Arcade Resources

Artwork Engraved Arcade Keychains

Posted April 22, 2008

Brian Jones (Oleszak Creative) has a new pet project. He is fabricating aluminum keychains from raw materials and then laser engraving them with original arcade game artwork! How cool is that? (more…)

Donkey Kong WordPress Theme – Ver. 1

Posted April 21, 2008

I was surprised that I didn’t get more votes on my poll about arcade game WordPress Themes. Not sure if many collectors don’t care, if they thought I wouldn’t really make the themes or what.

I got two votes for Donkey Kong, so here is the first version of a Donkey Kong WordPress theme. Now I do want to hear from you. What would you like to see and keep these things in mind;

This is a simple theme. I want to keep it that way, extra WordPress features can be added in by the user and customized.
This template may or may not be for beginner’s. Some knowledge of html, css, WordPress and design in general is assumed.
The watermark is there for obvious reasons 😉

Features

This template is widget ready

If you are an advanced user, you can make the custom text treatment. Otherwise, you will get a text treatment in your banner / header like the second image. Thanks to Rich for the font information for Donkey Kong.

I am curious for feedback. I won’t guarantee that I will use all of the ideas, but I think that the arcade collecting community will collectively have better ideas than just one person. Plus, these ideas can be carried through future designs. Leave a comment here on Rotheblog below about this arcade theme.

Update

I have heard the feedback, and I agree on one point. The light blue is iconic Donkey Kong. I used the Donkey Kong light blue in the bottom of the site, and it looks good and fits.

Here is a thumbnail of the updated layout with search field on the right included (no larger view)

Is Wagner Gameworks Closing?

Posted March 15, 2008

Wagner Gameworks Logo

Wagner Gameworks (Doc Pinball) is one of two or three local arcade shops that I know of that build and service coin operated machines. But if you were to read his Craigslist posting this week, it seems as though he is going out of business. But Wagner is still doing business. Read on to see what inside information I know about whether his arcade shop is actually closing up shop or if his choice of wording was just exceptionally poor. (more…)

Agent X Color Screens

Posted February 28, 2008

This week, Rich at This Old Game gave me a few moments of his time and sent me some photos of the screen printing process of the in progress Atari Agent X sideart. A short history here, back in September of 2007, This Old Game announced that they would be producing a full kit of artwork including cabinet plans to build authentic artwork covered Atari Agent X cabinets. Well known arcade enthusiast Rick Ford was the catalyst, wanting a cabinet for himself, and making arrangements with both Scott Evans to get the original Atari films and me to remake the kickplate as a vector artwork file.

Fast forward to today, February 2008. Rich is in the process of printing the sideart, paying close attention to costing. Side art is challenging to reproduce and still be competitive in the small industry that is the arcade reproduction artwork business. There are a number of reasons why reproduction artwork is costly, mostly dealing with demand in relation to cost of production and cost of technology to print oversize films.

Here we see a couple of photos of the detailed Agent X side artwork. (Click on the photos for larger views)

Atari's Agent X / Cloak Dagger - Negative Film Burn

The first is a photo of the Agent X sideart film from Scott Evans, you can see the blacks look like they are printed on a clear acetate. This negative image film will be used to burn screens to print the different colors. Now, keep in mind, there are six colors in total (green, orange, blue, yellow, grey & of course black) that would be printed on a white vinyl. The films here are scaled down to 11 x 17, effectively one fourth the actual size. They will then be blown up to full size sideart at a height of six feet.

Each of the five Agent X films would have cost at least $100 to burn at those dimensions, not to mention, there are some discrepancies between the original film and the final artwork that was printed on the limited existing Agent X machines. Here is a PDF demonstrating some of those inconsistencies in color, and here is the topic on Klov with some of the members talking about whether to leave the film original or correct the color errors. The final machines indicated that Atari would have had made adjustments to the film to change the colors midway through production.

In an effort to keep the artwork more affordable, the two Rich’s decided to not burn individual films and instead implement some masking with Rubylith. What is Rubylith you ask? Well, I actually asked that myself.

Rubylith was started originally as a brand of masking film, invented and trademarked by Ulano Corporation. But over time the brand became so generalized it became synonymous with masking, much like Kleenex are to tissues. Here is how Wikipedia explains Rubylith;

Rubylith consists of two films sandwiched together. The bottom layer is a clear polyester backing sheet. The top layer is a translucent, red coloured, self adhesive, emulsion. It is designed to be both easy to cut with a knife and light safe for use with orthochromatic films.

Instead of making films for each color, Rich will apply each color individually, masking off the one full size film for each run of the six colors. Take a look at the two photos below for a demonstration.

Masking off Agent X full size film for printing

First he covers the whole film in the Rubylith, and then he uses a pattern to identify which sections to retain for the color he is printing and which sections to cut and remove. In this case, he is making the film for the green. (This is a test piece, if it was the real film, could you identify a incorrectly cut away piece of rubylith based on the sideart colors?) The film with the clear acetate is then placed on a screen, covered in light sensitive emulsion and any area that is not covered in rubylith is exposed and burned into the screen. The areas with Rubylith are blocked and the emulsion just washes away.

All of the pre-ordered artwork will be printed in this way. One color is printed on all of the vinyl pieces, then clean off the film and start all over again with a full covering of rubylith, remove and retain pieces of mask to achieve each of the other four colors other than black.

Rubylith can also be implemented for spot fixes and spot colors. Using it’s masking abilities and sensitivities to particular spectrums of light (Red, Green, and Blue), you can go back to already printed artwork and add back in missing colors or fix errors in the print. Here are a couple of examples.

Here we see the speaker grill rubylith cutout with the Atari logo. Neither the rubylith or the black will be exposed on the screen. This is the screen for the middle red of the speaker grill overlay.

