Grandmother Buys Old Building In Japan And Finds 55 Classic Arcade Cabinets

An anonymous reader writes A grandmother agreed to purchase an old building in Chiba, which is just outside of Tokyo. When her family arrived to check out the contents of the building it was discovered that the first two floors used to be a game center in the 1980s. Whoever ran it left all the cabinets behind when it closed, and it is full of classic and now highly desirable games. In total there are 55 arcade cabinets, most of which are the upright Aero Cities cabinets, but it's the game boards that they contain that's the most exciting discovery. Boards include Donkey Kong, Street Fighter Alpha 2 (working despite the CPS2 lockout chip's tendency to kill old boards), and Metal Slug X.

Comments

neat, but was probably in use to 2000's

[gl4ss]

due to metal slug x being in there..

so a neat find, but it's not an '80s arcade been in the dust for 25 years.

Re:neat, but was probably in use to 2000's

[scsirob]

Agree. There are some pictures of PCB's that have chips with '90s date codes stamped on them.

Re:neat, but was probably in use to 2000's

[Anonymous Coward]

the whole story is over romanticized and not even technically true, there are posts about it on some of the arcade collector forums with more information
www.jammaplus.co.uk/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=63536

I find it more fascinating when pieces of rare Japanese culture appear outside of Japan
mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2014/06/07/whac-a-bison-vega/

there was a bubble bobble 2 prototype arcade machine from nearby there dusted off only a blip of time ago too

Boards or ROM's

[kevingolding2001]

Is it the boards that are really so interesting, or the ROM chips thereon?

Many years ago I remember playing some of my favourite childhood arcade games on my PC with MAME, and the hardest bit was getting hold of the ROM chip images.

Even way back then most the games mentioned in the article seemed to be available, so I wonder if this anything more than sentimental value.

Re:Boards or ROM's

[Sockatume]

Even with ROM images, some of the older, weirder arcade hardware is very hard to accurately emulate, so having whole boards is very precious.

Re:Boards or ROM's

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me why I should even care about such trivial nonsense. I don't need perfection, and I can't see why anyone would.

Re:Boards or ROM's

[Sockatume]

It also gives emulator programmer a reference point for correct behaviour, and information on how that behaviour was originally achieved which might be useful. Aren't we reaching the stage where low-level simulation of original hardware is possible for the simpler cabinets?

Re:Boards or ROM's

[symes]

I hope you never need neurosurgery.

Re:Boards or ROM's

[thegarbz]

A lot of old programs relied on some very specific behaviour of chips to perform accurately. They'd exploit bugs in the microcode or timing imperfections to make their games small and efficient. Older games did a lot of very weird crap to get around limitations of the time. I remember reading quite fondly how the makers of Monkey Island 2 hacked their way around the scene where you dive to the bottom of the ocean to make the blue fade to black scene work despite not having a colour palate setup to do so.

What typically happens is if you faithfully emulate what an old console is supposed to do then at best a game plays with minor bugs, at worst it becomes completely unplayable. Correctly emulating an old console on the other hand is a processing nightmare which can bring multicore 3GHz machines to their knees. What really happens is that the people who write emulators figure out how the original game exploited the hardware configuration and then code the emulator to look at which game is currently being played and apply an appropriate hack to make it work. I.e the emulator works differently depending on the game.

Trivial nonsense would actually prevent you from playing the game at all in some cases.

Re:Boards or ROM's

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. I hope that you never need neurosurgery either.

Re:Boards or ROM's

[mccalli]

Ever played Asteroids? If you haven't played it on the original arcade machine, chances are you're missing out on a large part of the experience because it runs on a vector monitor. Those beautiful glowing bullets simply don't show up on raster hardware in close to the same way. Same can be said for Star Wars - the sit-down vector monitor game was incredible.

I'm speaking as someone who has an arcade cabinet running MAME, and who regularly uses emulators on a Mac as well. I'm not perfectionist for a lot of the standard stuff, but I do appreciate that in some cases there are material differences to the real thing.

