Arcade Resources
Re-useable Arcade Game Stencils
I was excited to see this post today on the Google Arcade Forum.
After tons of trial an experimentation I have landed on a solution for those looking for reusable stencils for their games. Stencils can be cut from 1/8 inch Sintra material which is basically a dense PVC foam. The resultant stencil is rigid, resistant to temperature and liquid, cleans off with a hose and scrub brush, lightweight, thick enough so pieces won’t easily break off and lays nice and flat on the surface to be painted.. and oh, each layer is color coded to the paint needed 🙂
These are still experimental for a few more weeks, and will add 80.00 to the cost of most stencils and shipping won’t be cheap as they must be shipped flat but the option will be there at last. Some games these stencils make tons of sense such as Defender and Robotron, others like Taito they just wouldnt look as good as vinyl.
I have spoken with Brian a number of times since I started collecting arcade games. He is the authority on artwork, especially stenciling arcade cabinets to restore them. He has an arcade restoration business where he sells a lot of great stuff at Oleszak Creative.com.
There is always a fair amount of discussion on restoration and stenciling arcade games on the forums, and there are some collectors who would like to buy re-useable stencils. I know I would like to buy a set of re-useable stencils. I would like to restore my Ms. Pac-man, and if possible, would like to recoup some of the cost involved in painting it. For a three piece stencil set, it could cost as much as if not more than $150. Then, add in paint and buying / renting the equipment, and it gets expensive fast.
The $150 is just the cost of the vinyl in that amount. The cool thing about Brian, he is nice enough to do the arcade stencils right around cost. If it was a big coin-op business, the markup would make the stencils astronomical.
But not only getting some of the game restoration cost back, but for me, it would be my first time. What if I mess up the coin-op game artwork I am restoring on my first try? I could do some test spray pieces, but that isn’t the same and painting a whole cabinet. If I do it wrong, and the vinyl stencils are one time use only, then I have to pay another $150 for another set?
It is a tough decision for me. Brian would have answers for all of this, and has had some great advice for the klov forums on why acetate, metal, and other plastics don’t work well for stenciling games. Mostly because they aren’t tight to the surface.
He did mention that it won’t work on certain games, and it may not work for my Ms. pac-man arcade game. But I am going to email him and see.
Update July 23rd, 2008
Checked back with Brian today to see what ever happened with re-useable arcade game stencils.
Brian did find a solution that in theory should be shippable. However, vinyl stencils with a backing and a pre-mask allow for floating pieces in the artwork. The plan was to use Sintra Board, a dense PVC Foam that could then be used to stencil multiple machines. The problem is that it will only work with certain artwork, and is highly suitable for Williams games because they didn’t have any floating pieces of artwork.
But that is just one challenge. Not only do you rule out some of the popular Pac-man games like Ms. Pac and regular you are talking about shipping multiple boards that usually measure somewhere around 3’x5′. Shipping is pretty expensive, upwards of $50 depending on where you are located.
When it is all said and done usually the cost for the materials for the multiple use stencils would be about double the cost before shipping. But, if you happen to do multiple machines, or have enough swagger to think you can resell the stencil for someone else for 75% of your cost with shipping, then these would be perfect for you.
Brian does make these stencils using a CNC router and takes custom jobs, he just doesn’t push the service because 90% of the arcade collecting community will only use them once and can’t justify the extra cost. If you are still interested, hop on Gamestencils.com and send Brian a message to see if your chosen artwork can be done and how much it would cost.
White Mr. Do! with Sideart for Sale!
Late last week, an arcade collecting contact pointed out to me that another collector had a white Mr. Do! with the sideart, the one I have conveted for over a year now, was up for sale. Not to mention, this Do! was cheap cheap. Only $200. Check out the photos.
I couldn’t believe how great of condition the classic game is in. It’s like this white Mr. Do! was different than the others ones, because the artwork on the side had little to no flaking.
I thought briefly that this Mr. Do! machine was the one that Mark Deroller once owned. It had some ruboff on the side artwork of the machine, where you would place your left hand when playing the game. I also knew how far about Mark was in MA area to the current owner, and the current owner had posted total mileage each year he traveled to add to his arcade game collection. But, then I noticed the Mr. Do! control panel was different between the two different white machines. So, this makes it official that I have now seen three “white” Mr. Do!’s with sideart, possibly all made by Gleeb.
Only catch, the coin-op collector who owns it is all the way across the United States. I started to check into UShip, which is pretty cool, but it didn’t appear that even at such a low price I would be able to get the Mr. Do.
I told my fellow collector who turned me onto the Do! that we had to do something about it. He is within two hours of the game, and I have emailed the owner in the past about other arcade games. At the very least I was hoping he could make a deal to get out there and scan the Mr. Do! sideart.
But as of right now, he is considering the idea of just outright buying the Mr. Do! Watch here for updates…
Wizard of Wor, Dig Dug and Tetris Sold!
For a month or so I had been responding to the common Craigslist ad looking to “buy” games. Usually people put out these ads looking for freebies, but I knew it couldn’t harm me any to try to sell some of my non working games. I wanted to try to reduce as many distractions as possible to focus on studying, and fixing up the Midway Wizard of Wor, Atari Dig Dug, and Dynamo cabinet Tetris were time suckers to say the least.
