Perhaps this is just my inner poverty showing, but how does something like this even happen, from a monetary perspective?
I'm assuming the owners had investors or loans or some other financial reasons that would prevent them from spending a lot of money and then simply parking it forever.
And wouldn't property taxes or city nuisance abatement fines nibble away at the property over the years? It can't be completely free of carrying costs, right?
Even if there is no ongoing cost for the ship, wouldn't the owners rather have sold the furnishings rather than leave them to rot?
I did some research and found that there was a huge court case that didn't go in the owner's favor. So perhaps the owner is too emotionally invested to cut their losses?
Or perhaps they are tremendously wealthy and using the loss to write off other business gains? Or maybe it changed hands through inheritance, so the owner doesn't care about recouping the initial investment? Or maybe I'm overestimating the remaining value, and the thing is already a total loss?
This is all speculation. But it would be very interesting to learn how such a large venture was left to rot...
I'm no expert in arcade games but often the case with niche assets is that the cost of getting them off the premises can outweigh their market value, and assets are only worth something to creditors if they can be sold to recuperate accounts receivable.
For example via my employer I technically own a large multi-engine aircraft that is worth some $70 million dollars but requires significant repairs, engineering and refurbishment to restore to airworthy status, to say nothing of the cost of logistics to actually get the thing to a repair and overhaul facility. Even the cost to move it to a disposal facility (shredder) is prohibitive and requires significant logistics.
So it languishes in an aircraft grave yard providing a valuable service as a bird habitat.
>Even if there is no ongoing cost for the ship, wouldn't the owners rather have sold the furnishings rather than leave them to rot?
Organizations with more lucrative things to spend their man hours on tend to let abandoned projects just sit rather then liquidate them because the ROI of whatever they usually do is better than the ROI of liquidating a failed project. Property tax and other upkeep costs often wind up buried somewhere in a long list of similar costs from all the other real-estate the organization owns or leases or has to otherwise pay for. Things tend to finally get liquidated when a property needs to be sold or turned over like happened here.
Same mentality behind why each of us have a box of old VGA cards, 8MB RAM modules, and serial cables still in our closets that we haven't touched in years. You could sell them on eBay or Craigslist but for $0.50 per cable why bother?
There's a great 8-Bit Guy video, of him walking around a massive warehouse of brand new computers from the 70's through the 90's. Owner had a super sad story and was inviting anyone with an interest around the Houston area to take all they could. But how many can you fit in your car?
I don't know about this particular case, but it's not unusual for scenarios where an insurance or some other claim is made rendering property largely frozen / illegal to liquidate as anything but salvage.
Maybe if you sit on it long enough the statute of limitations can expire and you can do something more interesting than incur the costs of transporting a massive thing only to have it cut up for scrap, especially if you own land where it can just sit idle in the mean time.
This article is nearly 5 years old. I'd be curious to know where all the arcade games ended up and what the total value of them were all worth after resale.
Many of the cabinets are now in use, either in classic arcades here in the UK or in the hands of collectors. Most have been restored and are now fully functional.
I can't help but wonder what sort of maintenance might these machines require before starting up again? I imagine, at the very least, cleaning corrosion from the contacts of all mechanical switches and changing out the filter capacitors in the power supply and CRT. What else? Would every capacitor be suspect? Are the boards salvageable or would the cabinets just be gutted and a modern (MAME?) machine be substituted (or is this just sacrilege?)
Cabs from this vintage would have lots of individual components with probably a lot of through hole mounting. With the water damage being more recent I'd expect most of them to be serviceable. It would be most exciting if there were some for which no ROM dumps already exist. A game could be returned from the grave.
Since these games were grabbed by collectors I'd expect most of them to be fixed up like new. No need to go to all of this trouble if you are just making a MAME cabinet.
The Atari SUBS game in particular would be potentially difficult to emulate (at least trivially) due to its dual-monitor configuration, and without redisplaying it on opposite-facing monitors wouldn't be much fun lol
Restoration just requires logic for the most part. before switching on a game that's sat somewhere for 30 years, start with power. Is the machine getting 240v (or 120 depending where you are). Then check the transformer/power brick - is it doing its job converting 240v AC to DC voltages. Measure those. Is the monitor getting power and working. Then you can plug in your PCB (assuming it's not corroded to hell). Then go from there. There's so much info out on the web these days, someone has usually documented most problems you're likely to come across.
>> I can't help but wonder what sort of maintenance might these machines require before starting up again?
I used to have a small collection until I moved recently and sold most of them. The ones in my basement never degraded much, but suffered some common issues which are reasonably fixable. One sat with a monitor problem in my garage for 17 years. I'm in the US midwest, so that meant cold winters to thermal shock things when I'd open the garage door and such, but no direct exposure to the elements. When it came time to move, I fired up that game and it worked exactly as good or bad as the day I set it aside in the garage. My vector games were sold to a friend at lowish prices because I wanted them to go to a good home and they needed a little work - but they are physically in almost the same condition as when I got them 25 years ago. A box of boards I gave to the guy you fixed my monitor just because I had no use for them and again wanted them to go to a good home. My guess is most of those will work just fine. The one from the garage is the one I kept and it's beautiful in my new basement.
It's an interesting hobby. One I mostly gave up, but I had to hang on to one cabinet and a few boards that were most important to me.
