First Espgaluda II high score

Please excuse the low score first attempt. :(

First Planet Harriers high score

My first high score posting for Planet Harriers. Lavaa is stage 3, and I barely got half way though, so lots of room for improvement.

New Ketsui high score

New Ketsui high score

Planet Harriers' Analog Joysticks

Ok, so first thing to fix on my Planet Harriers cab were the analog joysticks. The ones that came with the cab were completely destroyed. One of them even had its metal shaft bent at a 15 degree angle, probably from some pissed off punk getting his revenge.

Upon opening the control panel, I found a large pile of shredded rubber and small white plastic pieces everywhere. It looked like both sticks literally exploded. After taking things apart, I found that the plastic bits were from a sleeve that fits around the central joint of the joystick, connecting to one of the analog pots. I can't imagine this holding up to the abuse in American arcades. The shredded rubber was from the stopper at the end of joystick shaft, used to regulate the throw distance. There was also a ton of dried up grease which was supposed to prevent the shredding, but didn't seem to do a good job.

I called a local distributor to get a quote for replacement sticks, and best he could do was $175 per stick for Happ replacements. I didn't even want to guess what Sega would have changed for replacing these with original ones. Anyway, I found what looked like the exact same Happ sticks on ebay (marked new/overstock) for much cheaper (thank you ebay!) I got the new sticks in the mail, and they felt pretty stiff, this is actually a good sign, as I wanted accuracy, not loose analog sticks thats don't return to the center.

The mounting points on the plates were exactly the same, so no problem fitting them to the control panel. The only difficulty was in the proprietary Sega connectors. I rigged my own connectors and started up the machine, only to find they would not calibrate correctly. Apparently not all 5K pots are the same. So I then decided to pull out the original Sega pots, put them in the Happ sticks, using the original connectors, and low and behold it works!

Here are pics of the original stick, then the Happ ones I bought, and then what it looks like mounted in the control panel. I may try to attach the rubber boot to the Happ sticks, but it would require me to drill holes in the mounting plate...not sure if I feel like doing that at this point. I also have to tweak the center line of each pot to get the game to accurately perform the extreme left/right dodge maneuver, vital to playing the game accurately. I really can't imagine American arcade operators going to these lengths to make the game this playable...which also tells me why some people found the controls lacking.

ESPGaluda 1CC

Finally! I 1CC'd (one credit completed) ESPGaluda tonight. For one of Cave's reportedly "easeist shmup", it took me about two months of playing it seriously, around 3 times a week, to complete with a single quarter run. I'm fairly sure I was able to 1-ALL DoDonPachi faster than this. Anyway, now I'll have no guilty conscience moving onto ESPGaluda II.

My final score was 35,219,710 using Ageha.

Planet Harriers

Planet Harriers came out in 2000/2001. Everyone was praying for a Dreamcast port that would never happen. There was a cab near me in Milpitas at the Van's Skate Park, but I think I only played it once, at $1 a credit. When it comes to playing arcade games for money, I'm a total cheapass gamer!

After it was confirmed that Planet Harriers was not coming out for the Dreamcast (or Gamecube), I went back to that arcade to try playing it some more, but the place had closed down. I'd never seen this cab anywhere since then, so I was not going to pass up an opportunity to buy this rare beauty at a good price. And then it happened! Of course I didn't get such a great deal on it without there being some problems that I'll have to fix. First problem being both analog joysticks were completely shot, and then both monitors had either the red or green color cutting out at random times. With Spy Hunter now behind me, let my next big project begin!

What rank control?

I've been playing Pink Sweets on and off for about two months now, and have run into a brick wall in Stage 4. The game just gets too difficult, and I wasn't able to break the 4M score barrier. For those that know Raizing type shmups, rank control is a vital strategy to completeing (1CCing) the game. What rank does, is increase the difficulty in direct proportion to how well you are playing/scoring.

Score too good in early levels (by medaling and picking up weapon options) and the game bitch slaps you in later levels. If you don't medal, or avoid options, and even suicide your ship (if you have extra ones), the rank drops or maintains, giving you a chance to reach the later levels, and thus potential for obtaining a higher overall score. Very ingenious play mechanics like this make it fun to figure out which parts of the game give higher score potentials but minimal rank increases.

Anyway, since I've only started playing this, I've been ignoring the rank side of the game, happily picking up options, medals, and milking bosses for all the points they are worth. So I've reached that inevitable brick wall and need to start strategizing.

