Big Nintendo Project

jibmums

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I'm working on eight 3-d models of the early 80's Nintendo cabinets, everything from Radar Scope to the various Kongs up thru the Vs. conversion cabinet. These will eventually be available for the 3dArcade frontend, if anyone uses or is familiar with it, and I've been trying to make them as accurate as possible, right down to the correct model #'s on the serial plates. I've scoured the forums for info and pics and found a wealth of both, but I still have several questions so if there are any Nintendo owners or experts that can help, please do. Anyways --

1. Regarding Mario Bros., there are two marquees, one with the "two player" word balloon on the left, and I've seen both the "Nintendo Pak" conversion cab and the dedicated widebody use both of them interchangably. Is there one correct marquee for each style cab, or are they indeed used interchangably?

2. Regarding red Donkey Kong (former Radarscope) cabs, every one I've seen has had the side art appliques on them, yet I recall reading somewhere that only the dedicated blue cabinets received this sideart. Can anyone substantiate or disprove this?

3. Regarding the three Nintendo Paks - Mario Bros., Donkey Kong 3, and the Vs. cabs - I have seen most of these in blue and many in orange, as obviously they were conversions of Donkey Kong, DK Junior and Popeye. Would a red MB, DK3 or Vs. be a logical assumption? It would, of course, have had to originally been a Radar Scope, either converted first to Donkey Kong or directly to one of the Nintendo Paks. I have pics of a red DK3 but this could just have been painted to the owner's taste. These models will represent factory made cabs or conversions, so unless there was at least one Nintendo-authorized red MB, DK3 or Vs., I'll keep them to blue and orange.

4. The similar Space Firebird and Helifire cabs, has anyone got one of these they could take some really good hi-resolution pictures of? I found a thread (possibly here on klov) with pics of a Helifire, but since I'll probably have to recreate all the artwork from scratch, they weren't quite detailed enough to use.

5. Sky Skipper, just found out about this one yesterday, also came in a Donkey Kong style cab. Was this a Japan-only release? Anyone have good pictures of this game?

That's it for now, may have more questions as the project continues. I will post a WIP pic of the whole Nintendo lineup in a virtual arcade if anyone's interested. Thanks for reading.
 
Hi Dennis,

2) Red DK's did come with side art on them.
3) The Nintendo PAK games were able to be installed into any early game starting with radarscope/DK. Therefore they could have been installed into red cabinets. There were so few red cabinets compared to blue and orange you just don't find that many red's that were converted. I have seen one converted to Mario Bros. It is very popular for people to paint their DK3's red as the red goes well with the DK3 art. So there are probably as many painted red DK3's out there as there are original red DK3 conversions. Just to be clear though, the Nintendo PAK games were all converted out in the field, not by Nintendo. They came with a serial tag that the op was suppose to install on the back when they converted the original game.
4) I responded to your PM about Heli Fire art pictures about a week ago. Check it out. I should be able to help you on that one.

I would love to see what you have done so far.
 

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Here's that WIP shot, I still have a few things to work on, the Mario Bros CP is one, and correcting all the coin doors is another. The cabs are sitting a little low and their black pedestals are buried in the virtual floor right now. Got about three weeks of work into them and I'm almost done.

CamaroMurph, those were your pics I was was thinking of, is there any chance I could get you to take a few more higher-resolution ones, especially of the CP and marquee? When I made the Radar Scope cab, the bezel from MAME in-game artwork was perfect but I had to recreate the CP and marquee from some hi-res pics I found on Derek Litton's home arcade site, and they came out great. I'm going to use your close-up pics of the CP's instruction sheet and the sticker above the CP, a few more shots like those would be perfect. If you break each piece down into 3-4 shots I can photoshop them together. I see that on the Helifire flyer, there is a sideart decal applied, if your cab has this I can surely use that also. Probably a very rare NOS piece to locate though.

Now that I've looked at the Helifire pix again, this bring up a couple more questions: the single-coin mech coin door, I assume this was indicative of an early Nintendo cab? Should my Radar Scope have an single coin mech as well? I've read that early Radar Scopes had their serial plates in a different location than later Ninty cabs, true? Would this be the case for Helifire as well? Lastly, the "peak" at the front edge of the Helifire side panels, is that a slight curve or a point?

Thanks again for the help, most appreciated!

 
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Wow. Great work.

The coin door's had a single mech on the early Nintendo cabinets and the transition to 2 mech's happened mid Radarscope. The early Radarscope games had 1 mech while the later games had 2 mech's. I have never seen a Helifire with 2 mech's.

I have never seen a Helifire game with side art. I have seen it in the flyer and admittedly at this point there are few examples left to check but I haven't found any original cabinets yet that even have any evidense of ever having it.

I don't think the different location of early serial plate's is true. Both the Helifire game and the Radarscope game I own have them in the standard center location. I've not researched that yet but I can tell you that the ones I have seen have always been in the center.

I have a busy weekend but will try to get you some better pic's. I have to figure out how to get the camera to do it. The one's I attached are 180 dpi resolution. I guess maybe it's a setting on the camera. What resolution should I be looking to get. I think it's a decent camera so I should be able to do better.

The front point on the Helifre cabinet has a very small radius. Much smaller than any of the corners on the more traditional Nintendo cabinets. I'll try to snap a close up of that too.

Murph
 
Okay, got a start on the Helifire model, so far the bezel is recolored (used the Radarscope one from MAME) and the sticker below the bezel is redone. Glad to hear about the lack of sideart, I wasn't thrilled about having to use the picture from the flyer.

Murph, you had posted a number of photos and one of them was the lefthand side of your Helifire CP, it was the instruction sheet and about half the joystick; basically, everything contained within the four lefthand rivets. That picture was great, showed the detail right down to the black halftones on the artwork. If you can take another couple pics of the sections between the other rivets, that's exactly what I can use to stitch them together and then copy the artwork. Same with the marquee. The pixel size was 1036 wide x 777 tall, so that or higher will work fine. If you can take a shot of the serial plate on the back, that would be a bonus, otherwise I'll just use the same one I used for Radarscope and photoshop in a new model number.

One other Helifire question, were the lowere rear corners on the side panels rounded, or did they come to a point like the example in the flyer? Can't quite tell from the pics, and if it is rounded it looks like it's definitely a smaller radius than Kong-style cabs.

Again, I thank you for your help with this.
 
Dennis,

The pictures that are above are 4000 X 3000 Pixels on my computer. It must be something that is happening when I upload them to the site. Might need to get a different way to get them to you. I can take other pic's too to show more detail if needed.

Murph
 
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