Hi everyone! Jay here. I know that Eric is supposed to make site posts from now on, but I wanted to make an update about something particularly awesome… Collapsus: Arcade Edition! Eric should have an update post in a few days to let you all know about everything else that’s been going on in Wraith Land, but for now it’s Jay Time! As most of you should know, we’ve been hard at work on Collapsus now that we have an office, but what you may not know is that we’re also working on a special arcade version of Collapsus. No, it’s not an Xbox Live Arcade version, or some sort of special mode of the iOS/Android game (though for a while the standard play mode was called “Arcade”), no; we’re talking an actual, physical arcade machine running Collapsus! We here at Wraith love the classics, and it doesn’t get more classic than an old fashioned, stand-up arcade cabinet! We’re currently working to get it up and running along side the other releases of the game, and if all goes well it will be playable at Cincinnati’s own Arcade Legacy. You’re probably saying to yourself, “Jay! What if I don’t live in/near Cinci?” That’s a good question: one we may have some semblance of an answer for… The Winnitron Arcade Network is a network of free-to-play, indie game arcade machines hosted around the world. We’re hoping (though nothing is concrete yet) to port the very same Arcade Edition that will be running on our dedicated machine to the Winnitron Network. Anyway, my intent here wasn’t just to inform all of you lovely people that the arcade version will exist; I also wanted to show you all how it will exist in a new series of blog posts following our saga of getting it ready. So here we go! A few months back, I bought an old NeoGeo MVS 1 slot conversion with Samurai Showdown off of eBay. It didn’t run, but the boards were salvageable (at least enough where I’m going to consolize the internals for myself) and the monitor had some nasty screen burn. I’m no stranger to arcade cabinets, I actually have a small collection (5, if you count this one) 3 of which I restored/am in the process of restoring and the last (or first, chronologically) that I MAME-ified, so I figured I could either repair it, or do something awesome with it. I chose the latter and got 2 projects for the price of one! Maker culture runs deep here at Wraith! Here’s the cabinet sitting in the office after I started taking most of the controls off and started ripping off the control panel’s screen printing.
Behold! Apparently before it was a crappy MVS conversion, it was a Commando cabinet! Our intent is to have the game running on a Raspberry Pi B+, using an I-PAC as the input encoder and running special color changing buttons controlled by a Teensy 3.1 microcontroller! It will feature a low-energy LED marquee backlight and an HD LCD monitor as well.
Right now, after evacuating the cabinet of all its current components, our next step is to strip off all the existing paint and decals, use wood filler and Bondo to plug all of the holes in the MDF and then add a layer of sheet metal under the control panel so we can fill the current button holes with JB Weld, sand it down and then use a hole saw to make new ones (since Collapsus requires less buttons than an MVS). Lots of work, but it sure will be a blast working on it!
We’ll keep posting updates and pictures as we go along, so stay tuned and don’t forget to PLAY HARDER!