Some time in 2005, I bought a Golden Axe arcade cabinet for maybe $200 or $300 from Craig’s List, which with inflation comes to about $36,000 today. My brother and I, mostly him though, got it up and working nicely with some replacement sticks and buttons from HAPP. This was back when they were good, apparently – the internet says they were acquired and then started putting out mediocre equipment. The machine followed me to a few different apartments before I finally convinced my sister to keep it at her house along with boxes of console games. 15 or so years passed, I accomplished little, and then out of the blue my sister tells me it is time to take Golden Axe back (I had already taken the other boxes to add to my Closet Full of Games™). I told her to keep it, she said no. I told her I would find someone to give it to because I didn’t want it thrown away, then I didn’t.
I help my brother in law now and again with computer stuff – you can bill upwards of $50 an hour to tell someone to try turning it off and on again. Well, he asked for some service or another and then drove the few hours to get here to drop off some laptops or mouse pads that needed updates. But, without warning, he brought Golden Axe with him – down I95 (the ‘I’ stands for Interstate, the ‘95’ stands for the number 95) on the back of a pickup truck, bouncing all the way. Somewhat expectedly, the cabinet was not in prime operating condition after this excursion, though it may just be that years living in rural PA took a toll on Gilius Thunderhead’s psyche.
My brother is too far away and rich to help these days, so I found a close-by owner of far fewer Fabergé eggs to give me a hand. Let’s call him Rick. So Richolas figured out that the monitor was just pretending not to work and came back to life with some pot adjustments (blaze it). Some controller wiring had come off and broken but it was nothing I couldn’t watch him fix with a crimping tool and some new metal wire end things you crimp. When all the work was finished, Rick and I stood back and appreciated all the hard work I’d watched be done to get the machine back to its glory. But, being the leader of the duo, I couldn’t sit back and rest on my laurels – I asked him what’s next.
It was a hard question that took guts to ask. The first step was to forget if the motherboard had a suicide battery on it and also forget I wrote a post on this site in 2006 that said it did not. After comparing images of chips to what was on my Golden Axe’s motherboard, I concluded we were safe. Next came research on the other System 16 arcade games Sega released and the discovery that I had been wrong in ‘06 – new daughter boards (games) can not simply be swapped in on an existing System 16 motherboard. The motherboard also has a chip that needs to be replaced for each different game, so there went the idea of buying Shinobi, Altered Beast, and ESWAT. System 16 multiboards, which I could use to replace the current motherboard and have access to all System 16 games, had existed at some point but seemed long gone from mainstream markets.
Ultimately we decided to leave Golden Axe as is. It’s a nice little game, a cool piece of Sega history, and I didn’t want to do any Frankenstein project on the cabinet, like adding shelves, throwing in a bunch of other boards, adding a spoiler, etc. But we wanted more arcade stuff to do and my wife is annoyingly supportive of my hobbies – “get another one,” she said like some sort of jerk. That started Rick and me down the path of deciphering what she actually meant, but only very briefly because it was fairly straight forward English and a decision was quickly made. We would build a cabinet. I mean he would build a cabinet while I watched and told him what he was doing wrong.
This decision opened up too many possibilities, especially so since I was making demands but not doing the work. Should we make it a four player cabinet? With the center two controllers having six buttons each for fighting games? But they also have those clicky rotary sticks for Ikari Warriors and Midnight Resistance? And maybe a track ball for bowling games? Obviously also a pedal. Then we argued over monitors – I wanted an OLED to future proof the setup, Rick scoffed at the idea and threatened to kill himself by grabbing the back of the Golden Axe CRT if we didn’t buy another incredibly dangerous CRT monitor for the new project. He defeated me through the power of irony and so we settled on CRT and the heartache, and heartachingly beautiful scanlines, it would bring.
There was also the matter of what would go in the new arcade cabinet. A single board seemed out of the question because we would be spending too much on the build for that to feel efficient, so I did some research on multiboards – the aforementioned System 16 one, a Capcom System 1 and System 2 multiboard, and an SNK one. They were all either discontinued and impossible to find, absurdly expensive, or both. A Raspberry Pi running MAME seemed like an OK but not optimal solution – emulation kind of sucks if you’re the anal retentive type commissioning a free new CRT cabinet. Also, would I still be able to look down on Arcade 1Up owners if I were running MAME in my machine? Probably, but not from high enough.
One of us, probably Rick, had the idea of using a MiSTer, which is a funnily spelled field programmable gate array (FPGA), which is a thing I don’t understand that results in hardware emulation as opposed to the usual software emulation we all know from playing NESticle every day. Ultimately, it means the games run more accurately and makes things a step closer to an authentic experience. Now that I had solved the problem of what to run in the cabinet, there was still a lot more to learn. The MiSTer could not emulate games that came out after roughly 1995, nor a lot of 3D stuff like Sega’s Model 1 board (Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter) onward. This was an acceptable tradeoff to me because I primarily wanted to play late 80s, early 90s, and 2D games. Connecting the MiSTER to an arcade cabinet would be possible with a product called a MiSTERcade, though I think there are a few competing products. This device would provide the connection between the MiSTer and the standard JAMMA wire harness we would need in the cabinet to connect joysticks and buttons and steering wheels and guns and track balls and fingers to stick up butts.
