"Welcome to Warp Zone!"

[XYXZYZ]

DISCLAIMER: This game was born as a beautiful dedicated Centipede in 1981. At some time during it's life, some operator painted it black, replaced the wiring with a JAMMA harness, new power supply and evidently turned it into a Street Fighter II. After that, it was turned into a Mortal Kombat. So, I didn't kill the Centipede, I'm just replacing the partial MK kit with my own stuff. The only original parts on this cabinet are the plywood and coin door.

Actually, I do plan on converting it back into a Centipede when I move up in the world, get a bigger place and have room for dedicated games. But as it is I have a one room apartment, so MAME machines are the most efficient way to go.



Okay, this is my third MAME machine. The first one was a big six button Midway cabinet (Made for a dedicated Killer Instinct actually) with a 25" monitor and an Xbox in it, really nice for fighting games. The second was a 3KOAM Z-back cabinet with a 25" vertical monitor, for shooters and other vertical games as well. Now, I could use the Midway cabinet for most of the games that I play. But the size of it, the 25" screen, games like Bad Dudes and Golden Axe, classics like Robotron, etc. Just didn't feel right on that thing. A smaller cabinet with a smaller monitor would feel closer to the original machines. Plus, using a PC instead of an Xbox would have more versatility. Oh, and I just wanted another machine in the room.






This was a Mortal Kombat conversion job I bought from a fellow Digital Press regular, in "the great $99 coin-op sale". He was cool enough to swap the board with an original Capcom SF2CE,which I've been meaning to get, and for an extra $50.00 he swapped the monitor for a 19" 1982 Electrohome G07. It has an incredible picture for such an old monitor, I was floored when I saw it.

I just love the shape and profile of the old Atari cabinets! They're so... arcadey... As much as I love them I wasn't planning on using one for my next MAME cabinet. The only way to do that is to get one that's already been converted, and I wasn't counting on that. So, I was thrilled when this opportunity came up- I get an Atari cabinet, a new control panel that's already drilled the way I want it, and no classic conversion blood on my hands!



When I make a MAME cabinet, the first thing I worry about is the art. I had a concept in mind, but I was thinking it'd be on some generic Dynamo. Having an Atari cabinet changed things, not only did the art have to be something generic enough to allow a wide range of genres to seem at home (Playing a ninja game on a cabinet with spaceships all over it would be wrong!) but I also had to come up with a design that would seem fitting for an Atari cabinet. Something that looked like 1982, but still flexible.

Nobody calls their machines "MAME" anymore. They give it a unique name, and outfit it with some kind of theme, usually ones that I don't think belong on a video game. Like sports teams, a movie license, What kind of theme will I go with? My Capcom six-button fighter machine has a Capcom theme, my vertical shooter cabinet is called "Danmaku" (a shmup genre) with a spaceship theme, but this machine is for a wide range of video games... hey, that's a good theme! Video games! Now, I need a title that says "video games"... ... the FINAL BOSS. Naaah. POWER UP! ...naah. All Your Base Are Belong To Us? No. I was playing Super Mario Bros. one day and it hit me-



WARP ZONE! That's a cool name for a video game machine, Warp Zone, like "Now entering WARP ZONE, the land of video games!" There's even a visual theme with that, I decided to make art that resembled some sort of generic video game world.

As I worked on the design, the classic nature of the Atari cabinet drove me to a retro look. I started with the bezel, because it's like the centerpiece, and I would design the marquee and CPO after it. I wanted it to look like a video game world, and after a month or so of rejecting other ideas, here's something I came up with- (Note how the borders on the bezel mimic the Centipede bezel)



I thought it was rather fitting for a classic machine, and I liked the little 8-bit video game stage on the bezel, which was also going on the front part of the control panel. But after doing a mock-up on a picture of the Mortal Kombat, It just wasn't doing it for me. It's rather cartoony, and it was just too dang colorful; games like Double Dragon and Ninja Spirit would seem out of place to me. So I wanted something a bit more monotone, and in the end the 8-bit stuff had to go. It was too hard to make something that really strikes me with that motif. So I stuck with the same basic design, the horizontal lines, and made a red/black scheme, with a little blue to accent it. I threw in some stars and a blue glow on the horizon in the lower section to make it look like the landscape of another world. I think it's a more flexible design than the 8-bit mountains.



