Hello, and welcome back to The 8-Bit Guy. This is going to be a fun little episode today. It’s going to be about these little mini
table top arcades. Now, believe it or not, I actually did not
know these existed. Somehow they just passed me right on by. It wasn’t until about a year ago when I
was visiting the national video game museum here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and they
had one of the Ms.Pacman units out on display and you know you could actually walk up and
play it. And so that was the first time I’ve actually
seen on of these. And, I’ve got three of them here. The first one was donated to me almost a year
ago by one of my fans. And it works but it’s got some problems
and I’m going to see if I can fix it. And then I picked this guy up at a local gaming
convention and it works but it needs some serious restoration work. So, I’m going to try to do that. And then I bought this one on eBay and it
actually seems to work fine, there’s nothing wrong with it so I’ll just show you that
one. And then, I’m going to show you some of
the newer models that they sell these days. And we’ll see how they compare ti the older
models from the 80s. So, let’s dig in! So, let’s take a closer look at this Coleco
Pac-Man game. All of these older units require 4 C-cell
batteries. That’s because their vacuum fluorescent
screens are quite the energy hog. So, one of the problems this unit has is that
sometimes it just won’t turn on. When it does turn on, the screen has some
issues. When you power the game on, you can select
4 different modes, including two different styles of playing, along with a 2 player mode,
and if you press the joystick down, it goes into demo mode. One thing you might notice when looking at
this is there is a lot of ghosting on the screen, no pun intended. If you look at the bottom row, especially,
you’ll see faint images of things that aren’t supposed to be there, and they tend to follow
what's going on with the rest of the screen. Even though I’ve never worked on a VFD screen,
my first guess is a capacitor problem based on similar issues with LCD and LED screens
I’ve worked on. The second thing you might notice is that
the scoreboard is missing. It’s totally not lit up at all, but it should
be at the top of the screen. Well, I guess it’s time to take this thing
apart. There are just a few screws on the bottom
to remove, and it comes apart easily. Wow, that is really weird looking. I guess that’s the speaker, but I’ve never
seen one like that before. I’m going to try to twist it to see if it
will come out. Wow, look at that. It’s actually just a tiny piezo speaker,
but they are using the cone to amplify its sound. I’ve never seen anything like that before. Well, I guess I’m going to have to desolder
these wires if I plan to work on it any further. But I think I can already see the source of
the problem with this thing, check out all of that corrosion. I suspect this leaked from the battery, but
I think the unit would have had to have been stored upside down for that to happen. Anyway, let’s get these wires desoldered. OK, so there are just 3 screws holding down
the logic board, so I’ll take those out and then we’ll see how the screen is hooked
up. Interesting, the screen is actually mounted
right on the board. I wasn’t expecting that, but I guess it
makes sense. Without the dark filter covering the screen,
you can see all of the possible positions of the characters on the screen. It appears to be covered with a red color
filter on the bottom part as well. You can clearly see the scoreboard readout
on the top, so we need to get that working. The screen on this thing is a vacuum fluorescent
display, and it works very similar to the screen here in this speak and spell, except
the different segments that can light up are not used to create numbers and letters. If all of the segments were lit up at once,
it would look like this. The ghosts actually contain a little mini
pac man and a pellet. When the power pellets are eaten and the ghosts
run, they can’t turn blue like in the original game. So instead, they turn hollow, like this. You might wonder why they used this sort of
screen. Well, at the time the only other choices would
have been a CRT, which would have been very long and would likely not have fit in the
machine. They might have been able to use a clever
CRT design like these old Sony watchmans, which use an inventive design to show the
image out the side of the CRT instead. But keep in mind these units sold for around
$60 back in the 1980s. And even if they’d managed to fit a CRT
display in here, they would have also needed to include a video graphics chip and a whole
slew of other components to drive that CRT, which would have driven the cost up by an
order of magnitude. Now, in theory they could have also used LCD
screens but at that time, LCDs were primarily just reflective in nature so they were not
backlit. And so, you wouldn’t have been able to use
this hood design with the arcade, pretty much changing the entire appearance of how the
