Arcade Tutorials

Tracing stenciled arcade artwork with vellum

The problem with reproducing arcade cabinet artwork always starts with proximity to the game. Scanning a cabinet is a ton of work, and when combining the stitching in Photoshop of all of the pieces, you might be looking at 6-12 hours on that task alone. The nice thing with stenciled artwork is that the design is usually highly refined and more simplistic, which means it is easier to do a tracing to get the artwork to a workable format. Here are some visuals. (more…)


Turn off music playing automatically in Ning

Short post today that will only interest a few. Here is a short explanation on how to turn off the autoplay option for music on a profile page on CoinOpSpace.com which runs on the Ning software. (more…)


How to use the CoinOpSpace forums

This post is very much targeted to address some of the questions about how Ning has structured the use of their forums. I hope that this answers some questions that I have been getting. To state again, the Ning forums are just a piece of the overall picture of creating a user community. The forums are not nearly as in depth as something like vBulletin, they are very stripped down to what is needed – reply, add images and some basic formatting. But some of the common quick links are available. (more…)


Design for CoinOpSpace Arcade Forum

I promised that once we hit 75 members at my new arcade forum CoinOpSpace.com I would do a design. I had started before we cross the 75 member mark, but today I sat down and worked really hard to try to finalize something.

I did fail in my first attempt, but that misfire led me to the second attempt which I was really happy how that turned out. (more…)


Klov vs. CoinOpSpace (Ning) Round 4 – Directly upload images

At the Klov.com forums, if you want to show an image in a post, you have to host it somewhere externally. This means, if you don’t pay for webspace, you have to sign up for a Photobucket account, or some other online storage and link to an image externally. This also means you have to fuddle with BB Code (Stupid version of HTML, why not just use HTML?) and you also may have to do some resizing.

I don’t know if this was purposeful, to save space on the server. That would make sense. But based on how truly crappy UBBThreads is as a forum software my guess is that this is default MO. At CoinOpSpace – My arcade forum and social network, you click a button to upload a photo, and you’re done. The way mom intended it. (more…)


Klov thinking about upgrading forum software – Voice your opinion

I wanted to endorse this movement for sure. Klov arcade forums are finally, again, looking at upgrading their forums. Only minor changes have been made over the life of the forum, some 6-7 years with only small upgrades. A year ago they were looking at an upgrade, and then….nothing. People waited, people asked questions, and no response was given. Hopefully this time, they follow through. (more…)


Tutorial – Change your coin door to accept tokens

You’ve got your gameroom full of your favorite games, but you’ve decided that you want to change those games over from accepting quarters to accepting tokens. I didn’t write this article, but it is a very good post detailing how you can change over all of your coin door ‘mech’ or ‘mechs’ to accept tokens. Strap in, the tutorial is long but it has lots of photos. Enjoy! (more…)