Archive for December, 2007
Pac-man Christmas Tree!
Check out this photo of the Pac-man themed Christmas tree in Madrid Spain. All of the big blogs are reporting on it.
Here is the video of the classic arcade tree in action. You can see that it is loaded up with some festival themed Pac-man imagry, but it has all of Pac-man’s old enemies, and they even move a little bit.
Here’s the static image of the tree.
Lots of users commented on how cool it would be to be able to play the Pac-man tree. Possibly I am sure, but complicated. It is awesome to see how much of a global force Pac-man is and how much that character line is recognized and appreciated. Wouldn’t it be cool if these guys in Madrid who made the Pac-man tree took some tips from my hometown lighting expert with the Trans Siberian Orchestra guy!
Some music a little more 8-Bit themed would be in order for the Pac-man tree, just as long as it didn’t keep repeating:)
Got the “Numerals” version of the Pengo Control Panel Overlay
There was a post in the Google Arcade Group by a collector by the name of Troy Akey. Troy has a number of NOS pieces of arcade artwork that he is guaging interest to do reproductions. One of listed pieces of artwork was Pengo, but he failed to mention whether it was a control panel overlay or the sideart. I am assuming it is the CPO.
I posted that the Pengo control panel overlay is about 90% vectorized already, as well as the Pengo sideart. I have a great scan of the bezel, and that shouldn’t be that hard to vectorize. I also own both of the marquees, and as of tonight have scanned in the pieces of the standing Pengo marquee. (The “numerals” CPO is the only piece of artwork I don’t own.) I hope Troy just lets me make my kit and focuses on one of the other six to eight pieces of artwork he listed. Besides, you can already purchase a numerals version of the Pengo overlay from Mamemarquees.
But, with my post, I was fortunate to find a bunch of other collectors who are interested in the Pengo kit of artwork I want to reproduce. One collector in particular has a couple of NOS Pengo control panel overlays with the numerals. He has a good network, and was fortunate to get the original NOS Pengo artwork from an operator’s warehouse. Really awesome and nice guy, and we made an agreement on the Pengo reproductions that I am doing in exchange for what he has. The main idea is I am hoping his work will save me some time.
The fact that he has the NOS artwork is pretty cool, but he has also scanned in one of the overlays at 600 DPI, 24-Bit color, and to take it one step farther, he has already vectorized the whole CPO in Paint Shop Pro. Pretty amazing.
We spoke a lot via email over the last 24 hours, and I got the three pieces of the Pengo CPO scan with the numerals, as well as the Paint Shop Pro vector file he made. Here is a small image of what it looks like;
From what I can tell he didn’t finish the Pengo lettering with the halftone pattern overlaying the red to blue gradient. But other than that, he artwork looked pretty good. But I’ll tell you what. Before today, I had some pre-concieved notions about Paint Shop Pro. I thought, “It’s a dumbed down former -freeware made by Jasc that is good for the most basic image manipulation, but nothing else”. Well, PSP has a new name, Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, and a much cooler looking interface. Oh yeah, and Corel Draw owns it now, and it isn’t free, but pretty cheap. But the fact that they combined a raster and vector program should make most designers run screaming in the other direction, and for good reason. From what I could find, there is absolutely no way to get vector artwork out of PSP as a vector format. It will save artwork out as a .ai, or .eps, but it is a flattened raster image and nothing more. It also doesn’t save as a .svg, only reads that particular file format.
I researched their “message” boards, which are so old and antiquated…I searched the web finding only indications that what I wanted couldn’t be done, and I emailed their custom support which let me know that the trial version of the software doesn’t merit troubleshooting from their staff.
So, what I have is, a nice vector traced file of the Pengo control panel overlay numerals version, with no way to manipulate and add to it. (Unless I want to learn PSP…no thanks.)
So, does anyone out there know anything about Paint Shop Pro and what I need to do here? Can anyone help me?
~ Edit: I posted on the Klov forums, the BYOAC forums, Google’s Arcade Group, and rec.photo.digital. I got some good ideas on things to try to export or save vectors out of Paint Shop Pro Photo X2. The one comment I got twice, was to try exporting the file as a .wmf. Well, a .wmf was the only suggestion I got that worked in some sense. But the vector lines that came out as a .wmf were terrible, the curves were angular and it would have taken more time to correct the original vector trace from Paint Shop Pro than it would take to redraw it.
