Back On The Arcade Machines.

[xman]

I thought some of you may be interested in this topic I've started here, well I hope so anyway. After a 13 year spell from the Amusement Machine Industry, the industry I went straight into after school, I find myself back in it and the pleasure is still there. Good to see nothing has changed in the way of the wages which was the reason I actually left it and got into the Automation Industry. Well years gone by and not owing money on a house anymore I am quite happy back in my industry I do love. That's the background and I was really hoping to have some pics of the 400-500 machines I now look after that are in 8 locations and spread around my state that I have taken but I can't believe I don't have a suitable USB lead to suit my phone...GRRRR so the pics will need to wait till tomorrow. I hope to show you guys some pretty interesting shit these machines use now and the cutting edge technology companies like Sega, Namco, ICE and Benchmark to name a few are using these days in the effort to make money through entertainment. To give you some idea of how cutting edge, this industry has always been way ahead of the home market like when VHS tapes were the latest in house, we were using 10" DVDs in a few machines till the manufactures worked out the hash environment was not suitable for the latest development, disc drives and the industry reverted back to dedicated mother boards with data stored on ROMs. Now days most is by use of some kind of PC to an interface board and running Windoz of some breed or Linux. Anyway, I'm hoping to have some pics up tomorrow even if I need to take in my trusty camera to grab some pics. There is absolutely no limit to the pics I can take as I do spend a bit of time inside, underneath, behind or in front of these machines working on them keeping them running and earning cash. Well that's about it without pics. Hope it's a bit more exciting tomorrow.

[xman]

Couple of pics of one of the centers I look after..




And this was a brand new machine we set up today at the same site called "Dizzy Chicken"...

And it's playfield...

Really not looking forward to changing those RGB LEDs in the track. The screen at the back is an LCD display showing how to play and in game it features a camera view from the top looking straight down at the play-field so like a "bird's eye view".

[xman]

A video of the playfield and backglass of Dizzy Chicken...

[xman]

This is the simulator ride I look after.

Quite apparent why this place never has customers, it's the factory next to our workshop..

[Nextelhalo]

Damn man, didnt even realize arcades were still kicking ass. Interested in that simulator there. Time Crisis 4 looks kickass, and congrats on getting back to your dream job

[xman]

I'll have more on the simulator next week Nex when I do a full inspection of it, hasn't been done in the 18 months it's been there and is long over due. Stay tuned. The Time Crisis 4 in the pick is major kick arse. The gun is at the start of the game a semi auto but you can hit targets that have it become a machine gun and this on a gun that recoils is nice however, no where near the recoil of a real gun. Still, a recoiling gun is better than not I guess. I wish this was available on console gun games but at $700 a gun assembly, not very likely at least not the quality of the Namco units.
This week I put this processor back in after it was repaired in the machine, "The Fast and Furious, Bike". Some of you may recognize this style of PC it uses.

The cables from the P.C. go to the all important interface board and the game is stored on the P.C.s HDD. If you look real close in this pic you will see under the VGA cable there is a white plug, it has the pink beside it. This unit has to be in place for the P.C. to play the game and comes when you purchase the arcade version of the game. You loose it and the game doesn't play. It has the required links to get it to work and allow the P.C game to "talk" to the interface board so there is no way to just grab a disc copy and play on your home P.C.. This is the machine the P.C is in....

This is the inside workings of a pinball machine, "Tron". I had to change a broken flipper button and grabbed this pic..

The inside workings of my troublesome "Ticket chewing machine". This thing chews tickets fed into it won on the games by customers and give a simple printed receipt the customer takes to the prize counter.

This is a big piece, "Connect 4". You can see it from the other end of the building being played. 4 of the same colour on a line is a win...

This is a nice piece made by Sega. Your in a pirate ship fighting pirates and creatures that board your ship but you have machine guns to defend yourself. The machine swings and sways with all the movements of the ship and it does this by way of 4 air shocks about 120mm in height each and are a arse to change. I know, I just changed the ones on the front of this one and the whole machine has to pulled to pieces and that took a couple of hours but it does earn shitloads of cash which does justify the $300 per air shock cost and there life expectancy is several months. The machine was telling me it had a air shock failure by the way as it tests itself on power up...

A couple of views of one of my centers. It has 130 machines in it..




This is a new piece I put in yesterday," Buck Hunt Panorama". I do love this machine...


These are two brand new pieces installed today. A very nice looking machine made by ICE USA...

A closer pic of the play field. I wish I filmed it because it has a top LED light show that the pic doesn't show like a video would...

