Knights & Knaves Alehouse

Centipede & Galaga for arcade games, Dr Who pinball for pins.

Used to have Centipede & Galaga - got rid of most of the arcade games though. No time for the ridiculous amount of upkeep, and they weren't in great shape anyhow (Galaga smelled funny, Centipede was kind of torn up on the bottom and the trackball pinched your hand), so no tears over that.

Still have a working Joust II and a Satan's Hollow, and a Space Invaders II with an as-yet undiagnosed problem in the power supply or a short on the logic board. Also have nearly enough parts to put together a Golden Axe.

Loved Gauntlet, that game had depth!

As for pinball...eh, never really a big pinball player. Does MS Space Cadet count?

Pinballs, cabinet video games and other coin-operated amusement (pool tables, etc) are our family business, so I've played (and repaired) pretty much every Bally, Gottlieb and Williams model manufactured from the 60's through the 80's. My favorites are Paragon (because of the back glass) and Xenon ("nice tube shot!"). When I retire in a couple years and never move again, I'm putting a Paragon, Gorgar and Black Knight in my downstairs rec room. I'd love to put a Xenon there too, but it doesn't fit the medieval/D&D theme.

I vaguely remember the Age of the Pinball Machine, but, sadly, never got to play them (strict parents, constant travel on the road while growing up, etc.). Gorgar is the one I've heard of that sounds like an absolute blast, and the artwork is pure Sword & Sorcery awesomeness. It would be neat if there was a PC video game clone of Gorgar! I'm not a fan of video games in general, but that I would love to play!

Twilight Zone is my favorite pinball machine.
A pizza place I used to work at had one and I could keep it on replays all day long with a single quarter.

It's hard to pick a favorite arcade game.
I've dumped a ton of money into Gauntlet.

I'm lucky enough to live in a town with this.

My favorites include Gauntlet, Gorf, and Time Pilot.

PatW wrote:Used to have Centipede & Galaga - got rid of most of the arcade games though. No time for the ridiculous amount of upkeep,

fingolwyn wrote:Pinballs, cabinet video games and other coin-operated amusement (pool tables, etc) are our family business, so I've played (and repaired) pretty much every Bally, Gottlieb and Williams model manufactured from the 60's through the 80's.

I'd love to hear more from the two of you (and others with relevant experience) about arcade and pinball game upkeep and maintenance. I've vaguely considered buying such games in the past (or, more recently, buying a MAME cabinet), but I'm not the most tinkerish guy on the planet, so getting some inside scoop on what maintenance problems and costs in general run would be very useful!

fingolwyn wrote:When I retire in a couple years and never move again, I'm putting a Paragon, Gorgar and Black Knight in my downstairs rec room. I'd love to put a Xenon there too, but it doesn't fit the medieval/D&D theme.

Sounds good!

Lord Cias wrote:I'm lucky enough to live in a town with this.

Nice!---we used to have a shop in downtown Wichita where you guy buy pinball and arcade games, but they closed up their storefront, unfortunately....

Upkeep on video games isn't bad. They're just a motherboard and 1-2 associated boards with a power supply (the equivalent of a PC) in a huge wooden frame. The buttons and joy sticks take a beating though. You'll need to file the points on them as the electricity carbonizes them, and "adjust" (bend) the connections back into place frequently, especially on something like the old "Track & Field" game. You'll also need to replace the points occasionally, but you'd have to play a few thousand games on a new set of points before they would be filed/burned away.

Upkeep on pinballs is much worse, but not terribly difficult. The rubbers (the bands around the bumpers) lose their elasticity and/or wear out fairly quickly (a year or so), especially if the game isn't played frequently (when not stretched, they "freeze" into shape). The points have the same issue as on video games, and there are a LOT more of them (behind every bumper, attached to every target, on the flippers, etc), but they don't wear out nearly as quickly as on videos (except the flippers...those get a lot of use). You'll also have to replace the coils on the bumpers and flippers fairly often. The bumpers and flippers operate via an electromagnetic coil (kinda like a mini rail-gun); when the points connect, the coil is energized, which pulls a steel piston through the coil, which moves the bumper arm or flipper. These burn out frequently. Flipper coils are the genesis of my infamous "3rd grade anti-gravity science project" story Cowger may have told you in the past.

There are two types of pinballs: the older, mechanical ones (up to roughly 1976) that use banks of points for everything (all the scoring rotors, etc), and the newer electronic ones. Gorgar was one of the first, if not the first, electronic pinball. The mechanical ones with all the points can be a nightmare, but if the machine is already in good shape it will last a long time before you have trouble with those as long as you keep it out of damp areas so the points don't rust. The electronic ones won't give you near as much trouble, except that the chips and score displays (I forget what they're called) eventually burn out and you have to replace them.

Pinballs need to be cleaned often. A dirty playfield doesn't really affect play unless it's REALLY dirty, but it makes the machine look bad. You'll have to clean the playfield, take the plastic covers off the bumpers and clean them, and clean (or replace) the rubbers. In around 1979 or so somebody in the industry came up with the idea of putting a mylar cover over the playfield to reduce wear and tear, which makes them a lot easier to clean than the old wooden ones. The inside of the back glass also needs to be cleaned, but be VERY careful as the paint has no protection against your cleaner and comes off quite easily.

I don't know what the rubbers cost these days. They weren't especially cheap BITD, and you'll have to buy several sizes (everything from 5/16" for the single posts to 3 1/2" or maybe even bigger) because the bumpers are rarely the same size. We bought them in bulk packages (we had a lot of machines). There are also a lot of lamps (tiny light bulbs) that need to be replaced often. These also don't really harm play if burnt out, but the game looks a lot better with all of them operational. I don't know about the availability of the lamps these days. The industry is pretty much dead, so there's not as much demand, and light bulb technology is changing, so the old style lamps might not be manufactured at all anymore.