Here is the exposed film. Cut by hand, you can see the little bump in the lower left corner that can be easily fixed with a liquid filler or even a piece of tape to get a straight – but angled edge.

Again, thanks to Rich for an insight into the printing process. Hopefully he’ll continue to have a few minutes here and there to provide more information to those of us that are interested about the progress of all of his printing jobs.

So, remember, if you don’t have a printer yet for your arcade reproductions, you will want to look up Rich at Thisoldgame.com

You got it here first, exclusive content about the Atari Agent X / Cloak and Dagger artwork films and printing progress at Rotheblog.com.

Gaming Console Icons for Mame

Posted February 27, 2008

One of the most time consuming aspects of building any Mame machine is collecting all of the “necessary” files. A short list of the digital files would include working game roms, bezels, cabinet photos, marquees and of course character art. The coolest Mame machines have all of the classic arcade artwork including icons of the different gaming console systems that will be used in the menus for selecting different emulators.

I came across a topic on the Arcade Controls forums (BYOAC) where a user had a collection of these icons that he had been editing on an on-going basis. I thought I would download the zip and take a gander at what I expected to be amateurish looking graphics. I was pleasantly surprised, check out a few of the icons of the consoles below;

I don’t know where the console images came from, maybe they came from an include with a front end or maybe they were generated from photos. Source doesn’t matter, there are a ton of console icons in this archive and here is the complete list of the gaming systems. All of the icons are at a fair resolution with transparent backgrounds (PNG files), great for use in Mame or even in a design for a website about video game news. You can download the icon collection here.

Amiga CD32
Atari 2600 Jr.
Atari 2600
Atari 5200
Atari 7800
Atari Jaguar
Atari Jaguar CD
Atari Lynx
FM Towns Marty
NEC PCFX
NEC TurboDuo
NEC TurboGrafx CD
Nintendo DS
Nintendo Game Boy Advance
Nintendo Game Boy Color
Nintendo Game Boy
Nintendo GameCube
Nintendo N64
Nintendo NES3
Nintendo SNES2
Panasonic 3DO
Philips CDi 450
Sega CD
Sega CDX
Sega Dreamcast
Sega Game Gear
Sega Master System II
Sega MegaDrive II
Sega Saturn
SNK Neo-Geo CDZ
SNK Neo-Geo
Sony PS2
Sony PSone

Scans of Ms. Pac-man Sideart

Posted February 23, 2008

I love little surprises like this.

I had a visitor (Kevin T.) stumble on my post about the Ms. Pac-man stencils that Joymonkey was working on last fall. I haven’t heard anything from Joymonkey, but some BYOAC members have reported that they got their stencils and are just waiting for nicer weather to use them. Kevin was looking for a set because his Ms. Pac-man artwork has the typical fade where there is no longer any pink, only yellow.

I know that many members over the years have probably scanned in the Ms. Pac-man cabinet artwork, and I know Joymonkey scanned it in from scratch when he remade the vector file for the stencils. But as far as I know, there aren’t any websites out there that have the scanned Ms. Pac-man available to download at this time. If you know of any other websites with a good Ms. Pac-man artwork scan, leave a comment and let’s start a list here. Joymonkey said he’d release his Ms. Pac-man vector file, maybe his sideart scan, once his stencils are done. But I don’t know if and when that might be.

Kevin spent a lot of time working on these scans, I mean a ton of time scanning in the Ms. Pac-man cabinet. But anyone who has attempted scanning arcade artwork before, knows how time consuming scanning can be. And not only do I have the composite files of the artwork, I have the individual pieces, all in two zip files. If you get a chance, leave a comment here and thank him for his time. I’ll make sure he gets the thank you. It sounds like he may attempt to also scan the Ms. Pac-man kickplate artwork, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

The other note I should mention, Kevin expressed to me that these are a touch inaccurate in that some of the lines don’t align correctly. But, at first glance the artwork composite looks good, and if you don’t like the composite, you can remake your own full Ms. Pac-man sideart with the scan pieces. He shared a link on where with me on where the files are hosted, so just click on the images below for start downloading the zip files.

I am posting this brand new today, and don’t know how long it will be online, so get the files while you can. I am sure I may get some sort of nasty email from a nasty company who make a shoddy poor product with someone who would gladly take your money for an incorrect product (read dishonesty) for a President. But for a short while, you’ll have the artwork files available to you at least to do with them as you please.

Has anyone else used MediaFire to host files? It says there isn’t a time limit for hosting, but if the files aren’t downloaded frequently enough, will they remove them? I was able to successfully download the files, is anyone having any problems downloading the zips?

~Edit – In case you have issues downloading the scans of the Ms. Pac-man artwork from the links above at Mediafire, you can try to download them from this website mirror.

Craigslist Pac-man Cocktail Deal

Posted February 22, 2008

It was about 11:30 last night, and I checked my feeds for Craigslist. As anyone who hunts Craigslist for classic arcade games knows, and I have experienced this first hand with my Ms. Pac-man win in Michigan, 99% of the time it’s junk and spammers but that 1% of the arcade findings are a great deal, and then it all comes down to timing.

Somehow I totally missed a post for northern Indianapolis at about 1:10 (I can’t remember what I was doing other than working at that time of day);

Moving and must sell many items. Antiques include; Armoire, buffet, secretary, marbletop end table, marbletop corner table, marbletop hall piece, carved walnut pedestal and Louis side chair. Reproduction queen ann desk, chippendale bench, and federal table. Old Pac Mac arcade table, needs repair. Do not want to download all the photos. Please call to set appointment to see if you are interested. Location NW side if Indy between Carmel and Zionsville.

I emailed late last night, figuring some other collector or worse in Indianapolis got to the pac-man cocktail first. Sure enough, it was gone. (more…)