"Batman". A simple kid's game that you need to hit the head that sticks up to win tickets. It does get real hard as the heads pop up at a faster rate as you go through the game...

This machine, "Fruit Ninja" is a top use of a touch screen I think. The whole screen is a touch screen and fruit appears from the sides of the screen with the occasional bomb. You slice the fruit by dragging your finger over the fruit and when you slice a few pieces of fruit, you score larger. You hit a bomb while slicing fruit, you loose points. You score tickets at the end of the game based on you score. simple..

I hope you guys are enjoying this. Makes us feel what it was like as kids again aye.

[xman]

Here's a couple of videos I took of some of the games.
Ambilight arcade style on the machine Operation Ghost.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxNsnNywW2I
Terminator Salvation....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3LcDW5X92w
Buck Hunt World....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oATA64EDIeo
And Harpoon Lagoon....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Xu2ks9E4w
I had a bit of a run down on the card swipe system we are using in one of my centers soon to be at all our centers. I'm really looking forward to learning more about this system as it is fully programmable and you can do cool shit like having pics and designs, actually anything on the small display on the unit you swipe your player's card through to gain a game play. This is the web page about the card readers we are using for the technically minded...
http://www.intercardinc.com/products/am ... clipse.htm
This is a YouTube clip showing what the Intercard Eclipse is capable of....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPEUxamiczk
More new machines arriving next week but that is after a weekend off and I'm glad, my head hurts with all this new shit I'm trying to soak in. Although I am a tech, this is still a very steep learning curve and a lot of the experience is made on the run and usually trial and error and trying real hard not to make the errors cost to much because this industry is all about making money.

[Dan Dar3]

Nice one Steve and good luck! And show us some closeup gameplay sometime

[xman]

No game play videos to offer yet Dan, been busy just keeping the 500-600 machine on my run going and have had quite a few failures mainly P.C. and monitor related of late. Even the simulator's main monitor has died and I'm awaiting a new one. It has a 42" Kortech LCD in it at the moment and even though Kortech in this industry is regarded as rubbish, I can't really imagine to many LCD monitors handling the shaking the simulator does anyway but I would have expected longer than 6 months out of it. All the P.C.s that have failed of late have all been "Dell" tabletop versons, seems the industry love Dells of this type for some reason and are all loading issues or power supply failures. I've had two "Buck Hunter" guns snapped in half in the last two days and while we do have spare housings, we don't have wiring harnesses and both where snapped and them ripped apart snapping and stretching all the internal wiring. Not a fun job to repair especially when the gun is actually USB and plugs directly into the P.C.s USB ports. I just set up another new machine "Transformers" by Sega. Here is a bit of a look at "Transformers". This machine is earning big cash overseas in it's first few weeks since release I'm reading and expecting big things from my biggest center with it.
http://www.segaarcade.com/transformers-theatre

I will take the Go Pro out one day and get some player prospective videos but really busy ATM I'm afraid Dan but it is on my "must do" list. Thanks for showing your interest by the way.

[xman]

It's been a while but we are getting in a lot of new machines now so i thought I would add some pics of the new pieces we are operating..
The New MaxiTune 5 drivers from Namco.


Lost Land Adventure by Sega. This is proper 3D, you need to fit very expensive glasses to view it , there inside the machine, and the screen is a dome shape with the picture shone via projectors on the inside of the dome making it 180 degrees of screen. This dome is what makes the effect so amazing. It showed me until T.V. screens are dome shaped like this, don't even bother trying to do 3D on home T.V.s.. In this machine, your peripheral view is what makes it appear things are attacking you from all sides. A truly insane experience and a peak of things to come in the home market in about 10 years time. The amusement industry seems to be about that far ahead of the home market technology wise.


Flappy Bird. You know the phone app that is now banned because the dumbarse that made the app decided it would be a great idea to use sounds from Nintendo's Mario Cart and thought they would never find out. Bad move, they did and are suing him over copyright breaches. This amusement company saw how popular the app was, changed the sound track and everyones happy including Nintendo but not so the app developer that didn't trademark it and therefore got nothing not that it would matter because any royalties would have gone straight to Nintendo anyway.


Nothing new here but that is Nintendo's Mario Cart arcade in the left side of this picture.


You like this Topic let me know and I'll grab some more pictures. We have about 60 brand new machines coming in February.

