Klax Cabaret

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What's the going rate for a working, decent shape Klax cabaret these days? Might pick one up tomorrow and curious to know what a good price is. Thanks.
 
I'm using a jamma switcher in mine to run both Tetris and Klax. Just an idea.

If you do this, it's probably worthwhile to perform the modification in the back of the 2nd printing of the Tetris manual ("Monitor is too dark"). The video off a stock Tetris is fairly dim, and while I was able to get a good image out of it solo, adjusting for the other boards yielded unpleasant results. Either Tetris was very dim or the other games were much too bright. That modification brings it up quite a bit and it evens things out nicely if you're running it with other PCBs in the same cabinet.
 
If you look at official Atari production numbers, they didn't make many of these cabinets. I suspect they will be hard to find because of the size, jamma, and the 19". I think they are very cool.
 
I picked one up the other day; the one that spurred me to make this thread. I suspect it was a Tetris originally and was converted to Klax. Has a Tertris manual and a Klax conversion kit manual inside it. Nice little 2-player cab though. And I got it for a great price too. [emoji6]
 
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I picked one up the other day; the one that spurred me to make this thread. I suspect it was a Tetris originally and was converted to Klax. Has a Tertris manual and a Klax conversion kit manual inside it. Nice little 2-player cab though. And I got it for a great price too. [emoji6]

More likely the other way around. The 171 Tetris Cabarets produced were factory conversions from Klax.
 
Oh, and one other thing for those of you thinking of setting these up for multi-game use. Even though both games have two buttons per player, they're wired together, and serve double duty as the p1/p2 start buttons. This makes it pretty challenging to put anything else in the cabinet.

I think a 2-in-1 switcher with Tetris and Klax is ideal, since those work together well. But probably not a great idea to throw other horizontal puzzlers in there.
 
That is a nice one. CPO is less "brown" than mine. I guess these had a habit of turning all murky colored over time.

Yup, pretty much everything Atari printed in the late 1980s-90s turns shit brown as it ages. These were originally purple.

I wish someone would repro these CPOs.
 
Back in 2002, I bought a complete but non-working KLAX cabaret out of an operator's warehouse in Iowa for $75...

That dumb game was cursed, though. After replacing the power supply, it played blind. It had one of the weird Zenith chassis K7000 monitors in it. Never managed to get that working. Eventually bought a regular K7000 chassis to put in it. The cabinet cleaned up nice. Fun game, but I was just sick of looking at it by that point.

At the time, a friend was selling a ton of games to a local chain of pizza restaurants. He sold this KLAX to them (on my behalf) for something crazy (for the time), like $500. I laughed gleefully.

A week later, the monitor died. Laugh was on me! My friend pulled it and brought it back to me. I repaired it and put in a new flyback. While testing it overnight in my garage, the new flyback went nuclear and had a melt-through. What a stench! Another new flyback, another round of testing, and the monitor went back in the game, and I happily forgot about it.

Until some forgotten amount of time later, when I saw another local collector offering that exact KLAX for sale. He had taken over dealing with the pizza restaurants from my friend. They wanted it gone because no one ever played it. I forget what he sold it for.

Anyway, if you ever come across a KLAX cabaret that has "Skippy was here" written inside the cabinet in black Sharpie, now you know some of its' colorful history.
 
I had to go check mine for the marker. :)

Back in 2002, I bought a complete but non-working KLAX cabaret out of an operator's warehouse in Iowa for $75...

That dumb game was cursed, though. After replacing the power supply, it played blind. It had one of the weird Zenith chassis K7000 monitors in it. Never managed to get that working. Eventually bought a regular K7000 chassis to put in it. The cabinet cleaned up nice. Fun game, but I was just sick of looking at it by that point.

At the time, a friend was selling a ton of games to a local chain of pizza restaurants. He sold this KLAX to them (on my behalf) for something crazy (for the time), like $500. I laughed gleefully.

A week later, the monitor died. Laugh was on me! My friend pulled it and brought it back to me. I repaired it and put in a new flyback. While testing it overnight in my garage, the new flyback went nuclear and had a melt-through. What a stench! Another new flyback, another round of testing, and the monitor went back in the game, and I happily forgot about it.

Until some forgotten amount of time later, when I saw another local collector offering that exact KLAX for sale. He had taken over dealing with the pizza restaurants from my friend. They wanted it gone because no one ever played it. I forget what he sold it for.

Anyway, if you ever come across a KLAX cabaret that has "Skippy was here" written inside the cabinet in black Sharpie, now you know some of its' colorful history.
 
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