Hey, do you like old arcade games? Ever had any interest in what makes them tick? If so, stick around, because we're going to find out!
The story of me acquiring this arcade game goes back to around 2002. My band practiced in an old WWII machine shop converted to rehearsal spaces, and in the common area, there was this old "Galaga" machine. It sorta looked like this, but not quite:
Someone busted open the coin door and we would play it for free. It was beat, but it worked, and we used to write our high scores on the wall next to it. It was great because you could sit at the thing, have a few beers, and trash talk your bandmates about how terrible their high scores were. We loved it.
At one point, it either stopped working or the outlet it was plugged into shorted out (this was an old WWII shop after all), so it just sat there in the corner all sad and broken. One day shortly after that, we got notice that the building (and the entire property it was on) was sold to a developer, and we had to grab our stuff and get out. When I went back to do a final check, that machine was in the trash pile. So I did the right thing and snagged it, figuring I'd take a crack at fixing it later on.
It first sat at a bandmate's house for a while, then my parents' house, and it eventually made the move to my own house when I bought it 14 years ago. In the winter of 2022-23, we decided to do major home renovations, so it got moved into my garage. All this time, it was getting shuffled around and not getting fixed.
Until last weekend.
You see, I'm now back in the house, and it's time to renovate my small garage (will probably do another thread on the house/garage later), and it's in the way. So I figured I'd take a quick look at the thing and see what's going on inside.
Mndsm
MegaDork
6/5/24 3:30 p.m.
Ooooh. I like this content. I've always wanted to go full restomod on an old arcade cab. Ususally a Tron because those lend themselves to some sweet ideas, but they're getting PRICY.
Here it is, in all its glory.
When I pulled it out of my basement over a year ago, I noticed that it had a weird 2-prong appliance plug on it and the ground wire was not connected at all. This is bad. So, how do I get to the rest of it?
Well, these are servicable like cars are, so you have to "open the hood". There are two latches on the inside of the cab and a hinged side panel. I couldn't easily get at the hinges, so I took the playfield glass and various bezels off to get more access.
Hmm... Galaga came out in late 1981. This says 1979. What's up with that? And why are all my projects from 1979???
You can see that the CRT monitor has some rather severe burn-in. Not great, but it only ever has to do one thing, so it's fine.
Cracking it open, I was greeted with this mess. Years and years of storage and neglect have accumulated inside. Gross!
The monitor is on the other side of the hinged unit, and it looks like at some point in the past, the monitor board was serviced.
The monitor chassis shows a build date of 9/23/80. But I thought this was a Galaga machine?
Well, it is, AND it ISN'T. It's actually a Galaxian cabinet. The general architecture and some ID tags inside like this scoring tag give it away.
If I'm reading this correctly, this is the 5,291st Galaxian cocktail cab built. This was a very popular game.
This is definitely a Galaga board. I know this because of the way that it is, and because I've played this machine countless times. All of this AND the daughter board behind it add up to about 23KB of data.
This here is the power section. Like all my other projects from 1979, it uses glass fuses and has questionable, hacked wiring in places. It's like I bought it from the Maine Wire Nut Bandit or Teal Mesh Tanktop Guy. Uncanny. This is a mess (which I have since cleaned up a bit) and it was problematic when it was built. A common swap on these old Galaxian cabs is adding a switching power supply to help deal with the unreliability this setup offered.
Well, whaddayaknow, there IS a switching power supply in here already! Hopefully it still does switching power supply things.
I haven't traced the wiring back to the power section, but I do see some sketchy stuff going on here I will likely clean up later.
And yeah, there's the power cord. There was loose electrical tape over twisted-together wires. Totally safe. This cord does not belong in here at all.
The cool thing though is that since these were money-making amusement machines made by professionals, some of the manufacturers (like Midway) had their stuff together enough to make standardized platforms that have easily serviceable components. The power cord is actually on a weather connector pigtail, just like cars have. Power cords are easily damaged, so making it a pigtail means replacement is easy. Problem is, someone cut my pigtail. I could order a new one for about $50 from a supply house, or....