I feel a lot better with this design, it has a little more sophistication than the last one. Present-day fighting games, space games, swords & sorcery kind of games, they all fit well with this theme.

Now we need a control panel! Actually, one thing that influenced the new design was Nintendo's Playchoice 10 control panel. It's a cool design, and I think it's good for a multigame theme. After designing the bezel it was easy to come up with an effective CPO. Right away I imagined this control panel with red balltop Sanwa joysticks, with the chrome shaft. And shiny new Happs buttons! At first I'd cluttered it up with borders and lettering, but in the end I decided to keep it simple-



I think it's pretty effective. The only additional graphics here are the little "Atari start people", just a little nod to the original machine. The middle of the CP has the "Warp Zone horizon" graphics, and I made the logo using a lowercase Transformers font, modified a little bit.

And to top it all off, the marquee! The overall design is dark, and I hate black marquees.  But I think this one is colorful enough to work out, I took the same basic design and tilted it for a nice dynamic effect. I added an image trail to the logo, like it's "flying through the warp zone!"



When I put it all together in a mockup, I really liked it. It has sort of a retro look to compliment the classic nature of the Atari cabinet, but modern games will look right at home as well. And the "Warp Zone" title is not only a snazzy name, (Titles with a Z are always more dynamic, aren't they?) but drives home the whole point of "video games".

I spent a month or so designing the artwork, and now that  I've come up with just the right theme, it was time to make the high res version and send it off to Scott at mamemarquees.com.  Now that I've finally got that out of the way, it's time to tear up some hardware!

Part 2 coming soon!

[The_Tyler_Black]

I like it. Its very 80's looking! Great designs! Good Job!!

[WaRpEd]

It has the right name.
But I could be prejudiced a little 

[whoozwah]

I'm diggin the visual style. Very very nice.

[TOK]

That is really well done. Definitely looks like it could have been from an early 80's game. 

[XYXZYZ]

Part 2

Sorry I didn't take more pictures of the development. But  once you've seen one torn down cabinet and bare, detached control panel you've seen 'em all...

This project was a pain in the ass to do, because just after I got the machine my job starts demanding all my time, and I spent the next 4 months living at work. And I don't have much space in my little one room apartment, so it sat in the middle of the living room the whole time.

One thing I don't like about working on the cabinet is all the Centipede evidences that show up, when I removed the CPO I can see where the guy welded a metal panel to the back of it, and filled the trackball and button holes with wood filler or something like that. And while removing the MK side art, it took some of the paint off and you can see bits of the original Centipede side art (Damaged by the adhesive, but you can see it.) And you can make out the whole centipede image under the paint when you look at it at a certain angle. So, that kinda made me feel bad. But converting this back into a Centipede in the future will be a fun project!

Side art
The first thing I did was removed the side art, took about three hours using a hair dryer and goo-gone to remove the adhesive. I just sprayed goo-gone all over it, waited a while and used a plastic ruler to scrape it off. I suppose the cabinet should be repainted, but it doesn't look so bad... I did have to touch up some blemishes with a can of black semigloss spray paint though. I didn't put a lot effort into the sides because it's going to sit between two other machines and I'll remove all the paint anyway when I restore it.


The control panel
The original converter's control panel was a mess; six button SF2 layout, no holes for start buttons! And the wires were all soldered to the microswitches, many of them were in bad shape as well. Given that it was used for Mortal Kombat,  the two middle buttons were wired together, along with the start button. I wound up having to cut a lot of the wires off, mainly because I couldn't get a screwdriver in there to take the joysticks off. First, let's remove the CPO. Taking it off with a hairdryer wasn't so bad, but removing the adhesive was hard as hell! Took me two days and 2/3 bottle of goo gone, I had a paint scraper and would scrape, scrape, and scrape some more, and that stuff wasn't going anywhere. Perseverance won in the end though. And as I work on the control panel, I have the additional headache of living  in an apartment complex; I can't just get up at 6:00 and start making a bunch of noise. (I could, but I'd be a jerk) So I had to wait until midday to do anything noisy. While I drilled the start buttons in, it was obvious that my battery operated 7V Walmart drill wasn't going to do the job. So I would up renting a more powerful drill from Home Depot, they even let me do the work right there in the store. Which was nice, because that drill was noisey as hell and I wouldn't want to put that on my neighbors. Also saved me the trip of returning it.