Re:Boards or ROM's

[kheldan]

For those of you who aren't aware, this is true. Older games, especially from the 80's, used graphics systems that used very little RAM, instead the graphics all being stored in EPROMs. The background images were one layer, with hardware that usually supported scrolling, and the foreground (or 'motion graphics') images in another set of EPROMs, with specific hardware to place said objects at specific locations on the screen, and yet another layer of graphics just for text images like player scores. Completely different from the bitmap graphics that everything uses now. The reason was the price of RAM. The exception to the rule was Williams games like Defender, Stargate, Joust, Robotron 2084, Bubbles, and other similar era titles, that used 3 banks of 4116's for a total of 48kB of bitmap graphics memory, with DMA used to move graphics data from EPROMs to the screen buffer. Since there was no 'standard' for any of this hardware you'd have to write an emulator for each and every different game. Then there's sound. Pacman/Ms. Pacman used a very simple discrete sound generator using a couple bipolar ROMs; you'd have to code specifically for that, or cheat and use PCM samples. Galaxian actually had a hardware PRNG connected to a simple resistor-ladder DAC and some low-pass filtering to generate white noise for things like explosion noises. Really, I learned a hell of a lot about electronics back in the day from having to learn how these boards all worked, so I could repair them effectively (not like there was tech support for repairing any of this stuff or troubleshooting manuals!)

Re:Boards or ROM's

[Dogtanian]

When I was about 15, there was a Laundromat down the street with an old Asteroids game where the vector monitor worked fine except that the beam never turned off, so you could see how it sat dead center in the screen most of the time, then drew a line from one asteroid to the next, to the next, etc. as it rendered a frame.

Let me guess... eventually it burned a hole all the way through the centre of the screen until one day it got through and (a) blasted the woman whose job it was to collect the change from the machines' head off or (b) lasered her, segment-by-segment- via an early-80s pseudo-computer-effect- into the Asteroids machine itself where she was forced to play life and death computer games and interact with anthropomorphic, sentient realisations of abstract computer concepts, while finding some way to prove that she *was* due the five hours overtime they'd refused to pay her?

Re:Boards or ROM's

[complete loony]

My colleague is currently designing a C65 in an FPGA, currently running at 28.9x the speed of a C64 but with lots of features still unimplemented. But even designing the hardware at that level, it will be difficult to be completely bug compatible. Particularly since he's driving 1920x1200 video over HDMI.

Re:But the Tokyo area is so crowded

[Sockatume]

It wasn't; although there are '80s cabinets in there, the hardware in a lot of the pictures is late '90s or early 2000s vintage, and one of the articles suggests it has been closed for about ten years. Given that there's been a recession on that entire time, it might be that the value of the space didn't justify the cost of clearing out all those machines.

Re:But the Tokyo area is so crowded

[swb]

One of the pictures seemed to show a poster with odds for some kind of gambling game. Maybe some kind of issue with licensing or maybe even some kind of organized crime problem?

Re:But the Tokyo area is so crowded

[rsmith-mac]

Nah, that's fairly normal for Japan. They were probably running Pachislo machines alongside some Pachinko machines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachislo

Re:But the Tokyo area is so crowded

[antifoidulus]

For a lot of reasons really. First of all, the article doesn't say where in Chiba prefecture this find was made, while there is a small part of Chiba prefecture that is close to Tokyo(including the part that is home to Tokyo Disney), the prefecture itself is quite large and includes a large peninsula that is quite a long distance from Tokyo.

Secondly, even in Tokyo proper if you travel to any point in the city that is more than a 10-15 minute walk from a station(and there are plenty of them) you will find plenty of run-down and abandoned buildings. Property in Tokyo seems to follow an inverse square law, the value is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the closest station.

Re: I saw this recently

[Cryacin]

She came to drink tea and kick ass. And look, she's finished her tea.

No story here

[Dahlgil]

There isn't really a story here. There may be a few classics here, but this is no golden age arcade, especially considering the stock of late era look-alike candy cabs. If this arcade had been mothballed and locked-up in, say, 1983 or 84, that would be cool. Otherwise, there isn't anything very special here.

