Rescuing vintage arcade video games from an abandoned ship (2016)

I'm no expert in arcade games but often the case with niche assets is that the cost of getting them off the premises can outweigh their market value, and assets are only worth something to creditors if they can be sold to recuperate accounts receivable.

For example via my employer I technically own a large multi-engine aircraft that is worth some $70 million dollars but requires significant repairs, engineering and refurbishment to restore to airworthy status, to say nothing of the cost of logistics to actually get the thing to a repair and overhaul facility. Even the cost to move it to a disposal facility (shredder) is prohibitive and requires significant logistics.

So it languishes in an aircraft grave yard providing a valuable service as a bird habitat.

>Even if there is no ongoing cost for the ship, wouldn't the owners rather have sold the furnishings rather than leave them to rot?

Organizations with more lucrative things to spend their man hours on tend to let abandoned projects just sit rather then liquidate them because the ROI of whatever they usually do is better than the ROI of liquidating a failed project. Property tax and other upkeep costs often wind up buried somewhere in a long list of similar costs from all the other real-estate the organization owns or leases or has to otherwise pay for. Things tend to finally get liquidated when a property needs to be sold or turned over like happened here.

There's a great 8-Bit Guy video, of him walking around a massive warehouse of brand new computers from the 70's through the 90's. Owner had a super sad story and was inviting anyone with an interest around the Houston area to take all they could. But how many can you fit in your car?

I don't know about this particular case, but it's not unusual for scenarios where an insurance or some other claim is made rendering property largely frozen / illegal to liquidate as anything but salvage.

Maybe if you sit on it long enough the statute of limitations can expire and you can do something more interesting than incur the costs of transporting a massive thing only to have it cut up for scrap, especially if you own land where it can just sit idle in the mean time.

There would have been a long period of time when those games would have been worthless.

A lot of them went to members of a UK video arcade collecting forum http://ukvac.com

They were in a variety of conditions, some ended up being rescued for parts whereas others were up and running not long after.

Have a look on the forum: it'll be in the Operator Raids section and I don't recall whether you need to have registered to get access to that part.

Many of the cabinets are now in use, either in classic arcades here in the UK or in the hands of collectors. Most have been restored and are now fully functional.

Shame they weren’t kept together.

Cabs from this vintage would have lots of individual components with probably a lot of through hole mounting. With the water damage being more recent I'd expect most of them to be serviceable. It would be most exciting if there were some for which no ROM dumps already exist. A game could be returned from the grave.

Since these games were grabbed by collectors I'd expect most of them to be fixed up like new. No need to go to all of this trouble if you are just making a MAME cabinet.

> changing out the filter capacitors in the power supply and CRT. What else? Would every capacitor be suspect?

Given the timeframe the article quoted for the most recent cabinet (1980-1981), they all predate the capacitor plague [1] by nearly two decades. It is possible that the capacitors in the PSU's of these games might still be close enough to spec. to not need any replacement. But given the folks who picked them up, they are likely to test everything extensively and then decide what to replace based on that testing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

>> I can't help but wonder what sort of maintenance might these machines require before starting up again?

I used to have a small collection until I moved recently and sold most of them. The ones in my basement never degraded much, but suffered some common issues which are reasonably fixable. One sat with a monitor problem in my garage for 17 years. I'm in the US midwest, so that meant cold winters to thermal shock things when I'd open the garage door and such, but no direct exposure to the elements. When it came time to move, I fired up that game and it worked exactly as good or bad as the day I set it aside in the garage. My vector games were sold to a friend at lowish prices because I wanted them to go to a good home and they needed a little work - but they are physically in almost the same condition as when I got them 25 years ago. A box of boards I gave to the guy you fixed my monitor just because I had no use for them and again wanted them to go to a good home. My guess is most of those will work just fine. The one from the garage is the one I kept and it's beautiful in my new basement.

It's an interesting hobby. One I mostly gave up, but I had to hang on to one cabinet and a few boards that were most important to me.

Restoration just requires logic for the most part. before switching on a game that's sat somewhere for 30 years, start with power. Is the machine getting 240v (or 120 depending where you are). Then check the transformer/power brick - is it doing its job converting 240v AC to DC voltages. Measure those. Is the monitor getting power and working. Then you can plug in your PCB (assuming it's not corroded to hell). Then go from there. There's so much info out on the web these days, someone has usually documented most problems you're likely to come across.

A lot of them have been brought back to life. As mentioned by the other poster capacitors weren't such an issue, and the ship had been reasonably weatherproof for a good while.

This video was recorded around the time the stash was first identified and you can see the cosmetic state of a lot of the machines isn't bad!

https://youtu.be/ZcyevQFzFWk

There's a good series of articles on the restoration and maintenance of a pinball machine, which has many of the same characteristics as video games, plus a few more mechanical issues.

https://blondihacks.com/johnny/

Speaking as a guy who grew up in a family of boaters, the nearby presence of seawater seems to greatly accelerate the degradation of electronics on ships, probably via salt corrosion.

Better? https://arcadeblogger.com/2016/05/06/arcade-raid-the-duke-of...

It's a readability thing. Many designers are taught (or organically arrive at the conclusion) that the ideal width to read an article at is roughly "book" width. There's some merit to the idea; it's easier to keep track of where the last line ended by seeing the shape of the words without needing your eyeballs to dance all over the place.

Once readability is founded, their argument is "who gives a rats arse about the rest of the page?" It's not the BEST design philosophy, but it's far from the worst one.

More about optimal line lengths if you're curious.

With line lengths that are too long, the user may have a hard time tracking back to the next line. Line lengths too narrow, the user's pacing and rhythm is thrown off. https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

I find the page easy to read as I hate wide chunks of text in general, but for what it's worth, Reader Mode in Firefox worked perfectly on that page when I just tested it.

Most is now reproduced for restoration. Even a well perserved cabinet has a bit of fading and wilting of the marquees and screen frame by now, not to mention the sides and control surfaces.

The United States has the following states that have a town named Wales:

Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, North Dakota, Utah, and Wisconsin.

If she met him in the States, it is entirely reasonable for him to first ask her what state she's from.

Bit strange to find it's actually docked in Mostyn, the northEAST of Wales since '79. Guessing the author lost his bearings and doesn't know the area.

If you're in to period dumb terminals see if you can figure out what the hell this thing I uploaded to Wikipedia used to connect to: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/4800-52-...