Inside the Obsessive World of Miniature Arcade Machine Makers

The success of Nintendo's diminutive gadget led to a flurry of copycats, from a tiny Commodore 64 to a miniaturised Sony PlayStation. Some were good; many were flawed, with the play experience only being surface deep. Fortunately, some companies wanted to go further than fashioning yet another miniature plug-and-play TV console. From a report: One, the ZX Spectrum Next, brought into being a machine from an alternate universe in which Sinclair was never sold to Amstrad and instead built a computer to take on the might of the Amiga and Atari ST. Two other companies headed further back into gaming's past and set themselves an equally ambitious challenge: recreating the exciting, noisy, visually arresting classic cabinets you once found in arcades. "I always saw them as more than just a game, with their unique shapes, art, sounds and lights acting together to lure money from your pocket," explains Matt Precious, managing partner at Quarter Arcades creators Numskull Designs. "I was disappointed you couldn't purchase models of these machines during a time when physical items like LPs were booming in an increasingly sterile world of digital downloads."

Quarter Arcades was subsequently born as a project "trying to capture a piece of gaming history" in quarter-scale cabinets. The machines are in exact scale, including the controls, and play the original arcade ROMs. But look closer and there's an obsessive level of detail: the rough texture of the control panel art; mimicking an original cab's acoustics by careful speaker positioning; recreating the Space Invaders 'Pepper's ghost' illusion effect where graphics 'float' above an illuminated backdrop -- all realised by dismantling and reverse-engineering original cabs.

Scale?

[WankerWeasel]

It'd be nice if even one of the photos gave some idea of the scale. They're sitting on a table on one but it still doesn't give a good indication of just how small.

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[Mattcelt]

I was lamenting this very thing.

TFA mentions that they're 1:4 scale. That gives a slight mental idea, but would it really have been that difficult to put them into visual perspective?

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[Mr. Sketch]

Their website has some pictures for scale:

http://www.numskull.com/quarte... [numskull.com]

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[No Longer an AC]

$129 (for the Galaga or Galaxian at least) at Walmart, $149 at GameStop and $199 at Staples?

I've got the Arcade1Up version of Galaga, 6 inch (total height, not screen size) versions of Galaga and Galaxan and two 3 inch of each (with little keychains on the back). I pre-ordered a credit card sized Galaxian in August which they said was "estimated to arrive in August", but now it says "estimated to arrive in December".

The small ones (that I have) are novelties that are true enough to gameplay, but they aren'

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[DarkLordBelial]

I agree - very annoying. Does this help?

http://www.numskull.com/wp-con... [numskull.com]

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[Strider-]

Needs a banana.

Too bad about the screen resolution

[kriston]

It's too bad the screen resolution doesn't match the graphics mode on most of these games. I get it, it's hard to find existing cell phone displays that fit pixel-per-pixel, but when you completely skip every fourth scanline it really takes away from the experience.

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[Rockoon]

Sounds like there is no GPU at all, otherwise they would surely have a hardware scaling bilinear filter that would have actually cost performance to disable (so sayeth nvidia and amd)

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[kriston]

They seem to use the common GPUs that are co-packaged with ARM CPUs, like Mali.

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[DontBeAMoran]

The following was posted by Drnick on forums.arcadecontrols.com:

"Here is a CSV file with all resolutions listed. of the 8000 + games that it listed (I didn't remove clones or anything, unless it didn't have any resolution info).

702 Horizontal games @ 256 x 224
770 Horizontal games @ 320 x 224
550 Horizontal games @ 384 x 232
540 Horizontal games @ 640 x 480

Vertical games (of which it lists about 2000)
610 Vertical games @ 224 x 256."

So, using his list, those who build tiny arcade cabinets could at least find s

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[kriston]

I have lots of mini games. I don't think they are anywhere close to these resolutions, which is sad. I'm not saying that the subject of this article also uses these crappy screen resolutions but I've yet to see one that uses the correct one.

Ironically, the mass-produced mini cabinets that I do have use anti-aliasing which is OK but not great.

At least they're not sacrificing Apple 1s

[smooth wombat]

While this is all very interesting, at least these folks aren't sacrificing one of the few remaining Apple 1 motherboards and turning it into ugly cell phones [gizmodo.com].

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[webmistressrachel]

Miniature CRT's and tiny flyback transformers are the only way to go! Now we just to convince Sony to fire up the Trinitron plant again and we're rolling (fat chance). Also, CRT's contained lead.

