The Memorial Day weekend is usually a bit slow as many people are out and about as opposed to reading blogs but regardless, we’ve got news. We hope you have a safe holiday weekend and if you are travelling, keep an eye out for some arcades to play.
Color DMD Updates: The Who’s Tommy Pinball; Apollo 13 & The Sopranos – ColorDMD has stayed busy on producing new colorization updates for old pinball machines. Now if you have The Who, Apollo 13 or The Sopranos, you can give your machine new life on the display.
Video hasn’t been released for The Sopranos yet so here is the announcement via Facebook:
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New arcade game in the works from the creators of Killer Queen Arcade – As this tweet shows…
New arcade prototype for @bumblebeargames with @nmikros pic.twitter.com/PVyQJkQk1S
— Joshua DeBonis (@joshdebonis) May 27, 2016
TMNT Arcade Action Figures Coming To SDCC – Comic Cons are big business these days and one of the aspects that vendors have long used to bring people into the doors are exclusives. It was announced this week that NECA Toys would have an interesting exclusive that relates to arcades – action figures based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade game that Konami released in 1989. From the reactions on Twitter, not everyone was happy about that but you can never please everyone on social media. You can read more about the toys here; I think the packaging is excellent with the arcade control panel there.
Electromechanical Pong – Atari’s Pong started a revolution that completely changed an industry based on electromechanical games into the video arcade. As a result, the EM games fell to the wayside and now it is rare to see something new for our sector of the business. So it is somewhat amusing to see Pong turned into a fully functional EM game. It is very similiar in idea to Sega’s 1968 EM release of Motorpolo, at least in the basic underlying technology. The only thing I wonder about is why they modded hard drives to become spinner controllers when that tech is out there…well that and whether or not the current litigious Atari will sue them if this goes big (unfortunately, the current owners have a track record of doing such things to shut down innovative developments). Now if that doesn’t happen and they manage to build these and sell them, I imagine that the mom-and-pop/bar+arcade market would be interested in it – that or a Quadrapong version like they show in the concepts portion of this video:
Sprint 2 Reverse Engineered, Provides Insights Into Early AI Development: Speaking of Atari, Hackaday.com has an article+video that gets into how reverse engineering a 70s arcade game can provide unique insight into AI (Sprint 2 is branded as Kee Games but they were Atari, just setup under a different name to deal with distribution issues).
Atari 7800 Toki port Coming Soon As a Cart – It’s been a while but you might recall that a while back, a prototype was discovered of an official port of Fabtek’s 1989 arcade release TOKI to the Atari 7800 console. It has taken some work but an NTSC build has been created so soon users that like to collect for retro consoles will be able to grab this one on a cartridge. This video shows the game in action – the 7800 could use additional chips on the carts although this did not go in that direction (like 98% of the 7800 library)…which is too bad since it could have used a better sound chip to improve that piece of the game.
Just for fun – Thanks to venumspyder for sending this our way, just something for a laugh:
Flyer of the Week – Puppy Pong: Since this post has been heavy on the Atari items, let’s look back at an Atari flyer. The Puppy Pong/Dr. Pong games were designed to take advantage of waiting room spaces. You don’t generally see arcade games marketed towards venues like a dentist or doctor’s office these days although I’ve heard of such places still investing into arcade machines for their waiting spaces. Puppy Pong actually started out as Snoopy Pong but due to licensing, the latter never made it into production. Full flyer found at ArcadeFlyers.com
Name That Game #85 – Last week had a couple of console-to-arcade ports on it, one in particular received several different versions as everyone wanted a piece of Boulder Dash back in ’84/’85.
#1 – Boulder Dash DECO Version by Data East
#3 – Vertexer by Taito
For this week:
For the name the game The first is Fighting Layer. Can’t name the other two.