Arcade Stuff > Xevious
Xevious
My friend Rick is the one who got me into the idea of refurbishing arcade cabinets. He got an empty sit-down Turbo cabinet, but ended up having to scrap the project before the project was completed. Some time went by, and I finished my Aqua Jack project. After seeing the results of that project, Rick decided that he wanted me to refurbish a cabinet for him.
He picked out this very nice Xevious cabinet. He decided that he wanted it to have a two player, six button layout with both a trackball and a spinner.
Squeezing 18 buttons, 2 joysticks, a trackball, a spinner, and a volume knob onto a Xevious control panel was a bit of a challenge. The original control panel had only 6 buttons and 1 joystick on it originally, but I was determined to make this fit without it being uncomfortable to play.
Here's the original control panel. It looks nicer in this picture than it actually was. The joystick didn't move, the buttons were worn out, and the control panel overlay had chunks out of it. Plus, that layout wouldn't let Rick play too many games.
So, I toyed around on the computer, modeling several layouts that would fit all those buttons and other parts onto that fairly small space. Eventually, I came up with a layout that would work. I also designed a custom overlay for it that would blend in with the original artwork. I had it printed at ClassicArcadeGrafix (no longer in business), and installed it. You can see the results below. It looks gray in this picture, but it's actually black.
The side art on this cabinet was pretty good but it did have a lot of scratches on it, particularly in the black areas. It was also quite dirty, and had some old amusement license tags on it. But I fixed all of that.
The best thing I found for cleaning the side art was some of that citrus-based cleaner. That took a lot of the grunge off. To get the stickers off, I used Goo Gone and a lot of elbow grease. To fix the scratches in the side art, I dug out my trusty old Sharpie permanent markers. A steady hand and some patience ended up with some decent results:
The final result, shown below, is a great cabinet that can do everything Rick wants it to do. He and his family get plenty of use out of it, and liked it enough to request another cabinet.
Note: That last picture was borrowed from Rick's website.