Tonight, I was able to finally break 4M, again ignoring rank, but only by picking up two extends (extra ships) in Stage 3 using a "super power up" option, which in turn made the game quite pissed. I then proceeded to loose two spare ships on the Stage 3 endboss and two more at the begining of Stage 4. I think I could have avoided these losses, and gotten about 500K more in score, if I reach the Stage 4 endboss. Maybe then I'll begin a rank strategy.

4,091,030 - Lace - Stage 4 - DJK

The things we do for love

Not exactly arcade related, but on some level just as masochistic as playing shmups. Having a girlfriend who is studying optometry for an OD degree, means I get to play guinea pig to her poking, prodding, lid flipping, corneal staining, dilating, phoropting, picture taking fun. That last part, the picture taking, is no cakewalk either. She shoves what looks like a jewlers lens against my cornea with her bare hand, and holds it there while using a camera (which is on a stand 4 inches away from my face) with light shining directly into my eye to take pictures for about an hour and a half. Did I forget to mention I don't wear glasses or have any vision problems?...at least not yet...

So now, I give you, the optic disc/nerve of my left eye:

Girls like Cosmo

I recently bought another cabinet, and have been storing it at my girlfriends place. While keeping it there, I decided to install Cosmo Gang The Video, as its a cutesy shooter game thats pretty easy and fun. Sure enough, I got my girlfriend hooked on it. Whats amazing, is that its even more fun with 2 players. You can read a review of the snes version of it on shmups.com.

The first weekend we played it, I got a highscore of 4,807,760 Gang 23 (there are 33 Gangs/levels in the game!) After two weeks, my girlfriend was able to beat that with 5,028,420 Gang 25! She was surely hooked. In double play we got up to Gang 28 together, but never finished the game on a single credit. Best I've been able to do since then on my own was 6,700,740 Gang 28.

What am I currently playing?

I've neglected this blog for quite some time, mostly because I haven't completed any major projects worth posting about. In response to this, I've created a new section at the top listing what arcade games I'm currently playing. I'll then make some minor posts listing my progress (or lack there of) on these games to keep the blog fresh with content.

Spy Hunter Lives!

I've had this sitdown Spy Hunter cab since 1999, when IBM closed down the Taligent offices in Cupertino. The cab was apparently DOA for several months before I rescued it. After opening it up, I found one of the beer-can-sized electrolytic capacitors in the power supply block had blown-up, spewing sticky brown acid into the bottom of the supply. The failure sent a jolt which fried the Power Supply board, main CPU board, and toasted the monitor. It must have been quite a sight to whomever was playing the game at the time, probably a loud bang, and then plume of smoke.

I've been working on restoring it on and off (mostly off) for the last 7 years. I rebuilt the power supply with a switching PS and new harness, replaced the monitor flyback, horizontal transitor, and then recapped the monitor PCB. I aquired a used/working CPU board-set from another collector in San Francisco. But for the longest time, I just could not get the sound or controls to work.

So I decided enough is enough, and dedicated the last two weekends to finishing this project! I bought a new MCR Switching PS from wizzesworkshop and threw out my homemade harness, and sure enough I now had sound with battery backup as a bonus to save scores and analog calibration settings. There were still issues with half the sound effects being distored, and the analog board being dead. I must have swapped out every chip on the SSIO board before realizing the boards were from a standup Spy Hunter model, which has only 2 speakers, so the sound connector is different than my sitdown 4-speaker wiring. After rewiring the connector, sound was solved, although there is still a sizable hum coming from the switching power supply. I don't know why, but the analog controls magically started working after I realized the star-grounding cables were not hooked up to the dual amp boards. Unfortunally this did not fix the loud humming. Last thing was to replace 3 flurecent tubes and starters.



Anothing thing I discovered, is that the cabinet was made from parts of other cool arcade games at the time (apparently this is pretty common). Under the main flooring you can see graphics for a Star Wars upright. And inside the bottom of the seat, Discs of Tron. Both awsome games in their own right.

Eugene Jarvis

This past weekend I met one of my all time arcade heros, Eugene Jarvis. Eugene, and his partner at the time Larry Demar, were the primary developers of William's Robotron and Defender/Stargate.