I could go to Home Depot and buy a heavy duty grounded power tool cord and solder it to the original harness. This was $10, and it will add a few feet to the cord length as a bonus.
The pigtail has the older style non-colored wires, but you can tell what each does by its texture. The ribbed wire goes to white (neutral), the smooth goes to black (hot), and green to green for the ground.
This is where I had to stop, but I'll be soldering this up soon and doing a quick power test. I am expecting further issues, but who knows!
Once it does get power, I need to make a decision: properly convert it to Galaga the right way, or restore it to Galaxian?
Following! The hoarder in me loves that it is THE machine from all those years ago. Bravo.
In reply to Tony Sestito :
Would you rather play Galaga or Galaxian?
Can't wait to see you power it up
Keith Tanner said:
In reply to Tony Sestito :
Would you rather play Galaga or Galaxian?
That's the thing, I like them both. To convert back to Galaxian, I will need to get new back glass graphics and a Galaxian board set.
To convert to Galaga properly, I would need to get new control panel pods with the correct joystick controls. Galaxian controls look like this:
While Galaga controls look like this:
The chicken-head knob controls are weird but work. You flip the long part right to move left, and vice versa. It's intuitive once you get used to it, but it's not right for Galaga.
Option 3 is to replace the internals with a JAMMA 60-in-1 setup, which includes both Galaga and Galaxian, as well as 58 other games. There's all sorts of internal work that needs to be done to do that, as well as installing panel pods with 8-way joysticks and multiple buttons.
I think for now, I'll just get it working as-is and go from there.
At a quarter per play, it generated nearly $11k in revenue. Obviously that stopped when it got hotwired :)
Any idea what a machine like this sold for back in the day, and how much it might have cost to convert to Galaga?
In reply to Keith Tanner :
There aren't really accurate records, but I've heard it was in the neighborhood of $2500-3000 for a stand-up cab. The cocktail cabs have more features, like screen-flipping for player 1 and 2, and were considered more expensive and typically catered toward bar and restaurant owners. I would estimate that it would have been more than $3k for this one new.
Depending on when the work was done, the Galaga conversion was probably a $500-700 job. I am not 100% sure the Galaga board is a real Midway/Namco one or a clone.
So this machine was a pretty good investment for someone. Let's go with the high end of your estimates, say $3500 for the cab and $700 for the conversion. That's $4200, and it returned $11k for a profit of $6800 minus electrical costs. $6800 in 1981 dollars is about $23,571 today. Not a bad ROI!
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Yup, a good, popular cab like one of the big Namco hits (Pac-Man, Galaga, Galaxian, etc) Space Invaders, Asteroids, etc. was a sure money maker. That's why arcade games were EVERYWHERE back in the day. Convenience stores, bowling alleys, bars, restaurants, laundromats, supermarkets... I could go on and on. Great little side investment. Cabs like this one were specifically aimed at bars and restaurants, but I also remember seeing some of the larger arcades having a few of them for people who wanted to sit down and take a rest while playing games. There are still a few restaurants in the area (like a pizza joint/bar called Poopsies in Pembroke, MA) that have the very same cocktail cab in operation that they had when I was a little kid. Their Ms. Pac Man probably has well over 100k plays on it, if not more!
I have to admit that a Ms Pac Man or Frogger cocktail cab would make me very happy, and probably take up much less room than the full Star Wars sit down cab I'd have if money and space were available in ridiculous quantities.
Tony Sestito said:
Also, I mentioned above that I have a Game Room. I should have probably done a build thread on that alone. It's still a work in progress.
Now I see why you blew your house apart for the extended renovations...
Once I'm done, I sit down and play Star Trek. That cab is mega rare; This one might be one of a handful left in existence. The coolest part is that this one has the game controls on the arms of the chair! 
