Midway 12 in 1 Home "Arcade" Machine thread- Upgrading them?

viewsonix

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Midway 12 in 1 Home "Arcade" Machine thread- Upgrading them?

First, lets get this out of the way:

Yes, it's not a real "arcade" machine.
Yes, it's cheap and many wouldn't be caught with one.

Now that we have that out of the way, lets see if anyone has info on these things that can help me and others.
I'm talking about the small upright Midway 12-in-1 arcade machines that came in a box and you assemble at home. They went on clearance for a hundred or two a few years back and the company, Big Electronic Games went out of business.

I got one for next to nothing, and after putting it on a wooden box I made out of scrap wood, the height of the machine is the same as my other arcades. Play is fine, the emulation was done well, and it plays Robotron fine.
The joysticks work fine, and the buttons are the same ones I've seen on Zaxxon cocktails, so it doesn't bother me at all.

The one thing I want to do is upgrade the monitor from a 12 inch TV to a larger one. The problem is that the 'black box' uses some weird signal that can't be registered by most TVs. Connection is by way of a standard 3 prong component cable.

I've done the Google-Fu but it seems that no one knows why some work and some don't.

Does anyone have any information about how they upgraded theirs, the make and model of the TV used, etc? How many TVs did you have to go thru to find a working one?

I've heard of some tvs displaying 'unusable signal' or a yellow screen when hooked up to these. I've tried 2 tube and 1 lcd tv, no luck.

Since old tube TVs cost practically nothing, it would be cheaper for me to just upgrade the tv and call it done vs making a mame box in an old arcade cabinet.

Please post constructive comments, I am trying to get some help here....
 
rap-genius-659.jpg


Those cabinets are a house of cards, ready to collapse. Seriously, you already called it:

...making a mame box in an old arcade cabinet.
 
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Not sure why you would spend money and time upgrading something that isnt worth much of anything.

I had one someone gave me free and I had a hard time giving it away locally.
 
Come on guys, what is he hurting by doing this? Nothing. Is it stupid. Yes. But who cares. We all do things just for the heck of it sometimes and sometimes it can turn out pretty entertaining. Help the guy out.
 
We are. Those cabinets literally fall apart if moved too much. Why waste time upgrading it if it's not going to hold up? Get a real arcade cabinet - something that will still be around decades from now.
 
This takes me back to when I got the "guts" from one of these and moved them to another cabinet I had laying around. In fact, I think the video is still on my channel, it was one of the first video's I uploaded using a cheap camera, so the quality sucks.

I do remember this being a picky bastard with the video signal. My problem was that the image was a bit dark compared to the cheesy AV monitor these came with. I think I actually took the casing from one of my TV's back then and turned up the colors along with the flyback, which did help. But I never had any signal errors as you describe.

Emulation was good but even with the monitor it came with there was never enough red. For some reason it's more of a peach color. That combined with the slower music in Satans Hollow just kind of ruined that game for me (probably because I had a dedicated SH at one time). Other than that I think the games were fine.

The joysticks are OK, but flimsy. The cabinet I used was set up for street fighter so it already had the proper HAPP controls. I used those and, as I recall, the wires were so thin I had to fold the stripped ends just to get them to crimp into the quick disconnects I had used. I can't imagine they would hold up to any solder.

Later on I had a nice bartop model. Still cheesy but a million times better than the uprights. Might have kept it but got a good game in trade for it.
 
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I knew making this thread that I would probably get a bunch of people making negative comments, but since the people on this board are pretty knowledgeable about technical stuff I thought it was worth a shot.

I'm not interested in doing a 'complete make over' on this thing because that's a waste of time and money. I have seen people put in new control panels and other stuff, and if that's what they need then fine.

I'm just trying to figure out this TV interface issue, and was hoping I could get some light on this thing. A lot of people don't have room for 30 cabs in their basement, so they have to default to multi games of various types.

Again, if you need to trash talk, there's another dedicated thread out there all for trashing these when they come up for sale.
 
Don't listen to the haters. They just miss Fizgig. I say go for it and have fun with it. Let me look into some of the specs on that thing and see if I can see any solutions for ya.
 
