So.... I inherited an old Japanese Game Center

awesome dude - I actually just picked up a new astro city myself not too long ago. I'd much prefer to inherent that though.... you can see a few astro cities and nacss from your pics.

you can probably make a killing on the cabs depending on what you have.
 
ponpo said:
When's the latest we can let you know we're going? Also I'm frail and small so shotgun sweeping duties if I come. Everyone else can lift things ( ≖‿≖)



( ≖‿≖)
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This isn't something formal or anything, so at the latest Saturday night, I guess.
 
This is all awesomely great. I expect to see the videos and pictures of this! Once again, congrats on getting all thatm OP. I hope you guys have and awesome time on Sunday!
 
My advice in that case:

Bring a drill to drill out locks on cabinets if grandma can't find the keys; you absolutely have to get inside the cabinets to take inventory, and you can't always work around the lack of keys with a screwdriver.

Bring a vacuum cleaner (or borrow grandma's) -and- a duster of some sort (I personally use an electric one, but a shitload of compressed air cans will do in a pinch), you're probably going to be dealing with a lot of dust and you'll need to clean off boards enough that any markings on chips and whatnot are legible.

When you take photos of boards, take a shot of the entire board, then zoomed in shots of any parts where there are legible words or logos on the board's ROM chips. That should be enough for system11 and other collectors to find out what is what in most cases.

And absolutely don't turn anything on until you're certain you've made sure every board (including the ones that make up the cabinets' monitors) is clear of dust. Excess dust causes electrical shorts, which kills equipment very quickly. When working with monitors, it -should- be safe at this point, but just in case, always work with one hand tucked in your pocket and don't touch anything that looks like it could kill you.
 
Not to be a debbie downer, but she's just giving you the contents of the game center, and not the actual space, right? People are saying that you should open it back up after restoring the games, is that an actual possibility?
 
StarCreator said:
My advice in that case:

Bring a drill to drill out locks on cabinets if grandma can't find the keys; you absolutely have to get inside the cabinets to take inventory, and you can't always work around the lack of keys with a screwdriver.

Bring a vacuum cleaner (or borrow grandma's) -and- a duster of some sort (I personally use an electric one, but a shitload of compressed air cans will do in a pinch), you're probably going to be dealing with a lot of dust and you'll need to clean off boards enough that any markings on chips and whatnot are legible.

When you take photos of boards, take a shot of the entire board, then zoomed in shots of any parts where there are legible words or logos on the board's ROM chips. That should be enough for system11 and other collectors to find out what is what in most cases.

And absolutely don't turn anything on until you're certain you've made sure every board (including the ones that make up the cabinets' monitors) is clear of dust. Excess dust causes electrical shorts, which kills equipment very quickly. When working with monitors, it -should- be safe at this point, but just in case, always work with one hand tucked in your pocket and don't touch anything that looks like it could kill you.
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The advice is much appreciated.

How exactly do I drill out the locks? I just want to make sure I do it right.

Would Rubber gloves protect me from zaps?

Also, can you recommend what kind of vacuum to get? Like, a picture or something? I try to pick one up.
Thanks a lot for the help!
 
Chairhome said:
Not to be a debbie downer, but she's just giving you the contents of the game center, and not the actual space, right? People are saying that you should open it back up after restoring the games, is that an actual possibility?
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Yup. Not the space, just the stuff inside
 
keisuke999 said:
The advice is much appreciated.

How exactly do I drill out the locks? I just want to make sure I do it right.

Would Rubber gloves protect me from zaps?

Also, can you recommend what kind of vacuum to get? Like, a picture or something? I try to pick one up.
Thanks a lot for the help!
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I've thankfully never had to drill out a lock, but there should be plenty of guides on YouTube and other places. Here's one I just found, though you definitely want to look at a few different ones also.

Rubber gloves are probably cumbersome to work with, and I don't know how well they'd protect you. There are only a few key spots on the monitor that have exposed high voltage, and it shouldn't be a big issue since you're only going to go back there to dust it off, which shouldn't involve directly touching it using a vacuum/compressed air combo. Nothing else in the cabinet should be harmful so long as it's turned off while you're working on it.