I ended up trying ImageConverter Plus to try to convert the .psp file to a .pdf. (Paint Shop Pro can’t export as a .pdf) I installed the software fine, opened a file, set my presets on what I wanted the output file to be and everything else. I hit start, ImageConverter said it was converting the Paint Shop Pro file…but it never made a file. Like there was an error.
I tried copying the vector artwork to the clipboard in Paint Shop Pro, and then pasting it into Freehand, Illustrator and Corel Draw. All of the software interpreted the PSP vectors as .bmp images.
I checked to see if Paint Shop Pro would save as a .cdl, Corel Draw file. But it doesn’t. Funny, since this Photo X2 is a new release, and both software are owned by Corel now. I even registered and posted in what looked like a well traffic’ed Paint Shop Pro forum (http://pspug.org). But no reply posts. What a piece of crap software, seriously. This isn’t that hard.
So, as of now, I am giving up. Unless someone out there with a licensed version of Paint Shop Pro wants to contact Corel for me and see if there is a way, I don’t think there is.
I zipped up the file and sent it to another collector to see if they could have any more luck. We’ll see.
~Edit 12/13/2007: I never did get a solution figured out on how to convert the vector art of the Pengo “numberals” control panel overlay from Paint Shop Pro into Illustrator. I haven’t heard back from the other collector, so as of right now I am assuming it can’t be done. I will be re-tracing this Pengo artwork soon, check my “Pengo CPO Vector Update 3 – Tracing Complete!” post to vote on whether you want this to be the next piece of artwork done or not.
Nokes First Snow
It started snowing last night, and when we woke up we had a fresh 2-3 inches on the ground, the first snow of 2007 in Indianapolis, IN. This is the first time that Nokes is seeing snow, so we were curious what he would do.
He handled it pretty well. He would drag his nose through the snow, moving with his snout submerged, and then when Sarah would move around and he would hear the crunch of the fluffy powder under her boots he would follow the sound.
He did try peeing on the deck, and no, that isn’t going to fly:)
Later today, when I took him on a walk, and there was ice on the ground, he didn’t like the sound of my shoes gliding on the ice….but he got used to it.
Great Craigslist deal on a Ms. Pac-man with vibrant pink sideart!
I hear a lot on the klov forums of different collectors who have awesome luck picking up some nice arcade machines off of Craigslist for great deals. The closest I have come to that myself, in this area, is an individual who was giving away a complete Gottleib Q-bert in Anderson, IN two or three months back. The key about Craigslist is, you have to monitor it all the time. It is a time consuming thing, and not something that fits into my daily schedule. If I sit down in front of the laptop, I will bring up my RSS feed reader with all of my saved arcade related searches. But if you aren’t sitting in front of a computer the instant that new arcade deal post hits the web, and are caller number 2, you don’t get the deal.
Well, last week Friday, I got lucky. At lunch I was lucky enough to see this posting on Craigslist for Michigan actually (arcade machines in Indianapolis seem hard to come by at jaw dropping deals);
For sale 3 arcade games for parts. Pac Man, Ms. Pac Man & Centipede. $100.00 each. Call (Number removed) for more information.
I thought I would call, that was an excellent price for those machines. The first thing that popped into my head was that this was an individual who wasn’t sure on the value of the machines. It just so happened, I was the first caller! I asked if they had some photos, and she said they did and she’d try to send them to me by the end of the day. That is usually a bad sign for me, because I was so far away in Indianapolis, if another person offered to come get the coin-op games that day sight un-seen, there was nothing I could do.
But luckily, in 5 minutes I had some files in my email. I say files, because they were a Microsoft specific file format type, and not anything I could view. After a chain of calls and emails, I was able to help the owner get the photos changed to .jpgs and sent to me.
I was blown away, and I told them this on the phone. The Ms. Pac-man had a lustrous pink left in the one side of the sideart I could see. I only had one photo to go from, but I had to assume that the sideart on both sides were close in color. I started to get really excited. But what ensued was quite a struggle.
I was the first caller by about 15 minutes, and then the calls just came streaming in. A collector posted on Klov about the machines and then all of the great arcade collecting community in Michigan on the west side was abuzz. Here I sat, down in Indy, with my hands tied a little bit. I knew I was possibly only interested in the Ms. Pac-man, and not the other machines. Gone are the days for me when I was to mess around with reselling arcade games for between a hundred and two hundred dollars. If I resell an arcade game, I want $300 plus to make it worth my while. The other frustrating aspect was, a lot of these collectors who are local, can make a little more money off reselling these arcade games, and that is what they intended to do. I wanted this Ms. Pac-man for my personal collection, having looked for one of this quality for two years at an affordable price, and I didn’t want it to slip through my hands.
