I still remember the first time I ever touched an Asteroids machine. It was in a dark arcade in Vallejo, one of those ones that had popped up in an empty storefront in a shopping center. The machine was different than all the others in the arcade, it was a lone cocktail cabinet amid the uprights that were packed anywhere they could fit them. I dropped in a quarter to see if I could make sense of the game, and was amazed at how fun it was controlling the ship. Of course I died quickly because I...

This is my Tektronix 453 oscilloscope being used as a miniature vector monitor for Atari Tempest. It took a bit of fiddling to figure out what settings I needed to put on the scope to make this work so I took a picture so I could easily reference it. There's supposed to be a Z input which would control the brightness but I couldn't get it to work. Either because my probe was flaky or because the levels from the board didn't match what the 'scope was expecting.

Sometimes it's handy to have a way to add coins by pressing a button, either because your game doesn't have a free play option or because when the game is put in free play it no longer goes into the attract mode. For MAME cabinets it's nice to have a way to get into the MAME menus, add coins, and exit the games. Using the player 1 button as the shift button on an  I-PAC  can often be problematic because sometimes all the players panic to hit start to continue their...

I just got the two narrow slots working on my Pepsi machine. I fabricated the cams out of tempered hardboard. I used 3/16" not because I wanted it to be stronger but because I had small scraps if it around and I didn't feel like getting out an entire 4'x8' sheet of 1/8" and cutting off a piece. The cam doesn't actually move any of the machinery, all it does is click the switches at the right time. Because of this I was able to make it out of wood. As it turned...