Arcade Artwork
Scanning in Mr. Do! Bezel
Today I took a lot of time to scan in the bezel, from the rare “white” Mr. Do! arcade game, in 8 different pieces and stitch it together. It doesn’t look great, there is some discoloration and one spot is just fractions of an inch from lining up, but even with all that headache and the one missing chunk, I can still perfectly finish my vector artwork for the Mr. Do Bezel.
Photo of Mr. Do! Bezel I won on ebay
Before I left for vacation I heard back from Mark, and we emailed a couple of times.
First, he did indeed end up selling his Mr. Do about 5 years ago he said, which would have been about the time he was posting looking for that bezel in the Google Groups. He said that he sold it to a couple he thought, and was remembering for some reason that they may have resold it soon after that. He offered to look through his old email to see if he could find some contact information for them. So that is very exciting.
Also….I have heard in the past that if you wait long enough you will eventually see something come back up on ebay again if you missed it the first time. Well, there was no first time that I missed it, but the White Mr. Do Bezel came up for sale under a “miscellaneous” title on ebay a couple weeks ago. I was in contact with another guy who does Mame stuff and we were going to get it either way between the two of us. Well, I bid and no one else did, I got the stupid thing for a $1. Of course there was $12 shipping, but still pretty cheap for something I wanted that bad.
I had it waiting for me when I got back from vacation, the colors look really good. There are some scratches which you couldn’t see in the auction, and it does have a small chunk missing at the bottom and some cracks / melted spots, but I don’t care. I wanted it to have it, and I knew I could use it to complete the bezel tracing that I needed to do! Here is a photo of it.
Found another email for Mark Deroller
Got the bug today, and decided to dig a little deeper.
I thought I remembered Mark DeRoller (who’s white Mr. Do started my whole search) posting a work phone number to call him back in 2001 on some of his inquiries. I looked back, but couldn’t find it right away, I didn’t have time to look through 67 posts. But, I did figure out that he has yet a third email address at a Yahoo account. The first two emails he had listed failed for me, but I see he also has a photo gallery through Yahoo from ’06, so he may still use that email.
Here’s hoping. I almost get the impression he might have stopped collecting and sold everything off, but who knows, maybe he hasn’t!!!
Wizard of Wor Capacitor Problem
I got a tremendous reply about my Wizard of Wor capacitor problem. A number of the collectors emailed me back and said they could provide me with photos. Another one went one step further and helped me identify from the schematic that it was indeed a capacitor I needed and what it is called.
On the schematic (Page 166 in the PDF online document) within the shape of the component there is a hand written .1. That means squat to me. I didn’t see a corresponding components “shopping” list with the diagram, only a list of the IC’s and other chips. Well, this collector let me know that usually .1 means that it is a “.1 microfarad ceramic cap”. That doesn’t give me a voltage, but that was specific enough.
Component C21 is what was burnt up and exploded.
Scott Evans, and getting Agent X ready to print
Talked with Rick last night. Sounds like his contact Scott Evans has the films for Agent X, for most of the artwork. He has the sideart and marquee for sure, and I think everything else (which would include the control panel) except for the kickplate. That worked out really great. Rick said it, and I agreed with him, it really would have sucked if he had the kickplate and that work had gone to waste….in a sense. It isn’t really ever wasted work, but would be better to see it put into use.
He is not going to send me Cloak and Dagger artwork to color match. The Agent X films should have the color specs on them. Now, being 20 years old, I know Pantone may have been around then, I just don’t know for sure, and even then how accurate it would be. We will have to just wait and see.
Who is the artist for the Bally Jr. Pac-man machine?
Talked with Rick last night, told him the only artwork piece I told have for a Jr. Pac-man machine is the original oversize, or small sized version, marquee. Hopefully he can take some photos of that with the flash off and I can see if I can trace it.
During the last month I have been debating about tracking down the original creators of the Jr. Pac-man artwork who would have worked for Bally. Joe said that after about 1984, most games had credits, so that is a great place to start. However, in the limited searching I have done so far, I haven’t been able to find credits for the Jr. Pac-man game. I don’t know if there is an arcade site out there that collects this information or not, it would be a good site for sure, but if anyone has any information about this please shoot me an email.
Rick saw the Agent X kickplate finalized
Rick and I finally caught up last night, and he got to see the kickplate art for the first time. He was really impressed, which is great. I talked to him about the circles at the top and how they were right at the dimension edge for the top. He said he didn’t feel like it was that big of a detail to sweat about. He originally said to leave them and depending on sizing they may not be cut at all. He asked what I would do, and to me, even if you lined up this art side by side with the original you might notice the circle placement off a little, I would just move them down a hair so you knew they would fit within the dimensions.
He trusted my judgement and told me to go ahead. That is what I like, when someone trusts my opinion, because I do a good job and I try to make the best decision for the person who wants it. But he also made a good point that every cab could vary in size, placement, etc. etc., so not every cab is alike anyway even in color because of fading and whatnot.
So, next step, he is sending over a sample of the Cloak and Dagger art so I can color match and we’ll go from there.
