Stargate Artwork

Sideart – Full reproduction sideart or stencil kits. I think if I were to do this I would choose the stencils for a more accurate restoration
Control Panel Overlay (CPO) – Reproduction artwork. This would require another joystick to be installed, which would make this panel not quite look right.
Marquee and Bezel – Reproduction artwork or purchase used.

Multi-Williams Artwork

Phoenix Arcade
There have been a couple “sets” of Multi-Williams artwork available. They were designed to go with a specific multigame kit or board, each matching the art of the games available in the kit. The first artwork producer was Phoenix Arcade. The produced a really nice set of artwork to go with Clay Cowgills Williams Multigame. However, this art is no longer available since the kit is no longer in production. Phoenix Arcade sold the films of the art, so this artwork may yet become available again.
Thanks to Jbuck for posting this on the KLOV forums!

Arcadeshop.com
The only currently available artwork available is the Multi-Williams artwork from Arcadeshop.com. This artwork is designed to go with their Multi-Williams PCB. It also is very well designed.

What Should I Do?

Either product above seems like a decent direction for me to go with. However, since I would like to go with JROK’s Multi-Williams board in my project, the Arcadeshop artwork would not be a good fit. The main issue is that their artwork has graphics and logos for Moon Patrol, which the JROK board does not provide. However, the Phoenix Arcade artwork is no longer available. I also feel that both sets of artwork are a bit “busy” with the way they each try to contain graphics from all the games. I’ve never been a fan of most multigame artwork because they always look too busy. I think I may end up designing my own for this cabinet.

Sideart
The first set of artwork to decide upon is the sideart. There is an interesting discussion on the KLOV boards about possibly coming up with a Williams Multigame stencil set, since this is the method Williams used to do their original sideart. I really like this idea, and even provided a few ideas of my own to the discussion:

I actually like the one on the far left, although it begins to get busy again. It doesn’t seem as bad as the other sideart possibly due to it being spread out more. Having it stenciled may also help it to look more legit as a Williams cabinet. I need to try these designs on a Stargate cabinet, which has a different side profile than the standard Williams cabinets like the Joust profile in the designs above.

Control Panel Overlay
A CPO design is going to be difficult for me to create, since I would really need one printed on CPO style material. For this reason I will likely keep an eye out for a Phoenix Arcade CPO or control panel. It is the best match for my plans.

Bezel
Not going to be too picky here yet. I have a Stargate bezel already, so I will probably use it until I can either get a Phoenix Arcade bezel or create my own design. The best bezel would be one printed directly on plexiglass, but I may have to go with a printed underlay to use my own graphics design.

Marquee
I think I will end up designing my own marquee to match whatever I do with the sideart. There a plenty of printers that can print a custom marquee, such as Mame Marquees.

Rotheblog Ms. Pac-Man Stencils

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I am planning to convert an old Donkey Kong cabinet into a dedicated Donkey Kong 2 (D2K) cabinet. I just finished my Tron, so I am now ready to proceed with another restoration project. I expect to receive my pre-ordered artwork from This Old Games by the end of the month, so I’d better get this project moving! There is a great discussion going on right now on the KLOV Boards debating which cabinet colors would be favorites for the new D2K cabinets. The maker of the D2K upgrade, Jeff Kulczycki, decided on a darker blue color for cabinets that will be built as a dedicated D2K machine. I’ve always thought that Nintendo had a different approach to their cabinet color choices. They generally used a secondary color from the artwork as the cabinet base color. Rarely did they use one of the primary colors in the artwork. Following their previous cabinets, I wanted to see which color I thought would be a better fit. I made a few quick images to compare and contrast the different colors, and here is what I came up with.

Sapphire Sparkle (the “Official” color):

Purple:

Yellow-Gold (My favorite!):

Red:

I really like how the Yellow/Gold color looks. It does a great job of complimenting the colors in the D2K artwork. What do you think? Submit your vote in my Poll over to the right. I’ll likely keep “official” and do the dark blue, but it’s fun to think about it.

Then I painted the entire cabinet with primer:

Once the primer was dry and the cabinet was sanded smooth, I painted it black.  I used Rustoleum Semi-gloss Black with a foam roller.  However, I ended up accidentally getting the oil based paint, not latex.  I was really happy with the results of the paint, but cleanup was a bear.  I think I will stick with Latex on future project.  This cabinet really stinks from the paint!

I ended up taking the ventilation screens off of the back doors so I could paint them.  They were starting to corrode, so a fresh coat of Rustoleum will help them to last longer and look better.

After the paint dried, I brought the cabinet into my basement.  Much easier to move a full size cabinet when there is nothing installed in it.  Once I got it downstairs, I installed the new sideart.  This was really tough!  The sideart was tough to work with.  I ended up trying the “wet method” of installing it, using water with a touch of soap in it to coat the adhesive.  This allows you to reposition it when placing it on the cabinet.  Has to be perfect!  Once the artwork was in place, I used a squeegee and a wet towel to squeeze all of the water out from under the artwork.  Ended up working great!  I was really nervous spraying water on adhesive. 

After the sideart installation dried, I moved the game into it’s place in the gameroom.  I have it on the end of a row of games, so I had plenty of space to finish assembling it.  It took a long time to assemble.  This cabinet is one of the most complicated designs I’ve seen.  Since it is probably one of the coolest classic cabinets, it was worth the extra work.  There were so many screws and brackets I was sure I would miss something somewhere.  However, it went smoothly!  I put the movie Tron in my DVD player to watch while I was working on the game.  Didn’t really add much to the project, but it gave me an excuse to watch it again.

Speakers reinstalled and ready:

Back view of the cabinet:

Repaired and painted test and volume controls.  Had to hammer this one out for a while to straighten it out.

Watching Tron while assembling the game:

Here’s the picture of the final assembly.  It’s not 100% completed yet.  There are a few final things I need to do, that I will list at the end of this post.

Here’s a quick screenshot of the freeplay chip that I installed.  Works great!

There are still a few things I need to do before it is totally finished.  

1. New t-molding
2. Midway kick protector (vinyl)
3. 2 white fluorescent bulbs
4. Repair coin door (find missing pieces) and add bulbs
5. Cap kit – the monitor “jumps” after it’s been played for an hour or so.
6. Touch-up the black paint

Here are some pictures of the artwork:

Here is the link to their Tron Sideart explanation: Tron Sideart