The “Mad” Planets align, got game guts in the mail

Back in November of 2008 I played Mad Planets for the first time and knew that I had to have one for my collection. I am not sure that has ever happened to me before, and I knew when a member at Coinopspace.com posted in the Mad Planets group that they had just about all of the guts for one and were looking to sell them that this was a unique opportunity and I couldn’t pass it up. Today when I got home, the boxes were sitting on the doorstep.

Finding Mad Planets parts – 70% of the work done for me

I emailed Mark H. that day to start to talk about what parts he had and to find out how realistic it would be to bring a Mad Planets back to life. It took a month and a half of emailing back and forth to get the deal worked out, but good things come to the patient right? Mark got me some photos to show me what he had and it turned out that he had the main PCB, the sound board, the power supply board, the main power brick, the harness and a control panel that was mostly populated. Soon after researching I realized how hard it would be to find the Wico spinner and the joystick so when Mark told me the control panel still had the spinner that was a huge sigh of relief.

I was also fortunate that Mark had a contact that was able to get the little interface board that works with the spinner and flight / joystick. As time passed, it appeared that this piece might be as rare as some of the other parts.

So, what Mad Planets parts do I need? Well, quite a bit actually. I need pretty much all of the artwork, the marquee, the bezel and the control panel underlay. Now, last week I finished vectorizing the Mad Planets bezel artwork and I have done some initial work on a partial scan I have of the lower underlay artwork. Pretty much all of the parts I have a line on or an idea of what I might be doing, but I never feel solid about anything until it’s in my hand.

The one item I do not have a line on is the Mad Planets marquee. I want an original marquee, I don’t want to do a sandwiched piece of artwork, so please if you know of one for sale please let me know.

What’s next for Mad Planets?

Probably not much until May. I know a guy who already has repaired a number of Mad Planets games, the PCB and the rest of the boards so I’ll probably ship those out soon to make sure they work right. I’ll turn my focus to vectorizing the rest of the necessary artwork and then in May I hope to do a full restore on a cabinet, restenciling the simple blue and red triangle patterned artwork onto a freshly prepped cab.

It’s going to be hard to be patient until summer to have this game working, but I know when it’s done it’s going to look almost brand new!

Here are some similar arcade posts

• Acquiring more pieces to the Mad Planets puzzle
• Mad Planets underlay artwork progress
• I bought an awesome Mad Planets for $50!
• Sanding Pac-man cabinet, wiring Mr. Do!
• Mad Planets Bezel Artwork Finished

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