arcade would look. Anyway, so back to repairing this. I decided to try alcohol on the corrosion
for my first attempt to clean it. I scrubbed and scrubbed and while I did see
some improvement, it wasn’t much. Next I tried some of this deoxit. I tried several times, including scrubbing
that around on there. So my efforts so far have been mildly successful. My next attempt was baking soda. I’ve had good luck with this in the past
for removing corrosion from copper or silver. Well, I’ve managed to remove most of the
build up, but these traces still look terrible. And to make matters worse, I found another
spot of corrosion over here I’ll need to work on. One thing I was curious about was how many
of these traces still have continuity and how many I’m going to have to patch with
wires. To my surprise, I actually couldn’t find
a single trace that was broken. And I mean that’s really surprising considering
how these traces look. So, I decided to reconnect the battery compartment
so I could do some further testing. One thing I noticed right away is that the
ghosting was gone. I think the corrosion was actually conducting
some power between traces. Of course, it’s hard to tell 100% since
I don’t have the dark filter over the screen right now. The scoreboard is still not working, though. So, I went back to continuity testing, I was
sure there must be a trace that is bad somewhere. However, I still couldn’t find any problem. I was really mystified as to what could be
wrong. To make matters worse, I was unable to locate
a schematic diagram for this board. So I decided to make my own. I started with the screen. I created a little graphic to represent the
pins on the screen and started poking around with my meter to figure out where they went. I found the ground pretty quickly. Actually I found two of them. I figured I’d just write enough stuff down. My plan was once I figured out what all of
the pins did on the screen, I could try to use a wire to manually light up the scoreboard
segment and verify that those segments work, and then trace those wires back to the chip
and see if there were any problems along the way. Fortunately, some of the pins in the screen
I could actually see if I held it at the right angle. I had determined the screen was setup like
a matrix with each row having a pin, while some of the other pins were vertical controls. The CPU cycles through these very quickly
to create a persistence of vision so that it looks solid to our eyes, much like a CRT
works. And it turns out I’m a bonehead in this
case. Watch this. I’ve been playing the game in demo mode. But I discovered by accident that if I start
the game in actual game mode, the score board lights up just fine. So it turns out the game was doing exactly
what it was designed to do. So, that being the case, I decided to just
put it back together. It did need a little cleaning, but nothing
severe. So let’s test it again. Notice this weird flicker pattern. You can’t see this with your eyes, this
is my camera being just slightly out of sync with the matrix refresh. I’m going to turn the light out in the room,
which will cause the camera to increase it’s exposure time, yep and sure enough it looks
fine now. You can still see a faint hint of the refresh. So, playing the game I can see that the scoreboard
is definitely working fine. I can also see that the ghosting effect that
was present at the bottom is now gone. Removing that corrosion must have been all
that was needed. So, I think I can do without this schematic. Let’s focus on this Donkey Kong unit now. One problem is this yucky stuff on the side
here. Not sure what that is. The other problem is the decals. They are faded and peeling off. Some of these are just hanging on by a thread. In fact I’m going to go ahead and pull this
one off right now. I think I can make use of the experience I
gained relabeling some of my cartridge games. The way I’m going to do this is first to
put the existing decal in my scanner and get a color scan of it. So this gives me a base outline to work with. But if you look at the image up close, it’s
grainy and just not a very clean drawing. What I do next is use the fill tool and just
fill all of the colored areas with white. What the goal is here is to turn this into
essentially into black and white line drawing. People ask what program I use. Well, this is a nearly 20-year old copy of
Paint Shop Pro. I’ve been using this software for just about
20 years and I’m really good with it, and it does everything I need. It still works fine on modern versions of
Windows. So, I’ve just not had any incentive to learn
to use a more modern paint program. OK, once I have all of the areas turned white,
I reduce the image down to a 2-color monochrome image like this. Here’s where most of the work actually begins. I have to go over and around every line and
clean up all of the stray pixels by hand. This process can take anywhere from 30 minutes
to an hour. I want these lines to look really nice and
neat. Once I’m done with that, I convert it to