The Tetris was the only one I was seriously considering keeping in my game room, but the black cabinet was so ugly. The original intention was to resell these once they were working to help pay for gas, or take down the paid cost on one of my other games. But the motivation for selling a game to make a small amount of money waned for me. I got my holy grail, the Jr. Pac-man. I had originally wanted to use the money I made to help pay for my trip out to PA to pick it up. But thanks to DanOfEarth, that wasn’t an issue anymore.
Finally, last Tuesday I found some people who weren’t looking for free games, and were interested in the three I had to sell. I just wanted my itemized costs back in total for the games, and the price was more than fair, great if you intended to keep one of the games. Dig Dug is too slow of a pace for me, Wizard of Wor holds no interest for me other than the fact that it is a two player game, and Tetris, again, ugly cabinet with no sideart.
Here are some photos of the games being taken away.
I made a whopping $10 on my sale after all of my costs were added up, but I learned a lot. I originally bought the Dig Dug as a Land Sea and Air Squad, painted solid black on the sides. It was my first game that I brought back from the brink of oblivion, and restored in some sense of the word. It was a lot of fun, bargaining for the deals, but it was a lot of work, and without knowing much about electronics, it was hard work for me to constantly figure out all of the problems I was having with any given game.
In the end things worked out great. I didn’t lose anything but time, and that is debatable when compared to what I learned and the contacts I made hunting down the arcade parts. The games found a good home where they should be reused in a family fun center, and I can park in my garage again:) Just in time for winter. Not to mention I can keep the other two cabs in case I need a fix, my empty Atari Food Fight and Atari Xevious.
Acquired Sinistar Marquee
Not a lot of time today to do my daily arcade post, so I thought I would show off my acquisition from last week.
Met with another collector, and he gave me a Williams Sinistar marquee as a trade of sorts for some web services. He got a stack of Sinistar’s marquees earlier this year at one of the Indianapolis, IN USAmusement arcade auctions for a pretty great deal. Made me wish I had paid attention to those opening auctions where they sell of that pile of stuff on the folding table.
I really like Sinistar, but I have only ever played it on playstation. I haven’t ever played a real Williams UR Sinistar at another collectors house. Still looking for an arcade collector that is fairly close by that I can try Sinistar out as it was played in the day.
Former CEO of Universal & Mr. Do!
Before we went to Michigan the first weekend of November, there was a post in the Klov forums about the versions of Mr. Do! I had mentioned one member had a couple of email exchanges with the former CEO of Universal, the company that made Mr. Do!
I emailed that member this week (shacklefurd), another coin-operated arcade game collector in Indiana. He emailed me back saying he wasn’t sure he still had the email address for the former Universal Games CEO, but he would check.
Here’s crossing my fingers. How cool would it be to find the company that made the Mr. Do! with white sideart and in finding that company discover that some of their former employees still have some of the white Mr. Do!’s in great condition. No sideart flaking at all. I can dream:)
If Shacklefurd doesn’t still have the email address for the former CEO, does anyone else have any leads? This Mr. Do! is becoming a little bit of my collecting grail. Shoot me an email if you can help me with any information about Gleeb or Universal.
Update – 4.15.09
Wow! Quite a bit of time has passed on this one. But, Jason S. was able to track down an email and more importantly a name for the former CEO of Universal and apparently he worked with other companies such as Exidy and Data East among others.
The original email he had bounced, and the new email I found got rejected, so I am going to keep digging. But I hope to finally find some answers to the white Mr. Do! character artwork license, possibly to a company on the east coast.
Circus Charlie sideart sold
I kept an eye on the peeled off Circus Charlie sideart that was on ebay this week, but I never did bid. Not a priority project for me right now, I couldn’t justify paying at least $18 for some beat up Circus Charlie artwork just to scan and vectorize it with no guarantee that I would reproduce it.
Buzzkill! won it, and I found a profile that matched his name on the Google Group forums, so I emailed him at buzzkill@comcast.net to see if he could help me out in scanning the (Konami) Circus Charlie sideart. That was the day after the auction ended on Wednesday of this week. I haven’t hear anything back yet, and I doubt I will.
If I am meant to get a scan of the Charlie sideart / sticker, I will. No big deal. But I don’t expect that something quite like peeled off artwork will come on ebay again anytime soon.
Pengo CPO Vector Update 1
I started working on vectorizing the Pengo control panel overlay (cpo) the day after I scanned it. In the first day I got the Pengo on the underside of the joystick (down motion) finished, as well as most of the Pengo eskimo player 1. On day two, I finished the eskimo player 1, and two players by mirroring the same artwork. Today, I also finished Pengo pushing an ice block into a sno bee on the upper left. But just Pengo, not the ice or the sno bee themselves.
Don’t know what tomorrow will bring for the Pengo artwork, hopefully continued progress.
There has been a ton of great debate and information on the Klov forums over the past couple of days on this Pengo project. We’ll have to pick between the two versions of most of the Pengo artwork, I will probably only do one set of reproduction artwork for this Sega game. We’ll have one marquee, one bezel, and one control panel reproduced. There is only one version of the Pengo sideart.
