[HN Gopher] Restoring the Galaxian3 Theatre 6, 1992 six player a...
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Restoring the Galaxian3 Theatre 6, 1992 six player arcade machine
Author : countrymile
Score : 183 points
Date : 2025-04-19 09:22 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (philwip.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (philwip.com)
| ljf wrote:
| Perfect reading with an easter long weekend coffee - I love well
| written and interesting stories like these.
| glimshe wrote:
| Amazing. Why aren't we building things like this anymore?
| ticklemyelmo wrote:
| We are? There are games like this in any modern "arcade" like
| Dave & Buster's.
|
| If you mean why aren't we building highly specialized hardware
| like this any more, I'd say it's because most of that
| complexity has moved into software running on general-purpose
| hardware, which is infinitely more flexible and maintainable.
| praptak wrote:
| It got hard to compete with home gaming setups.
| dezgeg wrote:
| It looks extremely expensive piece of hardware. I have to
| wonder how much profit this made for Namco or the arcades.
| throwanem wrote:
| A lot, I imagine, even as a loss leader. It was something
| like two bucks a play, far more than I could then afford
| (that would be about $5 now with inflation!) the one time I
| saw it in person. And consider too, the kind of flagship
| place that can devote the space and power a setup like this
| needs, is exactly the one to benefit most from something like
| this that, as I can attest, drew kids' attention like no
| magnet ever invented - and even we who had not enough
| quarters for that game, mostly still had enough for others.
|
| Namco being maybe one of two or at most three leading arcade
| marques, I think it would work about the same for them in
| marketing terms.
| mrandish wrote:
| Probably not a lot given the bill of materials and
| development (although most of the boards seem based on
| existing boards). These kinds of larger-than-life
| "event/ride" sort of games were a trend for a while. Sega
| made quite a few, probably because they owned and operated a
| chain of large amusement centers in Japan at the time.
|
| The idea was that these would attract more players due to the
| strong 'curb-appeal' of the size/concept and unique game
| play, while encouraging groups of friends to play together.
| Of course, each play was usually double or more the cost of a
| regular game. At the time, large arcade centers were
| competing with smaller hole-in-the-wall neighborhood arcades
| which could pop-up in any empty retail storefront as well as
| convenience stores who could easily add a handful of arcade
| cabinets in a back corner. While major amusement centers
| obviously offered a wider selection of games in one place,
| having a few of these unique big games differentiated them.
|
| However, these games also had several downsides. Of course,
| they were extremely expensive for arcade owners to purchase
| compared to a normal cabinet but they also took up more floor
| space and often required more maintenance. Ultimately, arcade
| owners measure value on revenue per square foot vs the total
| operating cost, including purchase price amortized over the
| time period a game continues to draw earnings. Since these
| games remained somewhat unusual, the calculus was clearly a
| close thing - probably not much different than a carnival
| calculating the relative value of adding a "big" Ferris wheel
| or roller coaster. The cost is high and, perhaps, only partly
| offset by direct earnings but increasing overall traffic
| through curb-appeal and differentiation are also important
| factors.
| toast0 wrote:
| Large environmental arcade installations were always pretty
| rare. The structure makes it more expensive to build and move
| and harder to find a space to exhibit.
|
| That said, giant space invaders and pac man are showing up a
| lot lately. I saw a 4 player Halo environmental recently
| (although it's out of production) [1]. I've got a 2-player
| environmental fron 1994 that's linkable up to 6 players (the
| spouse says absolutely not, but I did play a 6-player setup
| once! and I have two extra system boards, maybe one day I can
| smoosh them into uprights and link it all. I think two player,
| but linkable makes a lot more sense for sales; but then it's
| hard to find an arcade that's got more than one of the units.
| Some of the modern racers are single player but linkable; you
| often see them in pairs, but sometimes singles or quads; and
| very occasionally more.
|
| Of course, modern arcade systems are just PCs, but then so are
| the high performance home consoles.
|
| [1] https://rawthrills.com/games/halo-fireteam-raven/
| unleaded wrote:
| very sorry to post something tangentially related but does anyone
| know what happened to that ridge racer full scale machine? Can't
| find anything on it past 2022.
| HansardExpert wrote:
| I assume you're referring to this article
| https://arcadeblogger.com/2022/11/20/the-last-ridge-racer/
| contact Tony (the arcade blogger) he's a nice guy to deal with
| - his book is also great by the way. Maybe he can do a follow
| up?