a 16 color image and start filling in colors and I try to match the original label as closely
as possible. I’ve also decided to add a little something
here in the bottom. A lot of people had an aneurism when they
saw I re-created labels for my cartridges. So, on this one I’m going to add some fine
text at the bottom that says it is a reproduction label. I doubt anyone will notice this text unless
they are outright looking for it, so I don’t think it will degrade the appearance of my
game. All right, next thing to do is print it out
on my laser printer. Now I’m going to laminate it. I used packing tape on my cartridges but these
labels are too big. Regular laminations won’t really work for
this, but these here are self-stick sheets. So the sheets are essentially like a huge
piece of packing tape. This is actually my first time to try these,
so I’m as curious as anyone as to how they will work. I don’t really need the whole sheet, so
I’ll cut it in half. Well, here we go. Let’s see how this works. Hmm.. Well, I think that’s going to work out just
fine. Time to cut it out with some scissors! I suppose I should do a little test fit here,
and, I think it’s going to fit just fine. Of course, I’ll need to clean off all of
old adhesive residue first. WD-40 is my go-to product for that. I’ll just kind of rub that around and make
sure the whole side is coated, and I’ll let that sit for a few minutes. OK, then I’ll come back and wipe that off. I always use windex to remove any residual
WD-40 from the surface. And here’s the result, it is clean and ready
for a new decal! I guess I’d better remove the rest of these
decals as well. And I used the same techniques to re-create
these decals, I just scanned them and cleaned them up right next to each other. All right, so I’ve got all of the decals
removed except the one around the controls, as that one seems fine. However, I do need to turn my attention to
whatever this stuff is. I’m going to try some alcohol on it first. Well, after scrubbing for several minutes,
I think it did round about nothing. So I’ll try some WD-40 and see if that will
soften it up some. OK… I let that sit for about an hour, so let’s
see what it did. And apparently nothing. Unforuntaely, despite my best efforts, I got
WD-40 under this decal. And so now it’s coming off, so I guess I’d
better go ahead and re-create that one as well. All right, so after another hour of work,
here’s the result, and you can compare it to the original. I’ll go ahead and laminate this one too. Now, I can cut the main decal out with scissors,
but one thing that concerns me is that I have to cut round holes out of this, which is going
to be a challenge! I’ll come back to that in a minute, but
for the moment I want to tackle this gunk some more. I decided to try baking soda next. And after another 20 minutes of scrubbing
it had no effect. I also tried a variety of other chemicals
behind the scenes, including a magic eraser. Nothing worked. So I’ve given up on a chemical solution
at this point, and I’m going to use a knife to mechanically remove this stuff. This wasn’t my first choice. I know it will affect the texture of the plastic. But at this point anything will look better. Now, I’ve done this sort of thing before
with epoxy from metal asset tags and things like that. The key is to try to scrape as little away
as possible and by holding the knife like this, I can avoid any deep scratches. I was surprised how stubborn this stuff was
even with the knife. At first I thought this was some sort of glue
or epoxy that had been spilled on here. But one thing I began to realize is that even
after scraping away many layers of plastic, the discoloration remained. So, at this point, I don’t have any idea
what was spilled on here, but whatever it was affected the plastic deep down. I worked on this for a while and never got
it perfect, but it is certainly better. Let me clean up the adhesive residue on here
right quick. And then take a look. Like I said, it’s not perfect. But it looks better. Now it’s time to tackle these holes. I’m going to use an razor knife and a cutting
board and try to slowly and carefully cut the hole out. This is very delicate because if I cut to
little, it won’t fit correctly. If I cut too much, the label is ruined and
I’ll have to start all over again. So in cases like this it is better to take
your time and go slowly. OK, so here’s what we’ve got so far. Let’s get the last one. All right. So, there we have it. I guess I’d better try a test fit on the
game. OK, it seems to fit fine. All right, so the next thing I need to do
is take these labels that I’ve created and then use this spray adhesive and spray it
on the plastic and then stick the labels on there. Now, when I did the cartridge restoration
video a while back where I relabelled a lot of people were asking, you know, why didn’t
I use the spray and spray it on the label and then put the label on the plastic. They thought that would make a lot more sense. Well, it might. And I actually might try that here in a little
