We have a tradition with close friends that we call fifth saturday. When a month has a fifth saturday (which only happens 3 or 4 times a year), we take a break from life and have a get together. That means party time down in the arcade. Games, food, drinks, music and karaoke. Enjoy the photos!

This has gotten ridiculous. I came down into the arcade to play some games, and I had an unwelcome visitor just sitting there. To all friends and family, please call ahead before stopping by. Thank you!

It's a new year, which means time to clean house in the arcade. Recently I picked up a free non-working Legend of Kage arcade game. Conversion cabs just aren't my thing so I got it working, fixed up nice, then sold. My Virtual Boy (Nintendo's attempt at 3D goggles) has been collecting dust for years. Time to pass it along so it has also been sold. Finally, the Speed Racer slot machine. Now I'm a big Speed Racer fan but it hasn't been played during the last several parties including the New Years party. Because of that, it has now been sold. Time for a new purchase!

My home, my arcade, my rules. With all the covid and social distancing of 2020, there was no better way to bring in the new year than to spend it in the Vintage Vault Arcade. Even with an ice storm rolling through at midnight, we still got to usher in 2021 with a select group of friends and family. Enjoy the photos!

A Saturday evening. My son just got home from college for winter break, and I just got home from a day of Christmas shopping. I sat down and started to browse Facebook Marketplace for arcade games. Now the first ad I see, Arcade Game $123. At this point I'm thinking this person is taking "offers", which means they are turning Facebook Marketplace into an auction. Still, I clicked the link and begin to read the description. .... Game recently stopped working ... Free!
I do a double-take. The ad was only 4 minutes old and the game was close, just 20 minutes away from me. I sent a message, "I can come pick this up right now". I receive a reply, "It is all yours".
With that, I head out the door with my son, an SUV and a dolly. We get to the address and the game was already waiting for us at the end of the driveway, an easy grab and go. I get the game home and wait until the next day to dive into it as it was already late. Now the first thing I noticed in the ad was this is an original Defender cab as noted from its shape, the bezel and original silver 3 coin slot door. Nice. Williams cabinets are very collectible. I decided to look this game up, and it was a conversion kit game from Taito, released in 1985. The golden age of video games was 1980-1984, so the operater must've installed this in 1985 as soon as Defender stopped earning for him.

I opened up the cabinet and the switching power supply was flopping around in the bottom of the cabinet. I plug in the game and it was playing blind. This means you can hear the game play but not see it, so the monitor is bad. I secured the switching power supply and noticed the games power switch didn't work. It would only turn off and on by plugging and unplugging the game's AC power cord. Careful inspection showed that some tech really screwed up the internal AC wiring, so the next thing I did was rewire the cabinet to use the original power switch again. At this point I also noticed a strange board covering up the upper vent holes. Why? I don't know. It was nailed in with 10 nails so I went ahead and remove the board and repair the vent hole screen cover. Now I see the pattern. Some weird tech nailed a board over the air vents which releases the hot air from the monitor. Over time this must've fried the monitor. Now we're getting somewhere. Finally I wired in a spare monitor I had. Success! A working arcade game, The Legend of Kage!

The Vintage Vault Arcade was featured at starting point 8:21 on JoBlo Collector's Corner on Youtube. Enjoy!

Straight from the Vintage Vault Arcade, a new walkthru!   Love doing work Zoom calls from the bar.

The Vintage Vault Arcade is often used for entertaining, and last weekend was no exception. We had a kids birthday party scheduled, so as custom I started to go around and power up the arcade before everyone showed up. This particular weekend also happened to be an extreme temperature change, from very warm outside to near 40 degrees, very cold. I've found over the years that extreme weather changes are hard on these 40 year old arcade machines. The metal contacts will expand or contract depending on temperatue, and an extreme change can cause poor connectivity on monitors and arcade PCB boards. This weekend proved what I feared would happen. The sounds on the Donkey Kong Junior started going crazy upon power up and during the birthday party the Revolution X went black screen.

I can't stand games being down, so I pulled the Donkey Kong Junior PCB board during the party. My assumption was that the weather change caused bad contacts with the sound address chips causing random sounds. I pulled every socketed IC and reseated. I pulled the boards interconnect cables and sprayed them with De-Oxit (helps bad contacts). I also sprayed all connector sockets with De-Oxit. Finally, I put the board back in the game during the birthday party, and powered the machine back on. Perfection! No random sounds, no bad sounds. I even played a few games for good measure, all was well. The next day I focused my attention to the Revolution X, hoping the monitor didn't go nuclear. First thing I did was throw my trusty voltmeter on the game board, and it was reading 4.5V. Well, that'll do it. Most electronic circuits of this era need 5V to run. The power supply must have been slowly drifting lower with time until the game couldn't run anymore. I adjusted the power supply back up to 5V and the game powered right up! Can't beat that, 2 repairs... cost free! The Vintage Vault Arcade is now back to 100% again!

Absolutely the number one comment I get on my arcade, whether its from one of my online videos or in-person, is that I must have an outrageous electric bill. I don't leave these games on 24/7. I mean why would I if there isn't anyone in the arcade?

In my recent Totally Game episode I mentioned that it costs $8 a day in electric for a gameday. Mr. Greg Marquis commented on my video that this figure was impossible. In this blog posting I will explain how I came up with that calcuation. Get ready to do some math, this is going to be fun.

For an electrical circuit, there are 3 main units of measurement, voltage, amps and watts. Watts is simply voltage multiplied by amps. We know house voltage is 120 volts, so now we need to know how many amps the arcade is using. I use a Kill-A-Watt meter on all my games to determine amp usage. From my Kill-A-Watt meter I know my arcade draws about 80 amps when everything is turned on. Multiply 120V by 80A and you get 9600W or 9.6kW (9.6 kilowatts). A typical gameday for me is 8 hours long, so you multiply 9.6kW by 8hours and you get 76.8kWh (76.8 kilowatt hours). Finally, my AmerenUE electric usage rate is around 10 cents ($0.10) per kWh. Multiply 76.8kWh by $0.10 and you get $7.68. As I mentioned on the Totally Game episode a gameday costs me around $8 for the entire day. Now lets go to the screenshot image above. Here I have an actual 3 day use chart from my electric company. I had a Back To School gameday on Aug. 15 for the kids. As you can see, the kWh use jumped up from 68kWh to 137kWh. Subtract the two, 137kWh - 68kWh = 69kWh. Multiple that by ($0.10) per kWH and my Back to School gameday cost $6.90 (games were on for about 7 hours). OK Greg Marquis, any other questions? Seriously though, you don't have to be rich to run an arcade. You just have to know how to fix them! Now THAT is another blog article entirely.

I was approached by Truly / BarcroftTV out of the UK to do a video for their new series, Totally Game. This features the Vintage Vault Arcade (my home basement arcade or course!). I shot the video and did the interviews during COVID lockdown. They put out the video on Facebook which now has over 810,000 views and counting. I'm still waiting for them to put out the HD widescreen Youtube edit (which I will update once its out) but in the meantime you can view the Facebook social media edit even if you don't have an account. Click the image or link below to view the video.

Straight from the Vintage Vault Arcade, a review & gameplay on another one of my favorite games, Paperboy!