Built By Prairie

I call this the "stag reunion" cause it's as if Ms Pac-man went to the reunion alone and w/out her Galaga date in the marquee. They broke up, LOL. It's technically the Mrs Pac Gen3 A1UP machine that went on sale at Wallymart for $260. I then degraded it to Gen1 hardware so that I could Berry Berry Sneaky mod it for Pac-man, Ms Pacman, Pacman Plus, Burgertime, Frogger, Mappy, Galaga, Galaxian, Space Invaders, Dig Dug, Frogger, Mr Do!, Pooyan, Moon Cresta and Crazy Kong. It's a nice "Nintendo-less" collection and is a much better selection of 20th Anniversary Reunion era games even though it's more like 40th Anniversary now. I really wish it had the Nintendo games with Congo Bongo... This is an example of how I can advise someone to get the most out of their A1UP cab or really any arcade hardware.

• Gen1 Pacman hardware ($45 locally purchased)

• BBS Sneaky flash service ($30)

• Sanwa Clone Joystick set to 4 way. Happ type button with a Rollie Leaf Switch ($20)

• 3D printed collectables shelf

• Pink Ball Top ($5)

• Hanging Namco lanyards with name tags (repo style from the Renion flyer)

• J and Kick panel graphics ebay/Gulf Coast Graphics ($30)

If you don't know about leaf switches. Older cabs and pins use leaf type switches and they are very fast contact. They lack the "click" of a microswitch because it's just to copper contact points that get bent to close contact by the button. Rollie switches use a Happ type and use a leaf design to make the new, just like the old. It's a very fast switch so it's great for Galaga and makes it more (original-like)

Ideally I'd like to get a Reunion type Marqee made. I really like the 25th Reunion cab with Pacman in it but it is a lot of yellow and less matching with the original 20th Reunion Cabinet

I finished my second Countercade but this one is for myself. I like the Space Invaders control panel because the joystick is left justified and the buttons fit nicely. It's not my favorite graphics but SI does happen to be the first arcade game I've ever played at the Anaheim Disneyland Starcade. It's nice with the new monitor and rasberry pi. Notice the screen images have scan lines so it looks so true to arcade.

So back in the day I was collecting Nintendo Arcade Cabs so of course I went through some VS and PC10 equipment. I had a couple of guns that I had gotten ahold of yet they were broken so I made one working PC10 gun out of them yet had the non working shell from another one. I decided that it would be awesome to transplant the Zapper guts into a PlayChoice gun so this is it. I recently sold it so I wanted to take some pictures of it when I was testing it for the customer. It was pretty awesome and I did this guy a solid because I think an ebay collector would have paid about $200 for it. Its great because of how it feels so solid in your hand.

It all started with Joysticks for me. SF2 SNES was about to be released in the US and I had access to a Japanese version. I double checked what buttons were used and then I went ahead and started hacking my gamepads. I managed to make a simple box with no slanted top and things went from there. I believe that I was one of the very first to build their own. Years later there were commercial products being built. I even bought them instead of building them as I was working long hours at ATVI and other places.

I had moved and ended up in the Bay Area of CA for a job and met a bunch of SF fans at Sony PlayStation of America. It was there I really got back into SF2 with Super Turbo as we had daily epic battles. I got a full 4P Konami cab with a bad 25" K7000 for building it into a MAME cab... I think back to how wrong this was now BUT it did get me into modding in a pretty serious way. I was building joysticks and afterburner GBAs for coworkers till the GBA SP came out.

Someone had put online a circuit at one time on how to convert these $25-30 Samtron 6" monitors to take an arcade CGA signal. Still getting into electronics I had to figure out the circuit and source the right parts. I successfully built one and even offered all the parts in it's own kit. I created some daughter boards for my own conversions and ended up selling finished monitors for $100 a piece. They were a really clean installation that I really liked because I made a daughter board that sat on top of a header pin on the main monitor board.