Unearthed my 1993/1994 Atari 130XE Custom Arcade Cabinet Concept Art

[jasonbar]

Spring Cleaning unearthed my old sketchbook from high school/college/early corporate career.

I lived in Boston from 1993-1994. That's when I discovered rgvac & rgvam & got my first arcade cabinet (a boring generic JAMMA with Blockout--I even remember fixing the button on one of the button-top joysticks by using a rubber foot from my cable box to replace a missing part on the bottom of the stick).

Around that time, I got the idea of making or converting an arcade cabinet to house my Atari 130XE computer, joysticks, cartridges, disks, etc. I still had the 13" color TV that we bought in the early 1980s with our first home computer, an Atari 800. (We later upgraded to a 130XE with a 192kb memory mod.) I decased the TV & made lots of measurements of the key TV & computer components. Unfortunately, one dark night in my Boston apartment, I stumbled over the exposed TV tube & snapped off the neck board & broke the thin glass tube back glass. Rats! So much for that project...


Anyway, on to the sketchbook. I'd forgotten that I had started dabbling in cabinet art for it:

Marquee: riding the Fuji rocket with handfuls of controllers flailing in the breeze.

Left: taming the joystick-pulled Fuji wagon, disk box in hand like a bullrider's hat, pursued by Missile Command, Tempest, Asteroids, Centipede, & Battlezone characters.

Right: not-so-hot controller/peripheral perspective, or much hotter surfing a Fuji surfboard into the sunset with a burning Fuji on the horizon.

Front: cubbies for all hardware, with 2D control panel art looking like Atari joysticks, with faux cord art snaking down the front to faux controller ports overlaid on a zoomed-in keyboard background, with real arcade sticks & buttons sprouting from the control panel 2D joystick art.


I thought this was a hoot. Hopefully, I'm not alone in my hooting! Feel free to hoot at me or with me...

Thanks,
-Jason