[xman]

Just a promo of the latest pinball from Stern I thought you guys may be interested in especially those older members that can remember when pinball ruled the arcades. We have over 750 machines in this state our company owns and only one is a pinball, sad.
I had the pleasure of working on it this week. I think I'm the only one that actually knows what they are and how to play let alone the only one that knows how to work on them.

http://media.wix.com/ugd/d84c35_35cf2e3 ... d1692e.pdf

[xman]

One of the advantages with the company buying a whole heap of new machines is the old ones either get smashed up, once all the useful spare parts are removed, or the machines simply need a new home. This has been the case for 3 pool tables and an air hockey of late with more to come although they won't be pool table or air hockey sized. I am sick of moving these sized machines even when I'm the new owner of them. I got the pool tables to trade for things I needed for the farm like a truck to get around the place with and a discount on another concrete slab I need. The two pool tables that had ripped table clothes, I re-clothed, got new pool balls, re-tipped the pool cues, replaced the chalk holders and gave the tables a re-furbish. You've all seen pool tables but I figured not many of you would have seen the inside of an air hockey table so I took some pictures of the re-furbish work I did on it.
I took the over head light/ display unit off and then removed the play field...

This is the under side of the play field showing the blower motor. All the fluro yellow/ green pieces are the side rails and the over head display posts...

My youngest son pulling out the release solenoid and scoring opto unit so they could be cleaned for the first time since 1997. ...

A close up of the 110 volt blower motor. This creates the air on the play field that allows the punk to "float" on a cushion of air that is feed into the play field and escapes through the hundreds of holes on the play field...

The machines control board. Simple but it only has to turn the blower on and off, count goals, drive the display and time a 7 minute game so why make it bigger than it needs to be. Best of all, these boards only fail when someone blows them up like shorting them out other wise they are Xbox reliable...

The release solenoid assembly and opto score unit. This is the end my son hadn't removed yet. You can see why I removed them and cleaned them up now aye. 17 years of dust there...

And finally, after a couple of hours spread over several days, all cleaned up and good to go for another decade I hope down the farm...

[bigkidoz]

Too many toys Steve.

[xman]

Too many toys Steve.

I prefer the term, " Supplementing my income" or "preserving machines of the past for the good of the future".
But yes, I am considering I may have too many, maybe, but I can't help myself. Yesterday I go see my auto electrician and he has two pinballs there that weren't there two months ago. Curiosity hits in and I ask about them and his answer,
"They both need work, one works but the other doesn't. I knew you could fix them so I grabbed them as payment from a customer. If you overhaul the working one you can have the other. How does that sound?".
This is the working one....
http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=859
And this is the none working one...
http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=2568
So as you can see, I don't need to ask for machines at times. I couldn't ask for cash for the over hauls because I strip pinballs to a bare playfield, clean ever part and reassemble. Then I go though the electronics and repair as necessary. This will take about 2 months each machine doing them in my spare time and the labor costs are massive. They really are a labor of love for me. My real payment comes in bringing something back from the dead, seeing it all work perfectly again, playing them and finally selling them after a couple of months. You could never get your hours spent restoring them back in cash through sales but a couple of months use and the fulfillment of something that is landfill bound back to working order and then a sell-able, desired item is more than enough payment for me. A bit like restoring a car I guess but these take up less room.

[bigkidoz]

I agree better to be restored than dumped at the tip, we waste too much these days.

[xman]

I've been quite busy at work of late as all the planning and preparing for the new bowling center opening in a week's time we have done is all coming into action. It is a massive job for us as all the machines, 60 new machines, have to be craned into the location on the 2nd floor over an existing sports club and a brand new super market downstairs. All we have to land the machines on with the crane is a small outside corridor.
Some of our machines already unloaded from trucks and waiting in the loading dock to be craned up. This is how the machines arrive from the manufactures from all over the world.

One machine being craned up to the landing on the other side of the building...

A machine coming down onto the out door landing. It was my job to unload the machines here with one of the dogman that was controlling the crane driver as the crane driver cannot see this location from the crane. All the dogman's instructions to the crane driver are all done with 2 way radio. Here's a shot showing the crane dropping down a load.

You can see the bend in the crane's arm and the jib extended out to reach the landing. The crane is a 95 tonne unit but with the reach for this job, the loads had to be limited to 2 tonne.

This picture shows the inside of the bowl as it was early today, a week and a half after we started the first machine lifts. 21 machines last Thursday, 30 machines Wednesday just past and the remainder to come in next Thursday taking the total to 60 machines.


This is a couple of our machines unpacked. I will do more pics of the machines when they are setup and powered up but this was all I could get today.





And finally, the crane being packed up until we have it back on site next Thursday...


All packed up ready to go...

More pictures to follow as the bowl comes on line next week.

[fxmech]

always cool to see what you've been up to