II. THE CABINET
One day on a whim I just decided to turn up a different street on my way home from work one day and WHAM! There they were. Three arcade cabinets just sitting on this fellow’s porch. This guy lived just two blocks from my house and I never before saw that what I needed had been under my nose all this time.
Pounding the door, he answered and I asked him how much what he wanted for the Golden Axe cabinet.
“Uh, it doesn’t work. The board’s okay, I think, but the monitor is fried.” he said.
“That’s even better”, I replied.
I saw a look on this man’s face – one I knew well – of a man who realizes that clearing out some of his junk from the house will earn him a brief respite from the wife’s nagging. “How about thirty bucks?” he proffered.
“I will be back with a truck on Saturday.” We shook on it.
Surprisingly, Mrs. Zeno, normally very concerned about both how much I spend on my hobbies and how much they clutter our home, was perfectly fine with the idea. The price for the cab was reasonable enough and the fact that it was in our neighborhood indicated that it was Meant To Finally Be.
That following Saturday, the biggest piece of the puzzle arrived at Zeno’s house. Here’s where the fun began…
The Cabinet arrives in Zeno’s
garage. (I have no idea who the kid is, but sometimes I see him scurrying from
the garage to the kitchen to scrounge for scraps of food. He doesn’t bother the
dog so I allow him to live)
As described, here we had an old Golden Axe cabinet..,or was it? (foreshadowing) with a burnt display and supposedly operational board. Since I didn’t get any sort of technical documentation along with the cab I had no idea where to begin…
Will you just look at this
mess? I SAID LOOK AT IT!!
I spent a couple of days just walking around the cabinet, poking around it trying to make sense of the various systems and how they all worked together. I have to admit to a certain wicked thrill of indulgence at doing this. Being electromechanically inclined I was always curious about how these things worked, what they had inside etc. But as a teenager I usually never got too close to the backs of the things before the old fat guy with seven fingers between two hands would come running up shouting a string of obscenities and chasing me out of the arcade. Not this time, bubba. This baby is mine and I’m going to savor every second of its dissection.
Digression aside, it occurred to me that I might one day be possessed to put the thing back together in its original operating state and join the Seven Fingered Arcade Operator Society. At least maybe I’d want to play the original Golden Axe game since I’d never played it before. Therefore I should be very careful about disassembling the parts and allowing the ability to put them all back together. I decided to make my own documentation in the form of a log, documenting in detail down to the level where each screw and of what size plugged into what hole. The power supply for the board came out first, followed by the board, the transformer, monitor and harness, internal wiring (why are there outlets in here labeled for a laserdisc player? – more foreshadowing), cabinet cooling fans, speakers and marquee backlight.
Disassembly took a total of about five days (evenings, actually). This may seem like a long time and it was because two-thirds of this time was spent writing and diagramming how everything was taken apart and would hopefully fit back together. Although it is now very unlikely that the MAME Frame will ever be restored to its original incarnation, I do not regret taking all these notes as the experience provided me with more education on how these things work than I could ever have wished for.