I just use any vacuum cleaner lying around and use either the open hose or attach a crevice nozzle.

Chairhome said:
Cool, just want to bring everybody back down to reality. :-/

You could try to do a kickstarter if you do want to go that route though, to find a space to house the games.
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I don't think this is a good market proposition. Small game centers have pretty much all gone away for a reason. Getting things ID'd and sold to overseas buyers would probably make the most profit from this.
 
StarCreator said:
I've thankfully never had to drill out a lock, but there should be plenty of guides on YouTube and other places. Here's one I just found, though you definitely want to look at a few different ones also.

Rubber gloves are probably cumbersome to work with, and I don't know how well they'd protect you. There are only a few key spots on the monitor that have exposed high voltage, and it shouldn't be a big issue since you're only going to go back there to dust it off, which shouldn't involve directly touching it using a vacuum/compressed air combo. Nothing else in the cabinet should be harmful so long as it's turned off while you're working on it.

I just use any vacuum cleaner lying around and use either the open hose or attach a crevice nozzle..
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This helps a lot. Thank you
 
For the monitors I would first blast off the dust and then inspect them for loose debris that might cause shorts. The chassis is pretty safe to touch when it's off, but stay away from the anode cap at all times if you don't know how to discharge it. Also the big filter cap can have some bite if you touch the leads. Make sure the wiring looks correct, especially ground straps (you don't know if any of these were left in need of service to begin with and they could be partially disassembled). Check for cracks in the flyback and fraying in the anode wire. When it's running, check for arcs.

There's like 25kV running through the flyback to the picture tube so gloves won't be any protection. Although they will be useful for any rodent carcases you have to scoop up :)
 
StarCreator said:
Doing that without opening up every machine to at least clear out the dust would just lead to a lot of fried electronics. Horrible idea.



I'd warn that sites like coinopexpress don't really reflect the real world value of things. I don't know if they're right in this case but they do tend to inflate their prices above what collectors would actually pay.
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Not only that, rarity on arcade-museum doesn't mean much, since it only surveys people who actually keep track of the arcades they have through the site. More than likely it's just a game most people don't want.
 
Ok - checking stuff out for dummies, chapter 1 :) This applies to the generic cabinets, not the dedicated stuff.

1) Do not power anything up yet. Never fit or remove game components with the power on. Power switch is usually at the back, it's safer to actually unplug them.

2) Hunt for the keys - there's actually a pretty decent chance that if there's a small office in there, you'll find a whole tub of keys. They're flat rectangular looking things as standard for most of those cabs.

3) No keys? You'll have to drill the locks. It's difficult, might find examples on Youtube - you need a pretty heavy duty drill and toughened bits. Even then I've ended up with shards in my leg from an exploding bit before now. Alternative: hire a locksmith to open them. The door you care about most is the largest one on the front.

4) Inside will be a circuit board (if they were left inside) - these vary from about 1 foot square upwards, sometimes multiple layer. You'll see an edge connector with a 56 pin harness on it, remove that. If you see a large plastic looking thing instead with PC style connectors, that's a JVS hookup (probably Naomi or similar), disconnect those instead. Often the boards in those cabs are mounted on wooden panels which slide out. Pay particular attention to which way up the connector is, standard 56 pin JAMMA pinout will have a key position on pin 7 - pins 1/2 are ground and 3/4 are 5v. Familiarise yourself with the pin locations on the connector. Google for 'JAMMA pinout'.

5) When all the boards are removed, as Starcreator says take good photos of them, just blow loose dust off unless you have an antistatic brush. Do not try to clean them. These are sensitive to static by the way, and physically fragile.

