Arcade Stuff > Aqua Jack
Aqua Jack
In early 2004, I refurbished my first arcade cabinet. The one I chose was an old Aqua Jack machine that had been converted to Time Killers at some point. I'm not sure which is the worse game...
The cabinet was basically empty, with no monitor or boards inside. It did have a decent coin door, though. The best feature was that the control panel pulls out like a drawer, so it's very easy to work on.
Here's a picture of how it looked when I found it:
I went ahead and built a new control panel with switchable 4/8-way joysticks, 4 buttons per player, and a trackball in the middle. I kept the admin buttons to a minimum, so the only button that isn't arcade authentic is an exit button for returning from the games to the main menu. Also, the coin returns on the coin door can be pressed in to register a credit.
The really interesting thing I did on the control panel was install a little LCD screen that displays the instructions for each game. I control it via the serial port on the motherboard, and have the front-end send the instructions just as it starts to load a game. It was a bit of work to get it going, but now it works like a charm. It's not useful enough that I would ever put it on another cabinet, though.
Finally, I painted the cabinet and designed some custom artwork for it. Here's some pictures of the finished product:
