Namco / Atari's Dig Dug - 1982

Dig Dug was produced by Namco, and was distributed by Atari in the US. Dig Dug is essentially a maze game where you can dig your own path. Your characters name is Dig Dug and you battle Pooka's and Fygar's. The enemy characters have the capability to float through the maze and Fygar's can breathe fire. Dig Dug can destroy the enemies by "pumping" them up until they explode. Also a way to earn a massive amount of points is by using a boulder or a rock and having it fall down on multiple enemies. On the levels you are also given a bonus item which also results in points. You can partially pump an enemy and than walk through them, this helps build up chances of  combining enemies and flattening them with a rock for multiple points. Each round gets completed once all the enemies are destroyed or if they escape.

Not really much to say about my game other than I bought it at an auction locally at the same time I bought my Circus Charlie. I bought it because the price was right and the monitor was bright and crisp and had a cap kit recently done to it. It was however missing the glass bezel when I bought the machine. A member on BYOAC was looking to MAME a Dig Dug cabinet the guy was in TX and was hesitant about sending the glass bezel because he didn't want it to break during shipping, but I received it with no problems. I went onto mikesarcade website http://www.mikesarcade.com/arcade/artwork/ataricoin.pdf and printed out Atari Coin Door Inserts which look pretty neat. Below is a picture of my Dig Dug cabinet. In terms of restoration I really didn't do much with this game, I think to date it's likely the least amount of money I've ever put into a game. But it still plays and looks fantastic. Dig Dug certainly has it's fan base, many ports throughout various consoles along with mobile versions of the game still exist today even after 30+ years It's still a very popular game today.

Here is the review for Dig Dug, from the June issue of Computer+Video Games from the year 1982.

Atari's Centipede - 1980

Centipede was and still is a great Atari classic that utilized a 2 1/4'' track ball with one button to fire. It also had Atari's cone buttons also known as volcano player one and player two start buttons. The game has a centipede that makes it's way down the screen your goal is to destroy it completely to move to the next round which is essentially the same thing with increased difficulty and the background colors change. You have mushrooms that you need to destroy that get in your way along with a spider, and other various bugs. When I first got the cabinet it was converted to a "Twin Cobra". Romstar's Twin Cobra was a kit game so it found it's way into various dedicated cabinets, I decided to convert this back to it's original glory which was a centipede.

Here you can see the Centipede that was converted to a Twin Cobra. The good news is that I paid next to nothing for the cabinet, and luckily had a working CRT, and Twin Cobra PCB that I would later sell to get money for this project. I ended up selling all of the Twin Cobra Parts the marquee, bezel, pcb etc.. Unfortunately the control panel needed to be replaced since it was drilled too many times. Other parts that needed to be required to convert this back was the Centipede PCB, Marquee,Bezel, Cardboard Blue Bezel, Control Panel, Control Panel CPO, a Track Ball Rebuild Kit, and lastly Side Art. The game was already wired for JAMMA so I decided to keep it that way since I heard many problems existed with the original Atari Linear Power Supply.  While waiting for the parts to come I decided to strip the black paint off the sides of the cabinet sure enough I was right this was at some point in it's life certainly a centipede. The art on the other side was completely missing so I decided to completely go down to the bare I think It's particle board or pressed wood it's not plywood that's for sure. Once I got it down to that point I sanded, primed, and painted it white.

The parts came in and looked great. It was looking more and more like a Centipede. Since I was keeping it JAMMA I needed to obtain a JAMMA Adapter, I remember it was tough matching up the p1 up,down,left,right to correspond to the track ball movements properly but eventually all was working. Once the controls were working the track ball still needed to be rebuilt. Basically 6 new bearings and 3 new rollers, in addition to a new 2 1/4'' snow white track ball made it rolling smooth again. I can't emphasize enough how installing a new rebuild kit for the track ball has such a massive impact.