6) When it comes to testing the cabs there's no easy way past 'suck it and see'. You will need a multimeter and have identified a game board which is nearly worthless in the step above. First you power them up with no board installed - this is to get any potential "I've been turned off for years and plan to explode" situations out of the way first. Do this in a dark room and you should see the screen being 'not dead' but still black. If you did find the keys you can look in the back and see if the tube neck glows, it's the glass bit with a small pcb on the end. Don't ever touch the back of the screen, you're not qualified. You'll probably hear a small amount of 'popping' initially, if this calms down then you're good.

7) Multimeter time - DC volts, measure pins 1+3 on the 56 pin connector with no game board installed and power on, expect to see around 5v, if it's anything 5.8 or above you need to adjust the 5v supply - ask about that if you need to later. These run at 5v and higher is dangerous, but we expect them to be a bit higher since there's no drain with no board installed. There are no dangerous voltages on that harness, but don't go shorting it out.

8) Any that have a live screen and working 5v, plug in a test board. If you've supplied good photos to collectors to help with ID, we can probably pick out one which is almost worthless, and thus perfect for testing. Turn the game on and see what happens :)

Or you can roll the dice and be brave ;) I wouldn't. If a screen blows it's not impossible for voltages to feed back down through the video ground damaging the game board. I've seen it happen, additionally old power supplies can misbehave and you don't want to cook games.
 
system11 said:
6) When it comes to testing the cabs there's no easy way past 'suck it and see'. You will need a multimeter and have identified a game board which is nearly worthless in the step above. First you power them up with no board installed - this is to get any potential "I've been turned off for years and plan to explode" situations out of the way first. Do this in a dark room and you should see the screen being 'not dead' but still black. If you did find the keys you can look in the back and see if the tube neck glows, it's the glass bit with a small pcb on the end. Don't ever touch the back of the screen, you're not qualified. You'll probably hear a small amount of 'popping' initially, if this calms down then you're good.
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Just to clarify, I still recommend opening the back panel for some as-hands-off-as-possible dusting to minimize chances of kablooie. Trusting the monitor to not have gathered a fatal amount of dust in the last decade or two sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.
 
i'm actually not that jealous anymore since he's got a lot of work ahead of him haha


it'd be nice if there were some sort of a video thing, but that's probably too much to ask for from just one guy.
 
system11 said:
Ok - checking stuff out for dummies, chapter 1 :) This applies to the generic cabinets, not the dedicated stuff.

snip

.
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Thank you soooo much for this.

We already tested one machine (I didn't know all this info at the time...) and it worked perfectly. (It was Sega Columns... not sure if good or bad)

So, at least we know that THAT machine is working.

Right now, my plan is:

1: Clean up and organize eveything (how many machines, how many spare parts, what keys do we have)

2: Take out all the boards/cassettes and take photos of EVERYTHING
 
Just make sure you have good storage for the boards. Optimally, you want something with antistatic properties (bags for PC motherboards work well, or brightly colored bubble wrap is -usually- antistatic) to protect the boards while they are away from the cabinets. Failing that, put them into separate cardboard boxes and do not use any sort of bag (plastic grocery bags for example will easily zap something, never let an arcade board touch one of those).
 
Goddamn, from some of those pics on Imgur I can only guess that that parlour is filled with either arcade Hentai games or Strip Mahjong games o.O
 
This is awesome. Don't know if anyone asked yet but will some cabs be sold? Really want an astro but impossible to find anything near Boston
 
Wow, that stuff is in great condition it looks like.

Be very careful with those loose CRTs. They should have flyback transformers to be discharging them but you can never be too careful. If you are interested in messing with them at all you definitely should look up CRT discharging tools and procedures.

So you know how much shipping would be to somewhere like Florida for an Astro?
 
42 Aero City cabs!? Damn, I´d be happy with just one, maybe even a couple of those for yoko and tate games. Still sour I couldn´t come to terms on a deal I was real close on getting 2 years ago.
 
Wow those new pictures are really cool. I can just see that place all lit up and filled with people in it's heyday. Thanks for sharing mate
 
was astro city one of the most popular arcades in japan? wonder how much astro city is selling for in the u.s. did the arcade owner bet everything on astro city being a huge hit? so many machines. wonder how much those machines cost the owner at the time.
 
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