Yay! A friend of mine borrowed me his digital camera for a while so I could snap some pics AND a video of my arcade machine! :D :D :D
I've been restoring it since it had about 25 years of wear and tear, unfortunately I couldn't document that process, but the pics show how the machine looks as of today. It sill needs some little magic touches here & there, so I'm still working on it, one step at a time :).
Specs time!
- Black Video Robot Machine (national design)
- 19" Standard Resolution Arcade Monitor (15.7kHz Horizontal)
- Fully functional coin mechanism and coin box (this machine made quite a profit over the past 25 years! it was a New Rally X machine)
- Two joysticks + 14 buttons
- Stereo speakers
I got if for a hundred bucks, complete except for a game board. That was no problem since my intentions were to modify it to take a standard PC loaded with MAME and a bunch of ROMs. I rewired the arcade controls into SNES pads with a PC parallel port connection, built a video amplifier circuit and VGA cable for the monitor, stuck a keyboard and a mouse under the control panel and added three buttons underneath it to control emulator functions, directly wired to the keyboard. Also I've wired the coin mechanism to the '5' key so that MAME games take real money to play ;D.
Since my budget is running low at the moment, currently it runs with a 500MHz PC inside, not enough for demanding games such as the Metal Slug series or the Mortal Kombat games, but it runs simple games perfectly fine and as soon as I can I'm getting a better PC for it :).
Enough babble, pics or it didn't happen!
Pics hosted at
my Flickr account (http://www.flickr.com/photos/133mhz), click them to see in full size:
Front shot:
(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3224/2844350910_8749996bfc.jpg) (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3224/2844350910_8749996bfc_b.jpg)
3/4 shot:
(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3046/2843514237_9cc29ed0a7.jpg) (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3046/2843514237_9cc29ed0a7_b.jpg)
Coin door close-up:
(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3003/2844350530_d89066613e.jpg) (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3003/2844350530_d89066613e_b.jpg)
The metal doors were terribly rusty (and originally black) and the front piece of wood was falling apart due to massive water damage. I ended up replacing the entire wood panel and sanding down the doors to remove all the rust, then painting 'em with silver paint. You can clearly see the results now :D
Here's is an old pic of the machine, provided by the seller before he sold it to me, for comparison purposes:
(http://www.retrogames.cl/imagenes/varios/robot.jpg) (http://www.retrogames.cl/imagenes/varios/robot.jpg)
...does it look better now? xD
Oh look, the coin door has opened!:
(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2241/2843512585_dbbcd6a1dd.jpg) (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2241/2843512585_dbbcd6a1dd_b.jpg)
You can see the coin mechanism, the coin chute, the power supply for the original game board and audio amplifier, the stepdown/isolation transformer for the monitor and the PC tower on the back. SNES pad interface not visible, except for the parallel port connection.
Control Panel Open:
(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3253/2843513041_51aa633385.jpg) (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3253/2843513041_51aa633385_b.jpg)
Yes, I had to do all that wiring to get it working. I used zip ties so everything looks neat ;D.
And this is me, enjoying a good game :P:
(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3091/2844349232_b2b37ef2e8.jpg) (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3091/2844349232_b2b37ef2e8_b.jpg)
...and last but not least...
a video! ;D
Here I am beating the first level of a game you won't probably ever recognize ::)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4wb2a-DVho ;)
I'm jealous.
Wow, thats very nicely built. You are very creative.
Cool MAME cabinet. I like the speaker positioning.
Also:
http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8171 (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8171) ;D
Quote from: UglyJoe on September 09, 2008, 07:21:48 pm
Cool MAME cabinet. I like the speaker positioning.
The speaker positioning is a trademark design of the Video Robot machines ;D.
Quote from: UglyJoe on September 09, 2008, 07:21:48 pm
http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8171 (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8171) ;D
Very well, my good sir.
You win one Internet.
Please spend it wisely :).
Wow, that rocks! You need to make some fake screen that pops up every minute so your friends think they have to keep feeding it quarters....
Wow - 100 dollars? I'm jealous. I'd like to have something like this myself - but I want to be able to change out the control panel (for 1-player games, 2, 4).
I would like to design games for people who have these setups; arcade-style where you have to insert "credits" for lives.
Quote from: michaelthegreat on September 10, 2008, 01:52:25 am
You need to make some fake screen that pops up every minute so your friends think they have to keep feeding it quarters....
Invite all of FW over...
Make millions ;D
That game looks cool too, what's it about?