Again, if you need to trash talk, there's another dedicated thread out there all for trashing these when they come up for sale.

There is also a dedicated section for technical information and help.

If thats all you wanted you would be better off posting this there.

This is the "general" section so you will get more general comments.. including pictures of matches, and comments that it is generally not worth bothering with etc.

https://forums.arcade-museum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14
 
Larger Monitor

I'm with you, Viewsonix. I have one of those Midway 12-in-1s and honestly, it is one of my favorites. Got it really cheap many years ago and have often taken it to events for kids to play because it is so light compared to regular video cabinets.

I would also like to put in a larger monitor. I have the same question you have...not sure what they are using. If I find out, I'll let you know.
 
The one thing I want to do is upgrade the monitor from a 12 inch TV to a larger one. The problem is that the 'black box' uses some weird signal that can't be registered by most TVs. Connection is by way of a standard 3 prong component cable.

You say "most tvs" do you have any TVs this works on?

I'm going to guess you have VGA over the 3 prongs and not component. (VGA and component are very similar and sometimes interchangeable.)

Can you post some pictures of the wires from the board and to the monitor?

Look at wiring VGA to 3 prong and wire it up to a tri-sync monitor and see if that gives you a working signal. Even if you only have 25" tri-sync monitor to test with.
 
I knew making this thread that I would probably get a bunch of people making negative comments...

Probably because this site is for original cabinets. You won't find a whole lotta love (or technical info) for MAME or 60-in-1s, or 12-in-1s... Considering you have close to 1,000 posts here, you already knew that. You'd be better off posting on http://arcadecontrols.com/arcade.htm

As for my matchbook photo being 'negative', you probably should pick up a sense of humor, but my comments regarding those cabinets are accurate - they are cheaply built and prone to falling apart. That's not hearsay or rumor, that's from personal experience with them.
 
I knew making this thread that I would probably get a bunch of people making negative comments, but since the people on this board are pretty knowledgeable about technical stuff I thought it was worth a shot.

I'm not interested in doing a 'complete make over' on this thing because that's a waste of time and money. I have seen people put in new control panels and other stuff, and if that's what they need then fine.

I'm just trying to figure out this TV interface issue, and was hoping I could get some light on this thing. A lot of people don't have room for 30 cabs in their basement, so they have to default to multi games of various types.

Again, if you need to trash talk, there's another dedicated thread out there all for trashing these when they come up for sale.

No hate coming from me.... but I am going to offer up a suggestion: IF you can find a cheap/free Poker machine cabinet, it might be worth it to switch to the better built one(just going off of the info gathered from this thread). I've not seen one of these, so some pics may be helpful.

Especially of the connector.

The game's electronics output the video signal as VGA from a little googling.

So, it uses VGA signals, but an RCA connector? That might be a little hard to track down, maybe an adapter can be made?
 
So, it uses VGA signals, but an RCA connector? That might be a little hard to track down, maybe an adapter can be made?

Normally BITD you had a 5 cable BNC style split for higher-quality CRT's such as the IBM 21" monitors. There was also the 3-plug RCA component cable oddity for VGA too for standard home TV's.
vga-cmpnent.cable.jpg
 
Can Mods move this thread over to technical support forum or do we have to close and recreate?

Yes, the cable *looks* like a standard old RCA "yellow/white/red" cable. However some of you found that it's actually a vga signal, so thanks for that. Your Google-Fu is better than my Google-Fu

As for "what TVs worked", the only one I have found was the original 12 inch blue tv that came with the thing, everything else failed.

I actually don't really mind the trash talk, I figured that this forum has a lot of really experienced people in it and "if anyone could figure it out, these guys could".

Thanks for posting that link about the RCA to VGA cable, I'm gonna give that a shot since it's fairly cheap. I will post results.
 
Does anyone know where to get a replacement joystick for this game, a friend of mine needs one replaced and after taking a look for him, I realized that swapping it out for a standard arcade J/S was just not going to work, without A LOT of modifications.....
Thanks
Jeff
 
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