After talking with the seller some, it sounded like they only wanted to sell them as a lot. Understandable. At the time they didn’t know about the forum post, and thought that if they did a piece meal with the games, they would be stuck with one, two, or all of them in the end. Not to mention all of the time dealing with a bunch of different individuals and their schedules.
So, I had first priority, but the second person who called said they would come up, by Saturday, and get the games sight unseen, or that is what I was told. I now had a number of things working against me, availability, location, transportation, and time.
I was honest through the deal, and kept the owner’s best interests in mind, knowing that if this was meant to happen, it would. I won’t go into detail, but we worked out a deal. I think in the end, I communicated really well on this deal except for one minor piece. I got what I wanted, the Ms. Pac-man, so that was all that mattered, but the ex-owner is getting a really great deal from me.
Here are the photos I got tonight, and more to come later. First off, I wanted to post photos of my current machine to show the drastic contrast!
~Update 12/22/07 I got to see the Ms. Pac-man in person for the first time today. The Ms. Pac-man marquee has vibrant color with little scratches only on the black portions covered by the marquee brackets. The marquee was secured by non tamper torx screws, which I found odd. I’ll probably replace those.
The Ms. Pac-man glass bezel has just a tiny bit of flaking on the left side and the biggest surprise was the amount of flaking in the sideart. I can just brush off parts of the sideart with my finger if I wanted. The Ms. Pac game is dirty, so I will need to scrub it down, but I am not sure how to do that without taking off some of the sideart. Preserving the artwork will require some research.
I got to the back door through the marquee, checked the connections, powered Ms. Pac-man up, and surprise! It’s a working game! I got a working Ms. Pac-man with great pink sideart for $100. Thanks Craigslist. Hopefully it keeps working after transport.
I need some tips on cleaning the game. Can anyone give me any without ruining the sideart? I have heard of giving arcade games a clear coat to make the sideart shine and protect it, but I don’t want to put that over the dirt. Can anyone help me?
Ms. Pac-man Stencils on BYOAC
When I first got into the arcade game collecting hobby, the one game I wanted was a Ms. Pac-man. A common game that is easy to come by, but one I grew up with and have the fondest memories playing. (more…)
More new “The Dark Knight” Photos – Batman & Joker
I don’t think I will say anything new here on the new “Dark Knight” photos of Batman and Joker that debuted in the last 24 hours that hasn’t already been written somewhere else.
I will just say that I am impressed with the Batman suit. These photos show that there are some significant changes visually to the cape and cowl from Batman Begins, and structurally. Any aficionado has heard that the Batman suit is more maneuverable, and isn’t as cumbersome to wear for Christian Bale in this sequel. A coupe of the images of Ledger’s Joker, immediately made me think of Tim Burton. Not Tim Burton’s treatment of Batman or Joker, but just the white, faceless, ghostlike expression seemed like a page out of Burton’s morbid dreamscapes.
I just hope that Christopher Nolan, who has been so great at relating the wealth of information in these stories to some sort of modern, believable explanation. I am sure he will explain, subtly, why the suit changed and why it was necessary. Not like Joel Schumacher (*hiss*), who just thought the suit needed something…oh! Nipples (Sang with an Opera voice).
Rare HUO Bally Journey on ebay!
Located in Channahon, IL, this “Home Use Only” Bally/Midway Journey is truly a rare find for someone, and that arcade collector will be more than eager to dole out a premium to snatch it up. From the different views of this classic game, it looks pristine. Here are the photos of the Journey arcade machine.
Here is the description about the Journey game that was posted by the seller;
Original Bally/Midway JOURNEY Arcade Game
-1982 Vintage
-Was won by wife at Journey concert in Chicago in 1982.
-Set up for home use.
-Have schematics and manuals for machine
-Everything powers up except for the screen
A pretty amazing but not surprising classic game to come up for sale. My perception of Chicago and surrounding cities in Illinois is that collectors will continue to find treasures throughout the city for years to come. With so many arcade game companies with operations in Chicago, I have to believe that there are machines out there that are yet to be found.
~Edit 4.11.08
Turns out ZF Camaro out in Maryland was the individual who won the Journey arcade game auction on ebay (Klov thread with much better photos), and it just arrived this week! Wow, almost five months later. That is a long time to wait for an any game, but when it is a Home Use Only collectible game like Journey, it is worth the wait.