The PC
The PC has a Athlon 64 3200 and 512MB of RAM, more than enough power to run the games I want to play. It's got an ArcadeVGA video card, and it's interfaced to the cabinet with a J-PAC. Amazingly, I had no problems at all installing the Arcade VGA. Unfortunately the J-PAC died after a week, the USB/PS2 controller IC was defective and that caused the sync to drop when the resolution goes under 620x480. I emailed Andy at Ultimarc, he immediately gave me some troubleshooting advice and determined that that particular chip was bad, he sent me a new chip the very next day. Lots of people on this forums go on about how Andy aggressively stands by his product, and it's true, you can't go wrong with Ultimarc. And I'm really sold on that ArcadeVGA, after using it on this machine, when I go to my vertical monitor machine using a Matrox G400 it just looks like crap. Looks I'm going to have to get another AVGA.  Also, before I suspected the J-PAC I wound up breaking the monitor's horizontal frequency resistor, had to remove the monitor, desolder the resistor and put it back together by hand. 

The sound is straight out of the sound card to the JPAC using a set of headphone cables with the speakers clipped off. There's no external amplifier and actually sounds great. So it must be an amplified sound card, isn't that a rarity in on board sound hardware? Maybe I'm going to melt my motherboard someday...

The software is a Tiny XP build, MaLa frontend with MAME+ 124a. I have Daphne for Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, and ePSXe for the port of a laserdisc arcade game called "Time Gal". All integrated into the same MaLa gamelist using SGT's handy guide.

Putting it all together
I like to have the hard stuff out of the way before I put everything together and finish the machine, In my case that's configuring software and getting it all to work properly. Once that's done, It's time to wire the controls. I tossed the dirty old malfunctioning controls that came with the machine, I threw in some Happs buttons with Cherry microswitches, and some red balltop Sanwa JL-Ws, they do make a damn fine joystick. I couldn't decide to make it a three or six button layout; with six buttons the bottom row is too close to the edge of the panel and it's uncomfortable. But I'll be able to play a wider range of games, there are quite a few that won't run on my six button Xbox cabinet. So I'll just lay the CPO directly over the holes, and play three button games until the CPO gets damaged and I'm forced to plug the holes with buttons. Again, the control wires were soldered to the old switches, so I had to desolder them, add quick disconnects, and make a new wire that chains the grounds together. And the J-PAC doesn't have anything connected to the test switch pad, so I soldered a wire to it and ran it to one of the JAMMA+ switch inputs.

The only thing left now are switches and coin lamps. I made a new PC switch that extends out of the case and is mounted inside the cabinet, and I got some replacement 1892 lamps to replace the old dead ones in the Centipede coin door. I powered it by running a wire out of the PC supply's  12V line, and simply connecting it to the wires on the 12V line of the cabinet's power supply. I did disconnect it from that actual power supply, I don't know if the loading would cause any problems but I didn't want to find out. So, the coin lamps now work and I can see where to insert my quarters in the dark!

And now, after about 4 months of work, it's done.

Before-


After-







Here's the MaLa layout I made to match the graphics on the cabinet.






So what do you think?

[phishpac]

I love it!  It looks like you went back in time and brought the cabinet with you.  very retro!  way to go

[Lutus]

 

Wonderful.  This is what MAME cabs should look like.  Just like original cabs from the arcade hayday.

[Apollo]

Very very cool, well done.

[TOK]

Since you're showing Stargate as one of your marquee selections... How are you mapping the buttons to play that?
Just asking because I'm a Defender freak and was never happy with a fudged button layout. Even a 7 button layout with a Reverse button right by the player 1 stick felt like too much of a compromise.

The cabinet looks great. One of the best implementations I've seen of new art on an old machine. 

[TheDriver]

Loving the artwork, it looks fantastic. 

Regards

[Swatwolf]

 

Nice artwork, very bright and colorful...

[ivwshane]

Nice!
The bezel art and instructions really add a nice touch.

[arcadefever]

 

If i get a mame cab, i will like something like that  very nice 

The art design is very retro, i love it 

[ace3093]

Wow!!! 

Very nice job!