I grew up playing Stargate at a local arcade in the early 1980s with my best friend. And let me tell you, we wasted a TON of quarters on this game. Stargate was THE most complex game at the time (and probably still today!), with its 6 buttons, 2-way joystick, and extremely manic style of play. I think the average play time of this game was roughly 2-3 minutes per quarter (for a beginner). I distinctly remember staying away from Robotron, as that game was even harder, and eat about 1 quarter every 1-2 minutes! I cursed these games more times then I care to remember, and vowed revenge every time we ran out of quarters. Well now I have the last laugh, as I bought both of these cabinets around 5-6 years ago, and play them whenever I think they need a good spanking. Well, actually, these games still kick my ass, but at least I'm not wasting any more quarters. :-)

Eugene gave a talk at this years California Extreme (the West coast's largest arcade and pinball show) and I was determined not to miss it. Now before the talk, this very talented guy (Jean Baudin) was warming up the audience playing a very strange guitar which had 11 strings! It had both bass strings and regular guitar strings on a single wide neck, and he played it with two hands like a piano. What made this even cooler, is that he was playing classic video game music tracks, like Nintendo's Mario Bros!

Checkout the inlays in the fretboards. In the first pic, you can see a Pac-Man inlayed in a guitar on a stand to the right, and the second pic is a closeup of the guitar he was playing, which had a nice Joust inlay. Very cool!

Eugene then gave an hour long talk on how he came up with the idea for Robotron, went into detail on the programming/AI involed, and answered questions from the audience. He also pointed out several bugs in his code which were NOT fixed since they added some interesting gameplay mechanics (made it HARDER!). He is a very animated speaker, and a true pleasure to listen to. If you ever get the chance, pickup the PC CD-Rom "Williams Arcade Classics" as it containts video footage interviews with Eugene, Larry, and a few other Williams developers that echo the same excitement these guys still feel today when talking about their creations.

After the talk, I ran into Eugene on the CA Extreme show floor, and watched him play a few rounds of Robotron. I then talked to him for a bit about the manic nature of his games, and that in Japan today, some companies are still releasing 2D manic shooter games (like Cave). Knowing vertical shooters are still a niche market, I doubt he would ever think about producing one himself with his current company Raw Thrills...but if anyone in America could pull off something like this, he could.

(if you couldn't figure it out, thats me on the left, and Eugene on the right)

Video Junkie

Props to Bloodflowers (on the shmups forum) for digging up this classic clip on youtube. Whats scary is that I didn't look to different from that kid back in the early 80s. :-) Good thing I have a well paying job to support my habbit now!

Dreamcast 9-9-99

The movie "The Omen" wasn't the only thing to capitalize on a special date (6-6-06). My beloved Dreamcast was released on 9-9-99. I still play my DC more than my PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube combined. Maybe its that the hardware is still used in Japanese arcades today. Or maybe its the style of games which are still being released today for the DC! Or maybe its just the cool ass commercials.



This was one of Sega's 9-9-99 launch commercials. Notice the armband the thief is wearing; Sega's slam to Sony, for being first to market before the PS2! Also, in what could be seen as a strange forshadowing, at the end of the commercial Sonic slips off the top of the console and falls flat on his face, loosing all his rings (typical of loosing a life in the sonic games).

DDP 2nd Loop

I started playing DoDonPachi again, and finally made it to the 2nd loop with the >50M requirement! I nobomb nomiss'ed up to the end of 1-4. Finished the 1st loop at 52M with 2 ships in stock. Finally died at area 2-3 with a score of 61,891,740 (max hit of 279).

I posted my last highscore back in December.

6/9/06 Score update: just made it to level 2-4 with 74,010,010.

Pacman at the Library

I may be oldskool, but Pacman just ain't my bag. Although this is too funy to pass up!

No Pants Allowed

Ran across this today on the shmups forum, and it is a bit dated (being last summer), but worth mentioning. Barcade (located in NYC) hosted a "No Pants Allowed: The Underwear Arcade Video Game Gathering", blog entry here, and flickr photos here.
Warning: links & images are not exactly work safe (PG-13).

Two projects completed

Lack of updates to my blog should indicate my work/life job balance has been leaning almost entirely on the work side of the equation. But I had managed to finish two projects which I began back in December (mentioned in my 12/19 blog entry). I finished repainting the Sega Astro City 2 cabinet, and also finished routing a new control panel/table.

I completely disassembled this cabinet (almost every single screw came out except for two which were stripped :-( ) and repainted the inside and outside with Krylon Fusion spraypaint. Although this stuff is supposed to make a molecular bond to any type plastic, it does not bond well to fiberglass. :-( So I'm not too happy with the outcome, but looks nice for now.

Before (yuck! check out the mold under the control panel):


After (clean as a whistle):





Here is my completed console control panel project. Disregard the masking tape on the top, its there because the hinges currently have a problem when I open/close the top. Should be fixed soon enough.


[update]Here is a pic of the panel with hinge from homedepot.[/updated]