The cabinet itself came in three flavours – an upright, a cocktail and a cabaret. All are pretty striking, but my preferred 'want' was a cabaret machine. I did own a full USA upright machine once upon a time, and stupidly sold it some time ago – something I've always regretted.
As you can see, it is based on the shape of the USA Williams cabaret cabs that house the iconic Robotron game (along with Stargate I believe) – sadly, Streets, the UK licencee of Williams games never bothered with side art, so it's not much of a looker.
It arrived complete, but not working. The previous owner told me he had attempted repairs by literally guessing where wires went. Not the brightest idea. I pulled the monitor out and rigged it up to my Centipede cabinet and managed to get a picture which was something I suppose. So we appear to be good to go on the monitor front. Sadly, nothing else was working.
There will always be opinion on these things, but in my view, given that the only real character to the cab is the marquee, CPO and bezel, I don't feel too bad about gutting it and changing it totally. The rest of the cab is so bland looking – it's really the style and shape that has potential. So I got to work on getting everything stripped out.
What was a bonus, was I was able to sell the boards, marquee and control panel, and pretty much got my money back for the total cost of the cab – so I regard this as a freebie, which is always nice, plus, those bits will be re-purposed elsewhere by someone else. That said, I needed to free up as much budget as possible, because getting this to look like an original US game wasn't going to be cheap. Artwork, paint, boards, wiring, joysticks – the costs were going to start mounting up, as this was going to be the most intensive restoration I had ever undertaken.
But, after a few words of advice (actually a kick up the backside) from a fellow collector over here, who keeps reminding me that "everything is fixable", I felt slightly better about taking on this mammoth task. So what the hell, let's have a crack at it. Clearly, this is going to be a big job to take on – I've restored a few cabs now, but this is the biggest challenge yet for sure. There is a lot of woodwork to do, which I'm not too confident about at all; also filling, sanding and paint work. Not to mention, artwork, boards, sticks etc, etc, etc. This is almost a "from scratch" build!
These small beams, as well as giving the new panels something to be secured to, will add rigidity to the cab. I used a similar technique on the inside corners which solved the "wobbles".
So after brushing all the exposed damaged wood with the hardener and leaving to dry for a few hours, it was time to break out the filler.
There are some areas that I'm not too sure about where I've added filler, so there may be more repairs to come where I've currently filled, but let's see how it turns out. So long as everything is solid, I'm not planning on OCD levels of perfection.
Anyway, as messy as it looks, everything is filled, with a good amount of excess (as you can see!), ready for sanding. I've got the other wood panels to add, so will do that also to get the cab sanded and prepped for paint.
I should mention parts at this point. I've decided to go down the JROK route, and have acquired one of the latest firmware boards ready for install. What is a JROK board I hear you ask? This is a new build of all the Williams games on a single tiny board using modern components, that perfectly replicate the original arcade code. JROK provide an ability to boot the board straight up into the game you want, so it's ideal for this purpose.
Now, I know I've been banging on about authenticity in this blog, but given that this is essentially a reproduction cab, I don't feel bad at all about using non-original parts. The upside of going down this route, is going to be reliability. The modern JROK will be rock solid – a blessing in this hobby.
Joysticks! Being a twin stick shooter, these need to be good and accurate. I wasn't convinced that the expense and difficulty of sourcing genuine Robotron sticks was the right thing to do (given the whole thing is a scratch build/repro anyway). I've decided to go with a pair of Super Pro Leaf 8 way joysticks from the guys at GroovyGameGear.com over in the USA. These are a modern interpretation of the traditional leaf switch sticks of old. Played with some in the US last year and they are fantastic.
Clearly those shafts aren't even close to the originals, so I added a pair of Versi-ball adjustable shafts with candy red balltops ot the order. These are fully compatible with the Super Pros, so hopefully we'll end up with a good result for the controls. I'd really like the controls to be as close to the genuine Robotron experience as possible.
Artwork is ready to be printed – I have vectors of the Control Panel, Bezel and Marquee.
I've also have a stencil set for the cabaret-sized US Robotron side art ready to apply paint. Again, ordered from the USA. I've not decided yet on whether to roller paint the silver sides and black front or go for spraying.
The positive thing I suppose is given that this is pretty much a "build" it does give me some slack in the process and I don't have to be too worried about 1000% accuracy – there will be some variables (coin door construction for example). Given that, I'm pretty comfortable using the JROK and modern joysticks.
So that's where I'm up to so far. Once we get some paint on it, it'll start to look like a desirable cab again. More in part 2 to come.
If you enjoy reading this sort of thing, do take a look at some of the other completed restorations I've done in the past by clicking on "Restoration Archive" at the top of the page.
Thanks for reading – see you next week.
Next Post Cosmic Guerilla: Weekend Pickup!
Inspired by this and my love for a good game of Robotron, coupled with no robotron cabinet in my collection, I have decided to scratch build a cabaret all of my own.
Stand by for plenty of questions…..