Archive for November, 2007
GMAT test date set
Last week in some of my time off I finally made my appointment to take the exclusive and challenging exam. My GMAT date is in the middle of December, so if it wasn’t real before, it sure is now.
At least I have a date to focus and plan around. If it was open ended, or early next year, the amount of time might have been intimidating and been harder to stay focused for so long.
I have to get up to Pearson Vue on the north side of Indianapolis, just so I know where it is and where I am going so that is one less detail I have to worry about on test day.
Atari’s I, Robot Monitor Bezel Sticker Reproductions
I came across Classicade.com this morning, Bret Pherson’s website about his arcade games. Apparently he reproduced I, Robot monitor bezel stickers / bezel decals / bezel artwork, whatever you want to call them. He did both versions of the self adhesive bezel sticker, one was yellow and red, and the other bezel sticker was blue, red, and yellow, measuring 5-1/8″ x 15-1/4″. Visit Bret’s writeup and website here.
I am sure most collectors know about this I, Robot artwork, the reproductions sold out. I would expect as much if Bret was the first person to ever do “I, Robot” reproduction artwork. But there were only so many Atari I, Robot machines made if you base the demand solely on collectors who would apply the artwork. I would guess if another run of artwork was done, more arcade collectors would buy it just to have it. But it is good to know that Bret has the artwork if he ever wants to do another run of I, Robot decals.
Now I wonder, what other pieces of the artwork for I, Robot have been reproduced? Does any other collector out there know? Do you have any links to sites?
Moon Patrol Bezel Reproductions
I had to give a shout out to Jamie and his “Noise Land Arcade” who is in the final stages of making some reproduction bezels for the classic arcade game Moon Patrol. Jamie started this project because he could never seem to find a bezel in good condition.
The vector artwork on the Moon Patrol bezel was pretty straightforward, but the lightning type pattern in the background night sky was the real achievement. Jamie separated out the vector pieces and the raster pieces and worked on them separately. The raster artwork on the bezel was intense, I don’t know how he struggled through touching that up to a point where the Moon Patrol bezel could be reprinted, but he did an awesome job. Here is what he says on his website;
I’m getting very close to finishing my Moon Patrol restoration. I got the cabinet back in December of 2006. Since then I have been looking for a decent bezel on eBay, and was having a hard time finding one. They just don’t seem to turn up for some reason. I finally found one recently, which was in horrible condition.
I contacted Rich from ThisOldGame.com. He makes great repro art for Space Invaders, Burgertime, and other games. He said he would reproduce these if I can get him a good vector drawing of it! So, I’m now in the process of working on the redraw/cleanup for this using Photoshop and Illustrator. It’s coming along good so far.
Above is a larger view of the whole completed Moon Patrol bezel, and here is a smaller view showing the detail put into both the vector and raster portions.
Good job Jamie. Can’t wait to see the final product. Rich at This Old Game is doing the repros. Knowing his great work, I am sure they are going to be great. I can only imagine there are a ton of other collectors out there with their partially completed Moon Patrols who are going to be geeked to get one of these
Purchased a 96 in 1 Multi Pac Kit
There was a reason, that I can’t disclose right now, that I wanted to get Mike Doyle’s 96 in 1 Multi Pac kit for my Ms. Pac-man. I have been wanting this for a number of months because although I love Ms. Pac-man, it was always been one of my favorite arcade games, I need to breathe some new life into the gameplay.
The 96 in 1 Multi Pac Kit is just the way to do it. A lot of collectors get multi-kits for their coin-op games because it gives you some variety in gameplay. Most arcade game collectors don’t seem to like MAME either, and this is a way to get around having a MAME machine.
This particular kit comes with every darn possible variety of the Pac-man maze style arcade game you can imagine. Most are variations on the originals, Ms. Pac-man, Pac-man, etc. etc. But there are some video games on the kit that you wouldn’t expect and are completely unrelated.
- Ms Pac
- Ms Pac Plus
- Ms Pac Attack
- Piranha
- Mr. & Mrs. Pacman (new!)
- Pengo
- Pac Junior1-4
- Pac Baby1-2
And the game list goes on and on. 96 total variations and games. But probably the coolest part are the features of the multi pac kit. I will list the kit features I am most interested in;
- High Score save in NVRAM
- Selectable Speed
- Start on any level
- Difficulty
- Screen Saver
I love the high score feature, and I can’t wait to use the start on any level feature on some of the games, especially Jr. Pac-man. I have only beaten level 6 in my dedicated Jr. Pac-man once, and could use the practice on the last three levels.
Plus, I know a lot of people who play the games will want to set the difficulty and change the speed of gameplay.
The 96 in 1 Multi Pac kit should arrive hopefully sometime on Thursday or Friday and I hope to get it installed in my Ms. Pac-man right away. Thanks Mike Doyle.
Zookeeper Sideart Stencils
There was a topic recently on klov about someone wanting to get the sideart from the Taito arcade game Zookeeper vectorized so that they could make stencils.
I posted on the Zookeeper Stencils topic, mentioning that I could do the vectors, but I wanted to see the sideart scan to see how complex the artwork was. The Zookeeper artwork is very complex, with all of the little splatters, and the irregular line work. I posted on the topic asking how bad the party wanted the vector tracing of the sideart, but I never heard back.
I was surfing the other night and came across VectorZorg’s artwork again, and noticed that he had about 70% of the Zookeeper artwork already vectorized. The only part he didn’t have finished was the splatters on the sideart.
So I emailed him and started a dialog to see if I could get a copy of the file that he had and finish the remaining splatter effects. He emailed me back asking who was interested in the Taito Zookeeper Stencils, and I sent him a link to the thread.
You can see a larger version of the Zookeeper sideart if you click the thumbnail. I just took this from VectorZorg’s website. I’ll post any updates if I get them here first.
Update Nov. 18, 2008
Due to some unforseen health issues, Brian Jones has some time on his hands and it appears as if he is about one hour or two into finishing up this piece of vector artwork. All that was left were all the little textured blobs on the bricks, moon and everywhere else.
My guess is that stencils for re-painting Zookeeper artwork will be available sometime in late January of 2008 if not sooner. Will keep you posted as I find out more.
Jr. Pac-man vector marquee progress
Taken me longer than I thought, but I got through another vector piece of the oversize Jr. Pac-man marquee. I was going to go to the billboard behind Jr. Pac, but decided to Jr. himself.
The next piece of the vectorization process for the Jr. Pac-man marquee header will probably be the lamps, or something simple, like the blue ghost. The detail on Jr. was about what I figured, it wasn’t a breeze, but it wasn’t too hard to trace the lines either. It just took time.
I still hope to be the one person to have a whole set of artwork and produce it as a Jr. Pac-man kit to make your own machine, specifically for converting a Mappy into a Jr. Pac-man. But only time will tell.
Tron & Battlezone 3D Animations
Surfing tonight to find a cool piece of coin-op arcade related information to post on the blog. Then I re-visited Peter Hirschberg’s website, which always sticks out in my mind as one of the better arcade collecting related designed websites. Peter works for AOL in VA and clearly has some money put into the video game collecting hobby.
He also has a desire to work in special effects in Hollywood. Here is a video from YouTube showing some amazing computer models of the classic arcade games Battlezone by Atari and Tron by Bally Midway. He does a flythrough of the details on these games, and it is pretty phenomenal if you have any familiarity with them.