| squeedles wrote:
| Wow! Great deep dive! I haven't seen S100 boards in the wild
| since we retired our rack mounted 1980s Sun 2 decades ago (also
| 68020-based)
| guenthert wrote:
| That struck me as odd -- I associated only 8080 (Z80) systems
| with S100 (a very primitive bus). Wikipedia has early Sun
| systems based on Intel's Multibus (being multi-master capable,
| a considerably more complex bus).
| squeedles wrote:
| You are of course correct. The game is neither S100 or
| Multibus, but a similar cage. And I was misremembering the
| Sun2 as 68020 when it was actually just a 68010 -- which I
| could have verified if I only looked at the picture that I
| posted at the bottom of this page -
|
| https://david-loffredo.github.io/lowcloud/encrypt.html
| flir wrote:
| Have played that (not that cab, a European one). Was, indeed, a
| world of fun.
| countrymile wrote:
| Where is the European one based? Apparently there is only one
| left.
| lordfrito wrote:
| Way back in 2007 someone found one of these, disassembled it(!),
| transported it(!), rebuilt it(!). Long story but full of great
| pics. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.dragonslairfans.com/smfor/index.php?topic=231.0
| greatgib wrote:
| I was about to post the same link that I have found while
| looking where there might be another one in Europe.
|
| I highly recommend to have a look at it, it is incredible and
| totally fun to read!
| neilv wrote:
| I'm impressed that they got it together, after that adventure.
|
| And then it was moved again:
|
| https://www.dragonslairfans.com/smfor/index.php?topic=231.ms...
| timcobb wrote:
| > a 28 player behemoth that debuted in April 1990 at the
| International Garden and Greenery Exposition in Osaka, Japan
|
| Why would an arcade game be debuted at a gardening and greenery
| expo?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Why not?
| shakna wrote:
| Expo '90 had over 23 million people turn up. That is a sizeable
| audience. However, on top of that, one of the themes with the
| expo was "coexistence" with nature. It wasn't just a gardening
| show. [0]
|
| For example, Professor Iwatsuki gave the conference talk
| "Coexistence of Nature and Mankind in Urban Areas Role of
| Natural Science", and one of the forums was on "The Role of the
| Science in Building the 21st Century".
|
| It was definitely partly a garden show. But it was also a
| scientific conference, discussing how to shape the world in the
| future, in a sustainable way. That meant any technological
| breakthrough was something to pull the crowd.
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130314172710/http://www.expo90...
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The arcades these days have almost zero wow factor, stuck in the
| 90s, I'm sure these machines were nothing short of fantastic if
| you first play it back then.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I found that the wow factor was friends. You went to these
| places with mates and enjoyed the environment. Grab a slice of
| pizza and play some games.
|
| It wasn't so common to encounter arcade places in the UK so I
| used to dos around shopping centres. Not much of a wow factor
| but the wow was had having fun with mates and now this has now
| shifted to online and online friends making such places
| redundant. It's as we are now allergic to go outside.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Congratulations on a very successful restoration and thanks for
| writing such a beautiful deep dive.
|
| The work put in here is a perfect example of how motivation can
| be so much stronger if it's for the love, done by volunteers,
| than for any amount of money.
|
| It also evokes the Penn & Teller quote, "Sometimes, magic is just
| someone spending more time on something than anyone else might
| reasonably expect."
| wyldfire wrote:
| These days, it seems like one of the best multiplayer arcade
| games is "Killer Queen" [1]. It'd be nice if there were more
| games like that. It offers a gaming experience that's more unique
| to the arcade IMO.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Queen_(video_game)#
| throwanem wrote:
| It's a fantastic experience in local play, the perfect fun bar
| game for folks who don't think of themselves as "gamers."
|
| So far as I know there hasn't been a cabinet in town in ages,
| but I wish there still were.
| cypherpunk666 wrote:
| you can play local multiplayer on the Switch fwiw.
| throwanem wrote:
| Yeah, but you can spill a beer on a Killer Queen cab and
| not even see it drop a frame.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I have an old Xbox 360, and a projector. Any multilayer games for
| get togethers. I'm actually building a backyard tki bar soon.
| Would be fun to add this for parties as well.
| throwanem wrote:
| Classic Gauntlet in MAME is always a winner at parties, I've
| long found. Up to four players, complicated enough to be
| interesting, not too complicated to be fun when you're drunk,
| easy to pick up and put down.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| You can feel the sadness from the first picture with the tarp.
