Arcade Operator Barn Raid

I recently visited a long established family business, working in the amusement arcade industry since the days of Defender and Space Invaders.  Whereas my recent Raids have been in towns and industrial estate units, this one was located in a rural area.  I ended up making three visits here.  The first trip was to scope it out and compile a rough list of what I was interested in.  The second was to round up the cabs and get them ready for loading in a van, gathering up all the parts I wanted and lots of general rummaging.  A lot of items had to be moved to get to the machines I wanted.  The final visit was to pick up the cabs and the remaining parts. 

On arrival, the Op led me to the first storage area.  These pics are roughly posted in the order of going from the entrance to the back of the barn.

Shelves inside the entrance.  Note the Sega stacks, the Midway Galaxian marquee and the Space Invaders glass bezel.

More shelves with a MVS motherboard and a Sega Mega-Tech motherboard complete with carts.

Piles and piles of stuff.  Rummaging was the order of the day here.

Coin door locking bars.  Hundreds of them.  But the good stuff was on the top shelf.  More on that later.

There were numerous MVS carts and motherboards scattered round the barn like bread crumbs.

A buried Naomi cab and a Hantarex US250 power supply hiding beneath the control panel. 

These power supplies were also scattered round.

There is a bit of a macabre story behind these.  The Op said that each one is from a BAS cabinet, and it’s all that remains of them.  He told me that fruit machines are parted out and used for firewood.  No doubt the BAS cabs suffered a similar fate.

A Sega Thunder Blade cabaret cab.

A pretty tidy looking Point Blank.

Another Point Blank and some cocktail cabs.

More MVS.

A buried Skins Game.

Mortal Kombat and an Atari System 1 Indiana Jones board!  Interestingly the Op mentioned that the Indy speech was in Japanese.  I enquired about the Atari cab, and he shook his head and replied “Don’t ask”, no doubt going the same way as the BAS cabs.

Another buried Naomi.

Alpine Racer and a BAS cab.

The Op said this was cab was Hunchback.  He wanted a lot for this one.

There were lots of generic Jamma cabs from different manufacturers. I picked up a few of the better condition ones, including some BAS cabs, Electrocoin Midi cabs, an Intergames cab and a Video Game cab complete with rotary sticks.  I always find these different types of Jamma cabs quite interesting, information about some of these and the manufacturers seem to be thin on the ground.

 

I was tempted with this CarnEvil cab, a cool Halloween themed light gun shooter by Midway. 

The game looks fun, it’s quite unusual, and the side art is awesome.  However it was faulty, and I’ve heard reports of the Seattle board being extremely fragile and problematic.  Plus the Op mentioned that he had spent £400 on a new hard drive, so I knew it wouldn’t be cheap!

Even more MVS.  This time with some Robbie Williams.

The machines got older and more densely packed in the further we ventured into the barn.  It was evident that some of these machines had been sat here for a very long time.

I really liked the look of the Pheonix, but unfortunately it was one of a few cabs not for sale.

Let’s go back to that mountain of bubble wrap on the top shelf.  It was actually a great big pile of PCB’s!  We started taking the boards down from the shelf and tried to identify them. The bubble wrap had actually preserved the boards really well, with the majority looking almost brand new.  Whilst rummaging we found a couple of other stashes of PCB’s.  There were some pretty obscure titles as well, including Baraduke, an action shooter by Namco, Rabbit Punch / Rabio Lepus, a cute horizontal shooter by V-System and KiKi KaiKai, an overhead multi-directional shooter by Taito. 

I was especially pleased to find this one.  The label is faint, but it’s actually Rainbow Islands.  It was definitely one of those ‘Ok let’s stay calm and try and conceal my excitement’ moments!

The Op left me to rummage and I was checking out some boards when suddenly I saw a great big black dog by my side.  Not being the biggest dog fan, I completely froze with a PCB still in my hand.  The dog had a sniff round me and then fortunately ran back out of the barn, allowing me to continue my search for arcade treasures.