The problem w/ the video games is the electrolytic caps in the monitors, they dry out over time and you get hum bars, etc, on your screen. Similar problems will happen with the power supplies. The electrolytics also degrade if they're not used.

With a single video game, not a big deal, failures don't occur very often. With a bunch of them, things are failing on one, then the other, and if you don't keep on top of it, you've got a ton of work staring you in the face.

Of course the prices for games are kind of outrageous now, back when I had a bunch they were relatively cheap. But the parts cost for capacitors are pretty cheap, and there's no labor cost if you do the work yourself.

Video/computer arcade games of all stripes fascinate me; older systems that are little more than discrete logic components (your early Pong games, for example), all the way up to and including new systems that are rack-mount PCs running embedded Windows or more esoteric things. Trufax: when I play Crusin USA (I think that's the one, anyway) on my PC through MAME, the diagnostic screen shows the "system" is trying to reach an IP address...! It quits, eventually, and runs the game. I think it was one of those early 2000s arcade games that would do leader boards worldwide, etc.

I know that Golden Tee golf games from the late 90s on had built-in 28.8 modems that would allow tournament play. Boot one of those up in MAME and it'll spend a little bit trying to establish a connection.

On the lower end, you've got stuff like GORF and Wizard of Wor with their Votrax speech synthesis, and of course Stern's Berserk which accomplished its speech synthesis with a digital-to-analog board that used resistors of varying frequency to take voltages sent from the main board, run them through a row of resistors which would produce a certain phoneme. These, when triggered in a specific order, would produce words and phrases like COIN DETECTED IN POCKET and CHICKEN FIGHT LIKE A ROBOT. For a while (and I don't know that this has changed), MAME couldn't emulate the analog hardware and would just trap speech calls, and some clever person recorded all the "menacing" (but funny) phrases that the game would spit out; you could then download .WAV files from the MAME dev site and put them in the right folder and the trap in the emu would parse the speech properly. What that led to, at my work, was the ability to build funny robot phrases we'd use for system startups and shutdowns for our various desktop machine and non-production servers, so like our optical jukebox machine (this was back when the idea of storing an .ISO was out of the question; "big" desktop HDs were in the 3-8gb range) would boot up with THE HUMAN MUST NOT LIKE CHICKEN and shut down with COINS DETECTED IN ROBOT...

Don't even get me started on the most precise joystick ever created for an arcade game, the 39-position optical switch stick for Sinistar...!

Speaking of joysticks, here's a little trivia for you: I'm sure we've all played Battlezone, but few of us have ever played Army Battlezone (on original hardware, anyway). The US Army was amazed that Atari had built a 3d tank simulator for mere dollars and in a then-unheard of COTS (common, off the shelf) acquisition asked Atari to build a custom Battlezone machine for Army bases that used the gunner's controller yoke of it's new XM801 (nee M2 Bradley) Infantry Fighting Vehicle to use for training purposes. Gameplay was beyond simplistic, rather than Battlezone's aggressive kill-or-be-killed scenario, Bradley Gunner was just a shooting gallery, limited only by time and ammunition. Gunners played to learn to use the coincidental aiming system, and manage TOW missiles, and so on.

The control yoke steered the virtual turret back and forth, and elevated and depressed the gun, or steered the TOW missile in flight.

The US Army bought the prototype as promised but a new ballistic computer and rangefinder system was produced for the Bradley which negated the requirement for a coincidental sight system. Instead a simple laser rangefinder was used, and a single press of a button on the yoke would lase the target, then elevate the gun properly.

Atari however had hundreds (if not thousands) of the Bradley's yoke just sitting around, built. So what they did was use it as the control for the Star Wars arcade games (and the conversion/sequel, The Empire Strikes Back). Since those games were rail shooters in which the computer controlled heading, and the player controlled the cursor/crosshair on-screen only, the X/Y position control offered by the yoke made it perfect for the job. Likewise the less well known Firefox laser-disk game (a tie in to the movie) used the control since it, too, was a "rail shooter" requiring no directional input from the player - just shoot sprites projected onto the LD video playing back on screen.

Then there was Up Scope!, a Subroc-like "periscope" style shooting game whose CPU, video and sound were all an Amiga-1000 computer built into the cabinet (Mad Dog McCree, an LD shooter, was an Amiga-500, and there was a VR game from the early 90s that featured an Amiga-3000 with custom video boards and VR sensors plus goggles wired in to it).

Very cool, Bill!

- Wheggi

My buddy builds custom MAME machines as his hobby.
He's got one with about 30,000 games on it, I couldn't think of any titles that didn't come up, even including every console ever released.

He also does video pinball machines that are basically the same thing.
Got to play some old classics that you will never see in an arcade.

I'll see if he can link me some pics to put up, they are pretty fuckin' sweet.

Ghouls and Ghosts!


Loved (and completed) Golden Axe. Street Fighter 2, Double Dragon, Bad Dudes versus Dragon Ninja, and

Psycho Soldier...

Thank you everyone for your thoughts and input on your favorite games, as well as your experience on arcade/pinball maintenance.

If you are so inclined, please input your "Top Scores" initials/signature, the high score's corresponding favorite game (I've not found a good listing of character limits by game yet....), and ballpark high score value. I promise to abuse this information creatively

Any pinball fans out there who also happen to own iphones or (especially) Ipads, there's a couple really good virtual pinball collections available. The Pinball Arcade has a ton of classic tables available from the big name manufacturers. Also, there's an app called Zaccaria Pinball that includes a bunch of virtual versions of lesser known tables manufactured by Zaccaria back in the late 70s and 80s. Personally, I really love the Zaccaria tables...