| Such hobbies of restoration will end, the "built-to-last" has
| lost it's charm and it's sad. We have grown up with such high
| expectations for an object; "It must have X, Y, Z" turning the
| future is a blessing and a curse. I guess it was the way for it
| to be.
|
| You have a pocket device more powerful than Apollo 13 yet to
| actually preform restoration upon it is near-impossible. That
| itself will be a skill replaced by AI and as more future devices
| become completely unserviceable, all of this will just fade in to
| the darkness. It's broke, throw away and buy anew.
|
| Young folk today are dumbfounded on how to top-up their oil,
| change their wheel for their car, I do ask is this as intended?
| throwanem wrote:
| Pocket device? I have more computing power at the moment on my
| _wrist_ than we ever sent to the moon, likely also counting
| discarded IUs. And this isn 't even an Apple watch...
| doublerabbit wrote:
| And that's what I'd call a pocket device. It fits in your
| pocket.
| hinkley wrote:
| One of the things I would change if I could go back to childhood
| is to find the money and the people to play more Gauntlet. When I
| was in high school I became friends with a guy who knew where all
| of the co-op games were on the college campus just down the
| street from our school.
|
| Most of the arcades I knew of were too small to house a beast
| like this, but I would have watched the hell out of this one.
| mrandish wrote:
| Such a wonderful effort to see this rare game being restored as
| well as being accurately preserved. Of the future actions
| discussed at the end, this one seems most important to me:
|
| > Investigate a solid-state replacement for the LaserDisc
| players.
|
| Those laserdisc players are cantankerous, mechanical beasts and
| even the industrial grade ones will likely be a constant point of
| failure across enough 80-hour operating weeks. While laserdisc
| based games were fairly rare, in the aggregate there were still
| quite a few notable titles made (led by Dragon's Lair (1983)).
|
| It would be terrific for the preservation community if someone
| made a solid state replacement based on an SBC like a Raspberry
| Pi. Fortunately, most of the games used a handful of fairly
| standardized serial protocols to communicate with the disc
| player. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard, especially
| using FFMPEG to drive the actual playback and the serial input
| could have a scriptable command parsing and translation layer.
| There weren't that many different commands a laser disc player
| could do. Basically, the usual start/stop/pause/ff/rew as well as
| chapter and frame seeking with simple loop.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Dumb question out of ignorance. In electronics when you have
| absolutely no idea where something is failing is it possible to
| apply kind of a binary search in the circuit to either spot or
| discard a failing section? Is this an effective way to search for
| problems in electronics or are better ways to do it? Perhaps is a
| very stupid question but I had it in my mind for some time.
| varjag wrote:
| Just like with software, oftentimes you can bisect, sometimes
| you can't. There are some common approaches to roughing out
| problematic areas (checking power rails, confirming known
| oscillations, clocks and regular signals...). When you have the
| schematics, just as with source code you often can make
| educated guesses. With an unknown design though it is a
| laborious process akin to debugging a third party binary
| executable.
| toast0 wrote:
| It's like every other debugging issue. First you need to figure
| out what it's doing and what it's supposed to be doing.
|
| Then you work forward and backward until you find a spot where
| you can see a transition where the inputs are as expected and
| the outputs are not.
|
| The more you know about the ciruit the easier it is. Arcade
| circuits tend to have a lot of documentation from the maker as
| they were expected to be serviced. But machines with small
| production runs are harder; the manuals may be lost or less
| detailed. Makers also tend to leave out details of protection
| mechanisms, some of these have been reverse engineered and
| documented by the community, but more work happens on higher
| production systems. In this case, they had three player boards
| that should work the same, but only one worked, and they were
| able to narrow it to communication (by using an undocumented
| test switch). They got lucky finding a missing ground, and then
| looked at communication with a sillyscope and replaced a
| standard communication chip.
| austinallegro wrote:
| The 28 Player version was resident at the Namco Wonder Egg theme
| park for years. Not sure what happened to it.
|
| Sega G-Loc 360 and WEC Le Mans (the blue cabinet version is rarer
| than the red one), Namco Drivers Eyes (the full F1 Car cabinet)
| and the Sega Hologram Time Traveller machine were all great
| arcade machines bitd too.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I believe Fun World in the article is Fun World Game Center in
| Nasuha, New Hampshire.
|
| ref: https://www.coastingwithculture.com/2017-northeast-
| trip/part...
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