DurgerTime: the arcade misadventures of Brackynews - Log 1
By Brackynews 5 Comments
I've received games as presents before.
I've never needed to provide my own truck, until last June...
A buddy of mine wrangled an arcade cabinet for his band's practice spot. I hadn't seen it, he said it was a dumb shooter. I gave him some reading materials of what to do to fix up old cabinets, but he's a mech engineer so he was on familiar turf. Then about a year later he needs to vacate the spot, my birthday rolled around and I got a message saying would I like to have the cabinet by the end of the month?
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"It's BurgerTime."
<record scratch>
"I'm gonna have to throw some junk out" was my first thought.
Now.. I'm a retro fiend. I grew up in arcades, and I bitch about Game Room, and the sore lack of paddle controls in modern times.
The story of getting that thing down an old staircase and into my backyard isn't worth sharing.
This is the story of what happens next. We're going to find out the ending together.
I'm the proud owner of a thoroughly neglected, original Bally Midway BurgerTime cabinet, circa 1982, and 200 pounds of solid plywood. It's been through at least one sad hack job of a conversion; inside is a freely dangling JAMMA 1 board of Dangerous Seed, a thoroughly unimpressive Namco shooter. I'm one of 3 people on KLOV that admit to owning it. Anything that I do to this beast will be an improvement. So I figure there are 2 options, and weighed the pros and cons:
1. Restore it to original state
+ Nobody is more authentic than Peter Pepper
+ Someone will buy it for a high price, pay for my costs+ Interesting way to learn about cabinet wiring
- Need to buy a BT game board
- Innards are a bloody mess
- Probably hard to find a local buyer to haul it away
- I have almost no storage space, and not much time to tinker
- Selling is sticky because it was a gift
2. Convert the innards to a MAME cabinet
+ Always wanted one, can justify the space and time to keep it+ Purging the crummy Namco game
+ Multigame cabinets have been around for a long time
+ Can sell monitor and board to pay for materials
+ Will be lighter and stronger, better, harder, faster, etc.
+ Not an especially rare cabinet, can put my personal stamp on it without being lynched
+ Already have a bunch of spare computer equipment to use
+ Eventually when I do have to get rid of it, someone else can easily convert back to JAMMA
- Don't want it to look like a modded BurgerTime cabinet
- It would look ridonkulous with two sticks and fourteen buttons
So I think in my situation the MAME job wins out, while restoring the cabinet to something resembling its original glory. The only games that would be suitable to play are those that use a maximum of one stick and two buttons. I can still look myself in the mirror with that. (And maybe I can sneak in an USBportforafightstickmaybekinda?)
And away we go.
Thanks to MrJared for ideas.
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