As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #40, September 2007.

Ever since I first dropped a quarter in one, I've always wanted an arcade cabinet.  Then again I think that's a common statement among those of us that were able to spend time during the glorious golden age of the arcade.  Even though I only caught the tail end of that era, growing up in California's Silicon Valley gave me an avenue to stay on the cutting edge of coin-op gaming.  I spent my summers at the large arcades, weekends at Bullwinkle's (imagine Chuck E. Cheese except much broader age appeal), and of course countless nights at those small out of the way arcade dives that I miss very dearly.  Although the older days of arcades were beginning to fizz out, I was still able to find refuge in special classic areas of large family arcades, as well as the smaller single location operations that had been tucked away in the corners of strip malls for years.  Eventually those too would fade away and my classic coin-op fix would be relegated to occasionally seeing a machine in passing and the increasingly more seldom trips to the Santa Cruz boardwalk's classic games area.  It seemed now, more than ever, I wanted a home arcade or at least a few games so that I could peer back in to a fraction of that long lost nostalgia.  For our 10 Year Anniversary issue I thought I'd do something a little special in place of the NES'cade column and instead bring you, our readers, a look at my recently restored and converted arcade cabinet.

I think many of us retrogamers, in the back of our heads, have a list of the arcade games they'd like to own if given the chance.  Money, space, rarity, all those things aside I think we all have an idea of games we'd simply love to have in our homes.  While browsing Craigslist on a whim one night I stumbled upon a vague listing for a $100 Pole Position upright local to me.  I don't know exactly where Pole Position fits on that arcade list in my head but it has always been in the top ten, so I sent an e-mail to the seller and called it a night.  It turned out that the seller was quite local to me, four blocks away in fact.  I was heading out for the San Jose Grand Prix that night so I quickly arranged to come take a look at the cabinet that morning.  Once arriving, an earlier suspicion was confirmed as the seller was another retrogamer that I run into at the local flea market every now and then.  Story was the machine was bought in non-working condition with the intent to repair it, however once seeing what's actually inside one of these cabinets he realized he was in over his head and wanted it gone.  I poked around inside, gave it a good look over and offered $50 given the state of the internals.  This was agreed upon and I left with my first arcade cabinet - it was my problem now.

Pole Position machines are notorious for being unstable, the boards have a history of frying themselves and that was the case with my cabinet as well.  A list was made of what was good, what was bad, and what was salvageable.  At the end of this exercise the cosmetic stuff was all good, the electronics were pretty much all bad, and the salvageable list was dissolved into the other two.  The game boards were shot and the audio regulator boards didn't look healthy either.  The wiring loom, molex connectors, and edge connectors would all need to be replaced as well as the game PCB cage which had a healthy coating of rust on one end.  The power supply was a mess and had been bypassed in multiple locations - requiring either replacement or at the very least a complete rebuild.  The monitor also appeared to require a heavy rebuild as even though it did turn on, the overall condition was very poor and it had some extreme burn-in.  The cabinet itself, control panel, accelerator pedal, and coin doors and mechs were all very nice and functional however.  As for the marquee and the glass bezel, they were beautiful and perfect.  That's when the decision came to convert this dead however quite salvageable arcade cabinet into a MAME machine.  MAME is a computer program that emulates the hardware environment of thousands of different arcade games in conjunction with copies of the original program code that ran on them.  In other words, it allows near perfect reproduction of arcade hardware via software that can run on a multitude of devices, namely personal computers.  A computer would be used to replace the inner workings of the machine, replacing the original problematic hardware with modern, easy to repair computer components.

Everything inside was stripped out, looked over, and then thrown out if useless to me or anyone else.  All screws, nuts and bolts were packaged away in plastic bags, labeled with where they were taken from.  I progressed in small steps with the project, moving forward as each possible hurdle was passed, the largest one being the control panel.  I took the board out of an old PS/2 mouse, setting it up so that the horizontal optic would interface with the steering wheel optical wheel.  In other words the steering wheel would move the mouse back and forth horizontally, something that is easily configured in MAME.  To minimize over all cost and complexity I decided to use the mouse board as the interface for all controls.  The Pole Position shifter is a single switch, the original Pole Position program code defaults to the car always being in low gear unless the button is held down, when that happens the car is in high gear.  The switch for the shifter was wired to the contact points for mouse button 01.  The original Pole Position accelerator pedal is analog, controlled with a potentiometer, something that a digital mouse button won't work with.  I disconnected the analog connections in the pedal but left all the parts there in case I wanted to go back and return it to analog at another time.  I affixed a standard arcade microswitch with an extension bar to the underside of the pedal assembly, at about 75% pedal press the microswitch is depressed.  This was then connected to the contact points for mouse button 02, with a molex connector in between so that either the pedal or control panel can be serviced independently outside of the machine.  The coin switches were connected to a simple keyboard hack which involves tracing connecting points of a keyboard key to their integrated circuit connections inside the keyboard.