bit. But there’s too problems that could create. One problem is if you spray this stuff on,
it’s kind of liquid when it comes out of the spray bottle. And so, if you get the liquid on here it will
seep through the paper and it will show up on the other side underneath the laminate. And so, I don’t want that because once you
see that, the label is pretty much ruined. It’s possible if I try to do a lighter spray
from a further distance, then maybe I’ll be able to do that. The second problem is once you’ve coated
this in adhesive, there’s really not any way to pick it up. You know, because when you pick it up, you’ve
got to touch both sides of it. This thing is too flimsy to be able to really
pick it up and work with it like this. And you know, I really don’t want to touch
the other side when it is sticky because I’m going to make the adhesive uneven and possibly
mess it up. Not to mention I don’t want the stuff on
my fingers. So, I’m going to experiment here with some
different ways of doing this. Because this one would be considerably more
challenging to mask off than previous ones. But I think I can do it. So, we’ll see! OK, so this is a test-piece I made earlier,
and I just used packing tape on it, mostly to check for shape and color. Anyway, I won’t be using this, so I’m
going to test the spray adhesive on it. Hopefully if I hold the can further away and
use a lighter coat, maybe it won’t bleed through. OK, well, so far so good. I think this may work. All right, so here goes nothing, I’m going
to try putting on this piece here first. First the spray. This stuff also needs about 15 seconds to
dry up just a bit before applying it. OK, so here goes. OK, so far so good. I’m using the back of my fingers to rub
this on because I got the glue on my fingertips and I don’t want to spread that around the
top. And here’s the finished product. I’m really pleased with the outcome of the
new decals. I just wish I could have cleaned that gunk
off a little better. So now I suppose I should show you the game
itself. Again, this flickering is only visible on
camera. I feel like this game is somewhat easier to
play than the Pacman game for some reason. Anyway, there you have it. And, I also promised to show you this Frogger
game, which is in great shape already. This is actually my favorite of the 3 I have,
mostly because the gameplay seems to feel more like the actual arcade. I think it’s probably just because the way
the game works, it was easier to design a system like this around it. Interestingly enough, this game looks quite
a bit better in person. The camera actually picks up all of the segments
that are not lit, even though in person they are very hard to see. Not sure why that is, exactly. I suspect it has something to do with the
filter used and the specific frequencies of light. So, just take my word for it, that in person
there is no flicker and you can’t see the non-lit segments! OK, so I also promised to show you these more
modern mini arcades. I picked up quite a few of these. So what I want to do first, is since we’ve
seen the original pacman, I’m going to look at these two different versions of pacman
that are available today. Both of these are brand-new and never been
opened. OK, this first one here is the cheaper of
the two. I think I picked this up at Toys R’ Us for
like $15. Unfortunately, you have to destroy the package
to get the game out. All right, so here it is. This thing is almost too small to play it
like a tabletop arcade. You need to pull this tag out so that it will
stop operating in demo mode. So, let’s turn it on. Well, the music and sound effects sound like
the original arcade, rather than the old tabletop version. The screen is clearly a reflective LCD, but
I have to admit it is a lot more playable than the original Coleco version. And I think the reason has less to do with
the screen type, and more to do with how they’ve arranged the segments. You see, the little pac man character is large
and centered in within the lines. The way they did the older one, he was very
small and off center, which was annoying. So. Bottom line is, this is more playable than
the original, but it feels cheap and doesn’t seem nearly as collectible. So let’s move on to the boxed version. I think this one cost me more like $40, but
it was advertised as having a color screen. So I’m curious to see how it is different. At least I don’t have to destroy the box
on this one. However, this is interesting. Apparently you have to pull the tape off of
these things, and then rotate them to release the game from the box. It also has this same little pull tab in the
back. And here it is. This one is pretty cool looking, I could see
having this on a shelf as a decoration or something. So, let’s try it out. There’s a little bit of a flicker here on
camera, again not visible in person. I like the colors. It actually makes it a lot easier on the eyes
to be able to tell the difference between the walls, the pellets, the ghosts, etc. I’m not sure what sort of screen technology