I was testing the monitor outside of the game to make sure it was working properly before installing. As a side note I find that the best way to get these machines into a basement is to reduce the weight as much as possible. You want to pull the monitor, glass bezel, back door, sometimes even the control panel, and not a bad idea to remove the PCB for protection. After everything was installed it's really hard to tell this game was ever a Twin Cobra. I'm glad I was able to restore this game to it's original glory. Below is a photo of the end result.

Taito's Arkanoid - 1986

"THE TIME AND ERA OF THIS STORY IS UNKNOWN. AFTER THE MOTHERSHIP "ARKANOID" WAS DESTROYED, A SPACECRAFT "VAUS" SCRAMBLED AWAY FROM IT. BUT ONLY TO BE TRAPPED IN SPACE WARPED BY SOMEONE........"

 Arkanoid was produced by Taito which was mainly distributed by Romstar in the US. The game sadly never had a dedicated upright cabinet with perhaps the exception of a bartop cabinet that merit industries made. The kit game was very popular in cocktail cabinets, also a kit for uprights and found it's way usually into Midway / Atari cabinets. Arkanoid had various marquees the correct one should have the Romstar logo on it with the bricks. Various bootleg PCB's of the game exist and the actual PCB should be a small white board not green. Arkanoid uses a unique Taito classic pinout which is also shared by many other Taito games. Arkanoid borrows aspects from both Atari's Pong & Midways Super Breakout. In the game you essentially are the vaus aka the paddle on the bottom. You need to not let that ball go past you or you will be obliterated. The game play is simple hit all of the colored bricks, and move onto the next stage once it's cleared. Certain power-ups can be acquired hidden inside the bricks. The power-ups are as follows:

Certain items can be doubled up, for instance if you get a few "S" capsules it will drastically slow the ball down. They are pretty random some games you might get more of one particular capsule. Ideally the "B" is great but before warping into the next level it's best to try to milk as many points as you can before moving on. Generally speaking when you get a capsule it usually overrides your existing power up so sometimes it's best to avoid collecting them depending on the level. The "D" capsule when you have 2 or 3 balls on the screen you won't be able to collect any more capsules, so it's best to always have 1 ball on the screen. Each capsule I believe is worth 1,000pts. Certain gold bricks on the levels can't be destroyed not even by the laser. Certain grey / silver bricks require several hits to destroy them. You also have random things that circle the board which I suppose can be construed as the enemies but they are worth points and sometimes even helps the trajectory of the ball. You can kill them with sliding the paddle into them when they come close to the bottom. Also the ball destroys them, as well as the laser. You want to try to avoid hitting the top of the screen when playing this only increases the ball speed.

I picked up my cabinet from another local collector. It was inside a classic Stern cabinet. I'm not positive but I think it was a Stern "Turtles". When I bought the cab it was painted over black which was fine because I was planning on keeping it an Arkanoid. I still wanted to sand down the cabinet to the bare wood and repaint it

 

Next was the control panel, the game uses a spinner to control the vaus mine was not spinning that great so I actually decided to take it apart clean thoroughly & lube (Teflon gel) the plastic gears on the inside and now it's running much smoother. Sadly the top of the spinner was scratched badly it's a thin purple metal sticker I decided to pull it off and underneath was nice and shinny. Below you can see pictures of the spinner parts and also before I removed the metalic sticker on top of the spinner all scratched up:
                                                               

                  

  Working on the control panel I drilled a new sheet of plexi to place over the NOS Romstar artwork along with button stickers:

 

The button / instruction card sticker sheet that came with the Romstar kits:

When I purchased the game it had the wrong marquee on it, the game had "Arkanoid revenge of doh!" marquee. Arkanoid Revenge of Doh is really a follow up to arkanoid. In the Arcade world you had Arkanoid, Tournament Arkanoid, Revenge of Doh, Arkanoid Returns. The game was such a hit that several ports to literally every console existed. I was lucky enough to track down a NOS marquee. Here is my correct marquee installed:

 

The game just had generic Romstar artwork which looked like this: 

Many people along the way have since created various artwork for the Control Panel, as well as the bezel as opposed to just an instruction card. While I think they look alright it's not original and I prefer to keep the game as original to the kit from 1986 as possible. Many collectors shy away from this game based on the fact that it was a "kit game" but personally I think this is a must have for any arcade collection. It's funny when I see this game come up for sale parts or the entire game some people think it's called "Arkanow" I can see how the text on the marquee the "I" and "D" form a "W" to some eyes.

I ended up using white T-Molding and couldn't be happier with the way that the game turned out. I just really wish I was able to break 1,000,000 points I can hit 900k. When you complete the game, a total of  33 levels on the high score screen it will say "ALL". The last round you face doh who basically looks like a "Moai" one of the Easter Island heads. A tip that I can give is instead of killing him right away try to hit him and have him turn red and purposely die. By doing so your able to milk more points if I recall I think each hit on him is worth 1,000pts? When you beat the game you are left with this message:

DIMENSION-CONTROLLING FORT "DOH" HAS NOW BEEN DEMOLISHED, AND TIME STARTED FLOWING REVERSELY. "VAUS" MANAGED TO ESCAPE FROM THE DISTORTED SPACE. BUT THE REAL VOYAGE OF "ARKANOID" IN THE GALAXY HAS ONLY STARTED......

Below is a video of me just after beating the game, you can see it says "ALL". While not my best score it shows the completion of the game.

Konami / Centuri's Circus Charlie - 1984

Circus Charlie was produced by Konami in Japan, which was distributed by Centuri locally. The game had it's own dedicated cabinet with a 2-way monroe joystick. The game features 6 stages that you are able to choose to earn points. The first stage Charlie is riding a lion jumping through rings of fire. The 2nd stage you walk a tight rope jumping over monkeys. The 3rd stage you hop on trampolines avoiding knives and flaming breath coming from the other circus performers as you make your way to the goal. On this stage if you hop too many times on the same trampoline you will burst through the top of the circus tent causing you to lose a life. Also if you beat this stage twice you will be placed on a similar trampoline board only this time dolphins will be the main obstacle. Stage 4 which is considered "hard" Charlie balances on a ball and hops to other balls to the goal. On stage 5 which is considered "harder" Charlie is riding on a horse where you can have the horse speed up or slow down jumping on spring boards or sometimes going under them to make it to the goal. On this stage when you hold back on the joystick while on the spring board you can accumulate multiple jumps on the same spring board yielding you a considerable amount of points. Stage 6 is considered "hardest". On stage 6 you swing from the trapeze, sometimes grabbing onto other clowns other times bouncing off of trampolines on the ground.

Below is a picture of the stage select screen, another thing to note that is obviously done on purpose is that the game was made in 1983, distributed in 1984 at the time the Japanese game designers thought it would be cleaver to place the high score "19830" as the default when they were producing the game. They added a zero to the 1983 because they wanted it to be some what of a challenge to get the high score.


The game will let you complete the same stage a few times before giving you a "no more" message forcing you to move on to a different challenge. You have various secrets throughout Circus Charlie arcade game. On level one for instance if you jump backwards through a ring of fire on your lion and back through the same ring you will see another clown appear jump and grab him for an extra life. The stage I believe only allows you to earn 1 free player using this trick each time. The same level although considered easy if you keep repeating it will get progressively harder. Other places to jump backwards on level one is over the fire pits on the ground. Sometimes you will be rewarded with a coin that will pop up. If you collect all of the money bags on the level you will get a bonus at the end. The game allocates you a bonus timer you can take as long as you want on a stage but it's ideal to make it to the end the quicker the more points you will yield from the bonus timer up to 10,000 points.This game to me is the game that actually got me into this hobby all together. It's an obscure game that does have a cult following but those who know it seem to love it. When I was younger I went to sleep away camp and this was one of the games that was in the rec room that we were able to play. This was one of the games that I was actually good at on location and liked the fact that you can choose various stages to get more of a variety in game play. So I really wanted to play this game again it was roughly 20 years since I was able to. Down the road I discovered M.A.M.E. Those who don't know M.A.M.E. Stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. MAME allows you to simulate the older arcade games. The only problem was that I was playing circus charlie on a key board. After research I eventually ended up building a MAME cabinet which has thousands of games that it emulates. I discovered other titles in MAME such as Gun.smoke which landed me the world record, so I set out to buy / build a dedicated Gun.smoke cabinet. The thing is MAME is great in terms of testing a game out but it's not perfect and just not the same as having a dedicated cabinet. The sounds / video aren't perfect the controls aren't always the same and of course you don't have the artwork that sometimes makes the games.