As for the computer itself, it was all built out of extra components I had lying around collecting dust.  The display was replaced with an old CRT computer monitor with the swivel base removed and the screen bezel painted black.  I assembled the entire computer on a sheet of fiberboard that would be installed in the cabinet as a new shelf.  The system itself is a Pentium II at 350MHz with 128MB of RAM.  An old floppy, CD drive, and small hard disk along with an extra video card rounded out the internals.  All my computer operations were set up and configured outside of the cabinet, including basic setup with the Pole Position controls.  An inexpensive pair of computer speakers were disassembled and installed inside the cabinet in the same location as the original speakers.  A couple small pushbutton switches are used for computer power and reset, mounted within easy reach through the coin door.  Everything is connected to a power bar which is mounted inside the cabinet near the coin door, the power bar then runs to a heavy duty extension cord that mirrors the original power cord route through the back.  A small fluorescent shop utility light is used to light the marquee, wired to plug into the power bar with everything else.  The machine was then scrubbed down completely, removing years of use and abuse.  Along the bottom the side art was shredded and peeling badly so I made a level slice just above the peeling area to prevent it from continuing.  The top and back panels needed to be completely sanded and repainted as they had some water damage.  The inside was sanded and scrubbed down, and the outside was scrubbed one more time for good measure.

Once the cabinet was cleaned the monitor was fitted and secured, then the cleaned and repainted accelerator pedal was installed along with the coin door.  The speakers and marquee lighting were set in place and their wiring run.  This was followed by the control panel and the computer shelf.  Careful cord management was paramount from the beginning, keeping everything out of the way of everything else.  I sealed up the back, plugged the cord in, reached into the coin door, and flipped the main power switch...  The marquee sprang to life and the sounds of the monitor powering up could be heard.  I reached in and pressed the computer power button...  I was greeted by the MAME startup screen, a replacement for the Windows 98 boot screen, and then dumped into DOS.  My game operations are controlled via batch files and an on screen menu in DOS.  Simply reach inside, type in the number corresponding to the game you want to play and it loads.  This allows the machine to appear completely stock from the outside - no additional MAME buttons or special controls - yet allows more games to be played.  It's basically like doing a board swap except it's faster since it's done in software and through the coin door.  So for the average person, the machine appears as a 100% original Pole Position upright.  After a little fine tuning of the controls the only thing left to do was to replace the shroud around the monitor, of which a replacement was made from poster board.

The cabinet is set up to play games that use a single pedal and two gear shifter: American Speedway, Badlands, Championship Sprint, Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat, Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off-Road, Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off-Road Track Pak, Konami GT, Pole Position (all versions), Pole Position II (all versions), Stocker, Super Sprint, and Turbo.  Championship Sprint is one of my all time favorite games so being able to play it as well is a big bonus.  The Sprint games originally had a start button, this is remapped to the accelerator pedal.  The selection / nitro button in Indy Heat and Super Off-Road is mapped to the shifter, same with the fire button in Badlands.  Being an emulation glutton, Turbo runs slow but all other games perform perfectly to their original counterparts.  I should note that MAME required a recompile to emulate proper shifting in Pole Position, I'm using DOS MAME v0.56.  Although it plays a lot more, the machine was purchased as a Pole Position cabinet and most of the time that's what is being played on it.  Since it features both Pole Position games as well as the Japanese and bootleg versions, I've christened the cabinet Pole Position Deluxe.  Even now, over two weeks after the project was completed, I can be found spending at least a few hours every night turning laps around Fuji Speedway.

So far things have been running smoothly with the machine, only minor adjustments have been required.  It's been a big hit with everyone that's played it and it's nice to see that the across the board appeal of these classic games is still alive and well.  Currently the cabinet is living outside, waiting for space to be made indoors which should be taken care of in a few weeks.  It's almost surreal to stand outside in the night air, drop in a quarter and prepare to qualify, it truly does bring back the fondest of memories.  Total cost of the entire project, including the original cost of the cabinet, was under $150.  Twenty of that was made back by selling the non-working game boards for parts on eBay.  If there's one bad thing about this project it's that now I want even more games, when I don't even really have space for this one.  Oh well, I'll make room, a Frogger cocktail table serving double duty as a desk perhaps?

NES'cade will be back next month with a continuing look at arcade classics that don't require two people and a truck to move.  I do want to take a moment to say that it has been and continues to be an absolute privilege to contribute to Retrogaming Times Monthly.  Here's to another ten years!
 
 

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