this is. At first I was tempted to say it was backlit
LCD. But it could also be some form of LED. Either way, it does look a lot better than
the original mini-arcade, but yet still has that nostalgic feel because it is still using
a segmented display. So, yeah, I think this one is pretty cool. I wanted to open the battery compartment and
see what is in there. OK, looks like it uses regular alkaline batteries. So you might want to remove these if you plan
on storing these as a collectible, otherwise they’ll wind up leaking all over the place. And the good news is, you can put it back
in the box if you want and it will still look brand new! Let’s move on to the space invaders. This is also of the cheap variety and I think
I paid $15 for this one too. So, yeah, I’ll have to rip the box open. All right, so it uses a segmented display,
but it actually works really well. The game seems very playable, yet definitely
has that retro feel to it. The sound effects are more reminiscent of
the original arcade, though. OK, back to these boxed versions, this is
asteroids. So, this is a nice looking little arcade. Let’s try it out. OK, so this appears to be a backlit segmented
LCD of some sort. And yes, you can see all of the segments even
with the naked eye. Your ship seems confined to the center of
the screen, and can rotate around in a circle. The asteroids themselves look fine. But, after playing this for a while, I just
do not feel the game is very playable. Or maybe it just doesn’t feel like asteroids
because of the weird motion of the ship. Sure, staying in the center of the screen
has always been a winning move in asteroids, but when you turned your ship, it didn’t
spin around a circle like this. So yeah, I’m not impressed with this one,
also the screen contrast is bad, probably the worst of all of them I’ve tried so far. Moving on to Q*Bert. I’m going to be very interested to see how
the accomplished the screen on this one. So here it is, very cute design. Let’s power it on. What the? This is a full dot matrix display. I don’t know whether to be impressed or
call them out as cheaters. Well, this version of the game seems very
playable. In fact, the resemblance to the Nintendo version
of this game is uncanny. That makes me wonder if this is using one
of those Nintendo-on-a-chip designs. The joystick is properly designed for Q*Bert
since it moves diagonally like it should. Well, lets move on and have a look at frogger. If you remember, this was my favorite of the
3 original Coleco mini arcades I had because it felt like the most playable. Let’s see how the new one stacks up. Well, what do you know. It uses a full dot-matrix display as well. And the game seems to play very well. The interesting thing is, it has a nostalgic
feel, but it feels more like the original arcade than the mini-arcade. Not that that’s a problem, but just unexpected. OK, the last game we’re going to look at
today is Centipede. At this point I’m half expecting it to be
a dot-matrix display as well. And, indeed it is! OK, so nothing I can really complain about
on the display or the gameplay. But I wanted to take one of these dot matrix
games apart and see what’s inside. Interesting. It’s more or less one giant epoxy blob,
and I guess the screen is on the other side. But looking at this little board, a couple
of things stood out to me. The first thing that caught my eye was this
little chart that says Centipede and Q*Bert on it. It mentions R4 and J1. Could this mean that both games are on this
same board? I didn’t feel like desoldering the resistor. But I thought I’d just try shorting J1 with
a screwdriver and see what happens when I power on the game. And sure enough… my centipede game has now become Q*bert. I was curious if I could play it being that
the joystick is not oriented correctly for Q*bert. And it turns out I can, but it isn’t nearly
as easy to play. Let's reset the game, and see what happens. OK, it reverts back to centipede. Looking at this board I see a ton of little
exposed solder pads. And I have to wonder what these are for. My guess is there are other features just
waiting to be hacked, and I wouldn’t even be surprised if there is a re-programmable
flash memory that you can access, and possibly put your own games on here. Yeah, so I would not be surprised if one of
you guys have already done some hacking around on one of these. So, if you’ve figured out what those extra
solder pads do, then send me a private message and I’ll investigate it and maybe I’ll
do a follow up video to this in the future. Other than that, I hope you enjoyed seeing
all of these mini arcades from both the past and the present. And also, my camera died around half way through
the middle of filming this episode. I had to send it off to Panasonic for repair,
so I used a different camera for the second half. So, if you’re wondering why maybe things
look a little different, that’s why. Anyway, I’ve got a lot of great content
coming up, so stick around and thanks for watching!
