Restoring the Galaxian3 Theatre 6, 1992 six player arcade machine
48 comments
·April 19, 2025mrandish
throw4amP
Someone did it about 10 years ago:
http://www.laserdisc-replacement.com/ via http://my-cool-projects.blogspot.com/search/label/vldp-hw
The DEXTER unit has connectors that are compatible with various industrial LD players and was designed as a drop-in replacement. Files containing frame-by-frame data are loaded onto the device. The end user has the option of driving the Dexter LD emulator using a software emulator like DAPHNE, or just it into the original arcade hardware.
Some games do weird things with sync https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3170 and additional hardware like https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/mediawiki/index.php/BegasSyn... is required.
It really does amaze me just how deep the rabbit hole goes, and that people have actually managed to preserve these games.
mrandish
Cool. Good to know someone made a solution. After a quick look it seems like a solid offering that's been battle tested. I guess the only unfortunate part is that the code isn't open source and the price may be a little steep for hobby DIYers.
But for operators who want to get a classic LD cabinet working, it seems reasonable enough since it's complete solution, the maker supports it and, with over a thousand sold, it's probably already been made to work with every LD game and the usual gremlins have already been identified and dealt with.
lordfrito
Way back in 2007 someone found one of these, disassembled it(!), transported it(!), rebuilt it(!). Long story but full of great pics. [0]
[0] https://www.dragonslairfans.com/smfor/index.php?topic=231.0
neilv
I'm impressed that they got it together, after that adventure.
And then it was moved again:
https://www.dragonslairfans.com/smfor/index.php?topic=231.ms...
greatgib
I was about to post the same link that I have found while looking where there might be another one in Europe.
I highly recommend to have a look at it, it is incredible and totally fun to read!
cadamsdotcom
Congratulations on a very successful restoration and thanks for writing such a beautiful deep dive.
The work put in here is a perfect example of how motivation can be so much stronger if it’s for the love, done by volunteers, than for any amount of money.
It also evokes the Penn & Teller quote, “Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”
hinkley
One of the things I would change if I could go back to childhood is to find the money and the people to play more Gauntlet. When I was in high school I became friends with a guy who knew where all of the co-op games were on the college campus just down the street from our school.
Most of the arcades I knew of were too small to house a beast like this, but I would have watched the hell out of this one.
wyldfire
These days, it seems like one of the best multiplayer arcade games is "Killer Queen" [1]. It'd be nice if there were more games like that. It offers a gaming experience that's more unique to the arcade IMO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Queen_(video_game)#
throwanem
It's a fantastic experience in local play, the perfect fun bar game for folks who don't think of themselves as "gamers."
So far as I know there hasn't been a cabinet in town in ages, but I wish there still were.
cypherpunk666
you can play local multiplayer on the Switch fwiw.
throwanem
Yeah, but you can spill a beer on a Killer Queen cab and not even see it drop a frame.
austinallegro
The 28 Player version was resident at the Namco Wonder Egg theme park for years. Not sure what happened to it.
Sega G-Loc 360 and WEC Le Mans (the blue cabinet version is rarer than the red one), Namco Drivers Eyes (the full F1 Car cabinet) and the Sega Hologram Time Traveller machine were all great arcade machines bitd too.
liendolucas
Dumb question out of ignorance. In electronics when you have absolutely no idea where something is failing is it possible to apply kind of a binary search in the circuit to either spot or discard a failing section? Is this an effective way to search for problems in electronics or are better ways to do it? Perhaps is a very stupid question but I had it in my mind for some time.
toast0
It's like every other debugging issue. First you need to figure out what it's doing and what it's supposed to be doing.
Then you work forward and backward until you find a spot where you can see a transition where the inputs are as expected and the outputs are not.
The more you know about the ciruit the easier it is. Arcade circuits tend to have a lot of documentation from the maker as they were expected to be serviced. But machines with small production runs are harder; the manuals may be lost or less detailed. Makers also tend to leave out details of protection mechanisms, some of these have been reverse engineered and documented by the community, but more work happens on higher production systems. In this case, they had three player boards that should work the same, but only one worked, and they were able to narrow it to communication (by using an undocumented test switch). They got lucky finding a missing ground, and then looked at communication with a sillyscope and replaced a standard communication chip.
varjag
Just like with software, oftentimes you can bisect, sometimes you can't. There are some common approaches to roughing out problematic areas (checking power rails, confirming known oscillations, clocks and regular signals…). When you have the schematics, just as with source code you often can make educated guesses. With an unknown design though it is a laborious process akin to debugging a third party binary executable.
ljf
Perfect reading with an easter long weekend coffee - I love well written and interesting stories like these.
null
timcobb
> a 28 player behemoth that debuted in April 1990 at the International Garden and Greenery Exposition in Osaka, Japan
Why would an arcade game be debuted at a gardening and greenery expo?
shakna
Expo '90 had over 23 million people turn up. That is a sizeable audience. However, on top of that, one of the themes with the expo was "coexistence" with nature. It wasn't just a gardening show. [0]
For example, Professor Iwatsuki gave the conference talk "Coexistence of Nature and Mankind in Urban Areas Role of Natural Science", and one of the forums was on "The Role of the Science in Building the 21st Century".
It was definitely partly a garden show. But it was also a scientific conference, discussing how to shape the world in the future, in a sustainable way. That meant any technological breakthrough was something to pull the crowd.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130314172710/http://www.expo90...
loloquwowndueo
Why not?
squeedles
Wow! Great deep dive! I haven’t seen S100 boards in the wild since we retired our rack mounted 1980s Sun 2 decades ago (also 68020-based)
guenthert
That struck me as odd -- I associated only 8080 (Z80) systems with S100 (a very primitive bus). Wikipedia has early Sun systems based on Intel's Multibus (being multi-master capable, a considerably more complex bus).
squeedles
You are of course correct. The game is neither S100 or Multibus, but a similar cage. And I was misremembering the Sun2 as 68020 when it was actually just a 68010 -- which I could have verified if I only looked at the picture that I posted at the bottom of this page -
flir
Have played that (not that cab, a European one). Was, indeed, a world of fun.
countrymile
Where is the European one based? Apparently there is only one left.
Such a wonderful effort to see this rare game being restored as well as being accurately preserved. Of the future actions discussed at the end, this one seems most important to me:
> Investigate a solid-state replacement for the LaserDisc players.
Those laserdisc players are cantankerous, mechanical beasts and even the industrial grade ones will likely be a constant point of failure across enough 80-hour operating weeks. While laserdisc based games were fairly rare, in the aggregate there were still quite a few notable titles made (led by Dragon's Lair (1983)).
It would be terrific for the preservation community if someone made a solid state replacement based on an SBC like a Raspberry Pi. Fortunately, most of the games used a handful of fairly standardized serial protocols to communicate with the disc player. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard, especially using FFMPEG to drive the actual playback and the serial input could have a scriptable command parsing and translation layer. There weren't that many different commands a laser disc player could do. Basically, the usual start/stop/pause/ff/rew as well as chapter and frame seeking with simple loop.