As the saying goes, the best laid schemes of mice and men tend to get fucked up during agricultural revolutions. While Rick was panicking over the amount and complexity of work he had agreed to, I was browsing Facebook Marketplace using my secret account and not the account tied to my real identity of Jay Videolamer. Out of nowhere, besides the explicit search I did for arcade cabinets, I discovered a Bad Dudes machine for sale for under $500. Rick and I agreed that building from the ground up would be too expensive, time consuming, and feel less authentic than accepting that we were, in fact, bad enough dudes to rescue the president and so I drove 45 minutes away with the seats removed from my minivan. The seller was some arcade gun game record holder who would later offer me a deal on a Revolution X cabinet I cordially passed on, but other than interacting with an Aerosmith fan the sale went smoothly.
Bad Dudes came with its own set of issues, the most serious being there was no back to the machine; it was only a matter of time before one of my kids electrocuted themselves with the monitor. Rick cut a board to size and added a lock within a few days and then we were on to the smaller issues, all monitor related – it was a little dim, not centered well, and humming loudly. Rick is a lover of tools he will have very little use for so he jumped at the chance to buy something to discharge the voltage of an unplugged monitor (and is currently shopping for a CRT calibration device). Then he changed the capacitors and adjusted the potentiometers. Expanding the image vertically is easily done with a friendly knob but we learned that you need a specific plastic tool to adjust a coil that controls horizontal width. The hum and chopiness of the monitor were not fixed at this point so Rick has a plan to repair or replace the transistor or something else beyond me, but it sounds very impressive.
Bad Dudes itself is both a classic and also not that great. Like Golden Axe, it can be finished in around 20 minutes if set to free play. Unlike my other cabinet, it’s a Spartan X/Kung Fu-like, and not a Renegade-like, which was just an advanced evolution of Kung Fu. With that cleared up, Bad Dudes does offer a specific kind of Japanese 80’s cheesiness that is very enjoyable, if you enjoy that sort of thing. The intro cut-scene is iconic for its stupidity and after each stage, try not to say “I’m bad!” along with your bad dude. The cabinet itself is visually interesting and matches other Data East cabs from that era – you may recall seeing or playing Robo Cop. The marquee is arc shaped and the control panel is rounded in a pleasingly distinct manner. This actually is a problem for us, though, as the initial plan of rebuilding a panel with more buttons for this machine, we now realize, is hard or impossible. Maybe this was not the best cabinet to install the MiSTERcade in.
While Rick’s work on Bad Dudes was ongoing, I found another machine that piqued my interest – Capcom’s Mercs (which I am fairly sure is short for Mercurials) for only $250. The selling points were 1) It is a three player cabinet, 2) The monitor is 25 inches, compared to Golden Axe and Bad Dude’s 19 inch monitors, 3) The monitor is installed vertically so it would be great for shmups and some classics like Donkey Kong and Burger Time, and 4) Mercs is a good game. The downsides to this potential sale were 1) Though 3 players, each only had 2 buttons which would make many 3 button games inaccessible, 2) The MiSTERcade could not take 3 controllers without buying an expansion board, and 3) The seller was 90 minutes away and in an unpopular state.
Another unnecessary splurge on a luxury item, another set of problems. We are in the middle of sorting out Mercs – it currently has a detached control panel because the seller didn’t include the bolts necessary to attach it to the cabinet. Though to be fair, the thing wouldn’t have fit in my minivan with the control panel still attached. Once that’s sorted by Rick, we will work on the monitor and add some wheels to the bottom of the cabinet. Bad Dudes came with wheels and it makes working on and moving it a hundred times easier, and it’s about half the weight of the Mercs cabinet. Enwheeling any new cabinets is now a priority and has somewhat redeemed the Bad Dudes seller in my eyes – perhaps music is the weapon, afterall. Adding buttons to the control panel feels like sacrilege as there are never going to be more original arcade machines made and I don’t want to be responsible for chopping one up. But now we have three cabinets and only Golden Axe has three buttons per player.
Where to put the in transit MiSTERcade has still not been decided. Should we remove the Bad Dudes control panel, put it aside for safe keeping, and make our own with more buttons? Should we stop arbitrarily keeping Golden Axe out of the discussion out of some attempt to leave the machine pure? Maybe I will just keep buying single board cabinets while lying to myself about adding the MiSTER to one of them. Only time, garage space, the free labor I can extract from Rick, and my wife’s patience will tell.