I loved my 1600x1200@85Hz Trinitrons, but they guzzled more power than the GPU(s), and now I have four OLED tablets and two OLED phones

To make this better, they could build a custom resolution (or just standard and use the center) OLED display, similar to PS Vita, and show the scanlines with perfectly dark pixels on

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[thegreatbob]

I don't think my old CPD-520GST (ca. 1995) would do 1600x1200@85... 72 maybe. Also 1920x1440@ ~60, and still mostly readable. But it would do 640x480@(some number well above 200Hz)

Obsessive

[JBMcB]

I was only vaguely aware of the obsessiveness of mini arcade makes until I saw Lazy Game Review's unboxing of the Dragon's Lair mini arcade. It's a fully functioning Dragon's Lair arcade game cabinet that's roughly 12" tall. A hatch opens in the back, as it did with the original arcade machine, and a pretty accurate reproduction of the original Pioneer laserdisc player can be removed from it. It also has a tiny recreation of the Laserdisc, with sleeve, you can load into the mini laserdisc player, close it up, and slide it into the back of the arcade. It also has tiny quarters you can feed into the front. Madness.

And I thought the plexiglass arduino-powered mini-arcade I bought a few years ago was snazzy.

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[istartedi]

That game was $0.50 in our arcade. I never played it, just stood around with other people and watched a bit. It didn't seem like it had that many scenes. It seemed like a very limited game based purely in timing to get the right track to play, and yet it was insanely popular.

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[kackle]

It was a wild concept at the time. No, it wasn't anywhere near the fast pace of any other arcade games of the era, but I found it very interesting: It had a movie frame rate and resolution back in an blocky, 8-bit, 16-color world.

I got lucky one day and watched a master beat the game. It had lots and lots of scenes (and you had to beat each scene twice, with the second time being a flipped, mirror image of the first), but admittedly each scene goes by quickly so it doesn't seem like much overall. Lat

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[kriston]

These LaserDisc games were classic quarter eaters. The whole idea is that you had to discover the moves and practice them. The only way to do that was to feed more quarters into the system.

They were hugely successful. I fondly remember playing the Dragon's Lair and Space Ace series, along with Cobra Command and Star Rider, though Star Rider was more of a real video game overlaid on a LaserDisc video background.

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[istartedi]

Was Star Rider or Cobra Command the one where you flew a fighter over realistic terrain and shot stuff? The "overlay" technique was much more playable than the on/off cut-scene effects in Dragon's Lair. When you mentioned that, I vaguely recollected putting $0.50 in to play something where you had a fighter that was flying over highly realistic terrain. It was desert landscape. It was still a quarter-eater and I never got very far in that game, but it seemed more playable. Frankly, Dragon's Lair looked

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[kriston]

Star Rider was an actual racing game. The background, aside from the borders of the raceway, was incidental. It was a true video game.

Cobra Command was in the Dragon's Lair style of memorizing moves after paying your quarters.

Do you remember the old TV shows featuring blind gamers winning Dragon's Lair and Space Ace like Tommy the Pinball Wizard?

Amstrad CPC6128

[Frederic54]

I spent a lot of nights for a couple of years on mine... playing of course, but also learnt assembly then cracking/hacking games, used CP/M and dBaseII, TurboPascal, etc

Me too buddy

[AndyKron]

Don't you just hate websites that popup some crap that prevents you from viewing until you agree to some bullshit? Me too.

I wouldn't mind a tiny Space War arcade cabinet

[OrangeTide]

Maybe use something miniscule like an ATtiny10 [adafruit.com], although limited I/O pins might make it difficult to drive a vector CRT and gather inputs. More reasonable would be an Arduino Nano, as it has enough horsepower to generate video and run an emulator [hackaday.io].

Sadly I don't know what the CPU is like on the Space War (and Star Castle) cabinet, but I suspect a modern microcontroller is an order of magnitude faster. You'd really have to love that game to go to the effort of shrinking it down into a dedicated piece of hardwa

Pretty cool

[Trailer Trash]

From their web site:

"Made with real premium quality wood and metal materials"

I found that funny. I used to buy and sell arcade games in the 90s, and I can tell you that the cabinets were anything but "premium quality wood". They were cheap fiberboard that anyone with a screwdriver could break in to. Out of a dozen or so games that I owned, maybe one or two came with a key. I never even asked when I bought one because it was so rare.

Cracking them was easy, though. The back was held on by a simple cabinet

Bah.

[antdude]

I still have my mini arcade Frogger game from the rad 80s. For the new ones, I want ALL my favorite games in a single device. MAME!