I tracked down a Circus Charlie at a local arcade auction and payed a very fair price for it, but was pretty beat up condition. However the game was working which is all I cared about, being that this game was the one that got me into this hobby I had to have it. Maybe one day down the road I'll find a better condition cabinet for this game but I do also have a spare PCB for Circus Charlie. In terms of any restoration I didn't really do much to the game being that the side art is not being reproduced. It never had any bezel art work which makes it slightly boring. The game does have stenciled stars on the front of the cabinet and sticks out like a soar thumb in an arcade lineup. The control panel overlay cleaned up very nicely after using a magic eraser. I put grease in the two-way monroe joystick which helped drastically. Replaced the buttons. Touched up the inside blue part along with the stars on the front of the cabinet. The cabinet also does have the original lettering "centuri" logo on the coin door. I also replaced the power supply with a brand new one.

The game made it's way to several home consoles as well including Famicom, C64, MSX Playstation (Konami's greatest hits), and eventually made it's way full circle again back on the arcade in Konami's 80's AC Special (known as Konami's 80's Gallery in Japan) which actually used a hard drive. The arcade version had superior graphics to any of the home console ports.

Namco / Midway's - Ms. Pac-Man - 1981

Ms. Pac-Man another unmistakable recognizable gaming character at over 30 years old still continues to become staples in peoples video game collections. Although Similar to Pac-Man; In Ms. Pac-Man you have the fruit that jumps around, in addition to 4 ways to pass through and escape the maze as opposed to Pac-man's 2 ways. Ms. Pac-Man In my opinion is also better because you get different mazes after every few screens. I also tracked down this game locally on craigslist. Being that the game is so popular and common most likely on any craigslist you will find some form of a Ms. Pac-Man cabinet. Sometimes you might see multicades, or conversions, cocktails, cabarets (mini), and of course the traditional upright. I was able to track down an original cabinet in fair cosmetic condition but it was in non-working condition. I was happy because I knew that would keep the cost down and I would be able to fix it eventually.The first thing I did was tested the Ms. Pac-Man PCB inside my Pac-Man cabinet since it shares the same pinout. I had the RSOD, also known as the Red Screen Of Death. So the guy I bought my original Pac-Man PCB i had sent this one out to be repaired for a very fair price. Although Typically working replacement boards go for around 50-90 shipped. I wanted to keep my original board inside the cabinet since all of my numbers matched.

While the board was being sent out although the cabinet was in fair condition, I wanted to sand it down / fix any wood issues / repaint.

The coin door had the typical lock bars installed at some point it was obviously a game that was "on location" earning money. So I used bondo to fill the holes and smooth / sand it down.

Once the cabinet was sanded down I applied primer, and painted the cabinet using the above color code from home depot. Other pictures below showing the painting progress.

Inside the cabinet typically the power supplies go bad after 30 years, or need to be rebuilt. I decided to order a switching power supply conversion kit through arcadeshop.com. Below you can see photo's of the kit installed:

It had an original G-07 monitor inside the cabinet, I noticed a blown fuse, I wasn't sure what the condition was with the monitor so I decided to clean / wash it to get rid of 30 year old crud that had built up around sensitive parts. Temporarily I replaced the monitor with a virtually new burn in free Wells Gardner. Below you can see the before and after pictures of the original G07, down the road I will replace / fix the chasi and possibly re-cap, new flyback fix the original monitor. down the road I'm sure I'll utilize it as the CRT monitors are getting harder to find.

