This thread so reminds me of myself 40 years ago , still gathering stuff on a low budget .
While there were loads of black ash and woody cabs around on single joystick or left/ right button control with dedicated wiring . Also cheap , like odd back street would be cafe/video library site operators much like me ??? at that time .Offering very heavy plain square looking cabs for low as £10-£25 each …None of which had exciting personable appeal but were just about fit for purpose of siting to earn a quid or two..
Many had nice colour games in too such as Space firebird Pacman , Amidar and other Galaxian based upgrades. So we snapped them up by the dozen to fill the holiday camp arcades rooms we were capturing along north Wales coast .
Also many Cheshire and Flintshire youth clubs we supplied courtesy of the local county councils we were supplying table tennis and pool tables to in their adult learning centres and sports facilities and Cheshire youth federation involving youth clubs across Cheshire & Flintshire , they had to be cheap and plentiful to meet demand but only had earning expectancy of a few pounds a week with limited play time availability. Some in spite of their cheap acquisition cost still struggled to make big profits if and when the game in them was quickly out dated by a Kung fu master , wonder boy, pacland . 1942 or other later pcb ?
Some were already rough and knocked about and often needed converting buttons to 4 way joysticks , for scramble and Pac-Man type games. Then as said still had short life expectancy if we didn’t continue to move with the times and think about building our own jamma cabs for instance.
jamma was not yet in vogue , (Early 80s )
tho universal wiring in electrocoin cabs did give some easy change ability.
Especially when their rotate monitor frames were designed but those big dual joystick cabs were still expensive and hard to acquire second hand cheaper due to their flexibility.
Other makes like zaccaria were also available and we had lids of colourful Astro Wars Phoenix Galaxian Quazar games in the nice light plywood cabs , later they introduced the MGVS interchangeable jamma wired front opener which were handy but vulnerable to break in damage on unsupervised sites.
Big cabs like pole position and Astroids took a lot of van space up before we had tail lifts and we would roll them in on cut down brush handles rollers on ther side to deliver to sites - not always great for the artwork or finger nails lifting the heavy grip less cabs..
So to see this sort of restoration gets my admiration and reminds me so much of that time respraying panels , changing button/ stick layouts and repairing piano hinged doors and upgrading coin mechs to the multi mars mechs- ( 1993 was disastrous the small 10p nearly crippled us)
Mechs too- lucky if some were on 20p already especially pooltables but videos the S1 and S10 took a bit of patience to convert. Ouch! Across the whole range of arcade coin slots coin change was costly . Just a year later 1994 saw the 1p and 2 p coins go steel magnetic to lower production costs at the royal mint . This meant all the washer catching magnets had to be removed from mechanical validators. Some were quite difficult to modify so many got abandoned to scrap.
No wonder some of the cabs during this rapid development period were short lived or limited production lines - the upgrading took off with Jamma in the late 80s but the main market in these games was already in decline . This was due to the advent of things like game boy and Nintendo hand held toys -? free to play for young gamers , but cost parents around £40 per cartridge , but it hit coin operated videos quite hard .
Some on here will also have experienced all these changes but others may still be too young so nice to get in a history lesson?
Love the restore summary . Good to see the ongoing thread 👍
While there were loads of black ash and woody cabs around on single joystick or left/ right button control with dedicated wiring . Also cheap , like odd back street would be cafe/video library site operators much like me ??? at that time .Offering very heavy plain square looking cabs for low as £10-£25 each …None of which had exciting personable appeal but were just about fit for purpose of siting to earn a quid or two..
Many had nice colour games in too such as Space firebird Pacman , Amidar and other Galaxian based upgrades. So we snapped them up by the dozen to fill the holiday camp arcades rooms we were capturing along north Wales coast .
Also many Cheshire and Flintshire youth clubs we supplied courtesy of the local county councils we were supplying table tennis and pool tables to in their adult learning centres and sports facilities and Cheshire youth federation involving youth clubs across Cheshire & Flintshire , they had to be cheap and plentiful to meet demand but only had earning expectancy of a few pounds a week with limited play time availability. Some in spite of their cheap acquisition cost still struggled to make big profits if and when the game in them was quickly out dated by a Kung fu master , wonder boy, pacland . 1942 or other later pcb ?
Some were already rough and knocked about and often needed converting buttons to 4 way joysticks , for scramble and Pac-Man type games. Then as said still had short life expectancy if we didn’t continue to move with the times and think about building our own jamma cabs for instance.
jamma was not yet in vogue , (Early 80s )
tho universal wiring in electrocoin cabs did give some easy change ability.
Especially when their rotate monitor frames were designed but those big dual joystick cabs were still expensive and hard to acquire second hand cheaper due to their flexibility.
Other makes like zaccaria were also available and we had lids of colourful Astro Wars Phoenix Galaxian Quazar games in the nice light plywood cabs , later they introduced the MGVS interchangeable jamma wired front opener which were handy but vulnerable to break in damage on unsupervised sites.
Big cabs like pole position and Astroids took a lot of van space up before we had tail lifts and we would roll them in on cut down brush handles rollers on ther side to deliver to sites - not always great for the artwork or finger nails lifting the heavy grip less cabs..
So to see this sort of restoration gets my admiration and reminds me so much of that time respraying panels , changing button/ stick layouts and repairing piano hinged doors and upgrading coin mechs to the multi mars mechs- ( 1993 was disastrous the small 10p nearly crippled us)
Mechs too- lucky if some were on 20p already especially pooltables but videos the S1 and S10 took a bit of patience to convert. Ouch! Across the whole range of arcade coin slots coin change was costly . Just a year later 1994 saw the 1p and 2 p coins go steel magnetic to lower production costs at the royal mint . This meant all the washer catching magnets had to be removed from mechanical validators. Some were quite difficult to modify so many got abandoned to scrap.
No wonder some of the cabs during this rapid development period were short lived or limited production lines - the upgrading took off with Jamma in the late 80s but the main market in these games was already in decline . This was due to the advent of things like game boy and Nintendo hand held toys -? free to play for young gamers , but cost parents around £40 per cartridge , but it hit coin operated videos quite hard .
Some on here will also have experienced all these changes but others may still be too young so nice to get in a history lesson?
Love the restore summary . Good to see the ongoing thread 👍
Good progress.