Ah, Man

[Greyfox]

I haven't seen one of those old arcades in ages. You could walk into any mall in the 80's and hear the centipede game from halfway across the mall. The one I spent a lot of time in had a very distinctive smell of electronics and carpet cleaner. I could play Spy Hunter as long as I wanted to on one quarter, and my sister could do the same thing with Galaga. I remember being horrified the first time I wandered into a mall in Florida and realized they didn't have an arcade. That situation became more and more common as time went on. I think the demise of the American mall is in some way linked with the demise of the American video game arcade.

Re: But the Tokyo area is so crowded

[Anonymous Coward]

Also Japanese are super tidy and maintain things despite them not being used.

Actually, this is incorrect. They may be a generally clean and tidy people, but they typically *don't* maintain buildings - they re-build many (if not all) of their temples every few years rather than perform maintenance. Couples almost never buy used homes - that's why there's so much odd arcitecture in that country; you don't have to worry about resale value because everyone's just going to demolish the building anyways.

There was a neat bit about it on an NPR economics podcast a few months ago, if you're willing to do the search for it.

Re:Tron

[ArcadeMan]

More cute anime girls? More tentacles?

Usually, having the second one implies also having the first one.

'Knock-offs'

[kheldan]

Back in a previous life I repaired arcade games. A fair number of the PCBs pictured are knock-offs (illegal copies). Not surprising, really.

...and Software Written in Python

[Dogtanian]

Nobody expects their neurosurgery to be done by an old video arcade machine.

Its four weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope... and the original version of Space Invaders. Its *five* weapons are...

Re:But the Tokyo area is so crowded

[Dogtanian]

Secondly, even in Tokyo proper if you travel to any point in the city that is more than a 10-15 minute walk from a station(and there are plenty of them) you will find plenty of run-down and abandoned buildings. Property in Tokyo seems to follow an inverse square law, the value is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the closest station.

Which begs the question- would it be worth someone's time to buy some of these unwanted out-of-the-way buildings and then fund (possibly fully) the construction of a line and station covering that area?

That quite obviously wouldn't be cheap- to put it mildly- but given the ludicrous value of some buildings and land in Tokyo, the returns could be huge.

Re:But the Tokyo area is so crowded

[AmiMoJo]

Gambling is illegal in Japan but also extremely popular and a mainstream pass-time for many people. They get around the law in various ways. For example many machines let you win non-monetary prizes (which are legal) that a little shop around the corner from the pachinko parlour conveniently pawns for a fixed amount and sells back to the pachinko operators again.

Dates

[morgauxo]

Everyone seems to be pushing up the date this place closed. Sensationalizing the time capsule perhaps? TFS says 80s. TFA says early 90s. One of the games in the photos is "Cherry Master '97". Hmm... I wonder how much research it would take to determine when that game came out? "Early" 90s indeed. So the place was open at least until 1997.

Not much of a find at all

[kazekirifx]

I live in Tokyo, and I've seen tons of similar-looking arcades close within the last 10 years I've been here, including some in very recent years. Video arcades are still somewhat of a thing here in Japan, unlike most other countries - though they are rapidly disappearing here as well. As others have pointed out, judging by some of the games pictured, this arcade hasn't been closed for more than maybe 10-15 years at the very most, and I'll bet it's actually a lot less than that. I should mention that I do collect arcade boards a bit myself, so I have an idea of what the market is like here in Tokyo. To put it bluntly, the majority of this is considered junk here - especially the cabinets, which all have CRT displays. CRT cabinets are desirable to classic arcade game collectors - maybe to have just one or two at home for personal use - but the majority of them get hauled to the dump nowadays since there is little demand for large quantities of them in still-operating arcades. As for the boards, I'm sure there might be a few semi-rare ones in there that might sell for a few hundred dollars, but I can tell you with certainty that most of them would likely sell for the equivalent of $5-30 US$ in an online auction in Japan. To be blunt, the reason this stuff is still in this building is because the previous occupants didn't have the money to have it hauled to the dump - and little of it has higher value than it did when the arcade was closed. Most of it has probably actually gone down in value. This is really a poor excuse for news, and I'm surprised Slashdot bothered posting it. It might look like a cool find to people outside of Japan and people who don't know much about arcade equipment, but to those who do know, this find is barely worth mentioning at all. I would consider it a pretty cool find if a friend had found it, for instance, but it's certainly not international news-worthy.