Before and After cleaning the g07 monitor:

So not much was left to do other than slap on some artwork for cosmetics, Also I had replaced the marquee because the original one was majorly faded due to the fact that the marquee sits so close to the bulbs / florescent. Many times the marquee loses the "Pink" and almost turns white. Also I had added Pink T-Molding from T-Molding.com. I kept the original Control Panel Overlay because I couldn't really justify replacing it the condition was good enough.My cabinet has alot of "number matching" parts, my cabinet, pcb, and throughout other various locations on the cabinet has number 51987. Below are some pictures showing the serial number throughout my Ms. Pac-Man cabinet In addition to the Dip Switch Settings:

I found a great deal on a burn in free CRT Wells Gardner which when I installed noticed an error with scrambled lines saying "Over Range". I Googled and came up with a .pdf fix from Wells Gardner claiming to hit the OSD button on the remote board and lower the contrast / brightness which should fix the issue. The only major problem I noticed was that my remote board didn't seem to function with the "Over Range" error on the monitor. So I asked the seller what the cause was. He said to cut the middle wire on the three prong sync molex. I felt like Macgyver and wanted to make sure I wasn't going to cause any further damage. Reluctantly I ended up saying oh well and just cut it, sure enough that fixed the "Over Range" Issue and the Wells Gardner Monitor looked fantastic ! Finally the game wasn't playing blind and looked great.

Above you can see that Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man were meant to be together! Below is a video of the game running. While recording I got a blue maze to start level one which doesn't happen that often. After the death of Ms. Pac-Man towards the very end of the video you can see the maze change back to it's more common / traditional color for level one.

However according to Don Hodges:

"The origin of this bug is in the original Pac-Man code. There is a subroutine which controls the flashing energizers in the attract mode of Pac-Man. Normally, this subroutine is only supposed to run during the introduction screen where the ghosts are introduced by name. On some occasions, when the player dies, this subroutine gets called, which flashes the 2 screen location where these energizers are located. When it is called in Pac-Man, it causes the disappearance of the dot that is 2 to the left of the starting point of Pac-Man in the maze. The other screen location that is affected is already blank, so the changed color has no visible effect there. In Ms. Pac-Man, it causes 2 screen locations to change color, which affects the different mazes in slightly different ways. For the first maze, this same dot to the left of where Ms. Pac-Man begins changes color to pink. Like in Pac-Man, the other screen location that is affected is already blank, so the changed color has no visible effect there. For the second maze, two locations are affected. For the third maze, only one location is visibly affected. For the fourth maze, two locations are affected. In any case, this bug is very difficult to spot because usually the anomalies are covered up by a screen refresh almost immediately after they are created. The exception to this rule is during the demo mode of Ms. Pac-Man. If you watch the demo long enough, eventually you will notice that the dot in question is colored pink on rare occasions after Ms. Pac-Man has died during the demo, and it stays pink on screen long enough to be easily observed."

***Adding to this post: I noticed during game play that the game seemed rather difficult. The Ghosts were not staying blue for that long. I was able to compare this against my MAME machine and my suspicions were correct. No dip switch settings on the actual PCB existed to change the difficulty or the ghost timing so after more research I was able to come up with a solution. Basically "There are 2 small solder pads near the DIP switch bank, right next to it is resistor pack RM6, the 2 pads are located just past the end of RM1 (by DIP switch see if they are jumpered". Below is a picture of my board set and the cause of making the game more difficult or rather the ghosts changing quickly from blue back to normal. You can see the glob of solder right above RM6 (above and slightly to the right of dip switch bank), after I De-soldered that glob my game was playing as it should! hopefully this helps anyone else who thinks that their Ms. Pacman PCB seems like the ghosts are changing back too fast.