> changing out the filter capacitors in the power supply and CRT. What else? Would every capacitor be suspect?
Given the timeframe the article quoted for the most recent cabinet (1980-1981), they all predate the capacitor plague [1] by nearly two decades. It is possible that the capacitors in the PSU's of these games might still be close enough to spec. to not need any replacement. But given the folks who picked them up, they are likely to test everything extensively and then decide what to replace based on that testing.
I knew this happened, but I never knew why it happened so often- or that it was actually coded into a word(Capacitor Plague) with a timeframe.(99-07) I just thought we quit buying dirt cheap caps in consumer electronics. I have not seen a motherboard pop caps in a long time.
Nice to know a true root cause and better understand all those boards I trashed long ago.
Pretty exhaustive wiki on the topic, thanks for that.
Pretty much. Our house came with a mid-80's arcade game because the previous owners didn't want to be bothered taking it with them. It works fine. I replaced the coin acceptor with a switch so you can play until boredom sets in. Everyone's already lost interest.
The best part of getting the game is that it came with full (hand drawn!) schematics!
That's more true for early 1980's and earlier electronics with through-hole caps (though a shorted cap could easily ruin your day), but I've seen a lot of mid-80's and newer vintage computers and game systems destroyed due to leaky SMD electrolytics.
I recently fired up an old Mac Plus that has stayed in the family and everything seemed to work fine until it started smoking, the display started to go wonky, and then it quit... Almost certainly an old-capacitor issue
That sounds like the RIFA brand AC line filter capacitor blowing. Cheap and easy fix provided you have a soldering iron and the long Torx driver to get at the screws in the handle. :)
Do you have a guide or something on how I can DIY this? I know soldering from my past military experience. The Mac has been in a shop for 8 months now "waiting on a part", I'm considering reclaiming it and repairing it myself, but I know nothing about the details.
There is a lot of nostalgia invested in that thing, it was my family's first computer and my own personal first experiences gaming and programming.
There's a good series of articles on the restoration and maintenance of a pinball machine, which has many of the same characteristics as video games, plus a few more mechanical issues.
A lot of them have been brought back to life. As mentioned by the other poster capacitors weren't such an issue, and the ship had been reasonably weatherproof for a good while.
This video was recorded around the time the stash was first identified and you can see the cosmetic state of a lot of the machines isn't bad!
Speaking as a guy who grew up in a family of boaters, the nearby presence of seawater seems to greatly accelerate the degradation of electronics on ships, probably via salt corrosion.
Not to mention the cabinets themselves. Almost all of them were made from varying types of plywood, which hate moisture. Atari was notorious for using MDF, which disintegrates in the presence of water.
Literally half the page is covered by a massive photo.
I expected scrolling further down the article would rid me of it, but it doesn't - furthermore, it's aligned to the right instead of the left, which breaks my brain while I'm trying to read it.
I can't imagine any benefit to this layout. Shrinking the screen causes the article to display properly, I learned, and I couldn't find a Reader mode...
Great article - extremely poor formatting in Desktop mode.
It's a readability thing. Many designers are taught (or organically arrive at the conclusion) that the ideal width to read an article at is roughly "book" width. There's some merit to the idea; it's easier to keep track of where the last line ended by seeing the shape of the words without needing your eyeballs to dance all over the place.
Once readability is founded, their argument is "who gives a rats arse about the rest of the page?" It's not the BEST design philosophy, but it's far from the worst one.
More about optimal line lengths if you're curious.
With line lengths that are too long, the user may have a hard time tracking back to the next line. Line lengths too narrow, the user's pacing and rhythm is thrown off. https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
I find the page easy to read as I hate wide chunks of text in general, but for what it's worth, Reader Mode in Firefox worked perfectly on that page when I just tested it.
I somewhat recently came across this youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9mrDyAw2EvsnFozzrxLrmQ. "Joe's Classic Video Games". They frequently produce fairly lengthy and in-depth videos about doing maintenance and restoration on older arcade games.
The one thing about these old cabs I still love is the artwork that adorns them. I know there's always been a huge market for skateboard deck artwork, but I still wonder if there's a market for this type of art - some of it was just magnificent in its heyday.
Most is now reproduced for restoration. Even a well perserved cabinet has a bit of fading and wilting of the marquees and screen frame by now, not to mention the sides and control surfaces.
Sorry, never opened it and I don't recall opening it (it was all I could do to photograph my hardware, upload to Wikipedia and get it to a potentially good home in lieu of losing it to the rubbish). However, I just noticed it has an interesting character: according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde#Similar_characters it is the REVERSED TILDE. Maybe that is a clue. Not being maths trained, I also stumbled on ∺ (geometric proportion) which seems interesting and appealed to me as a potentially n-dimensional 差不多 :)
I'm assuming the owners had investors or loans or some other financial reasons that would prevent them from spending a lot of money and then simply parking it forever.
And wouldn't property taxes or city nuisance abatement fines nibble away at the property over the years? It can't be completely free of carrying costs, right?
Even if there is no ongoing cost for the ship, wouldn't the owners rather have sold the furnishings rather than leave them to rot?
I did some research and found that there was a huge court case that didn't go in the owner's favor. So perhaps the owner is too emotionally invested to cut their losses?
Or perhaps they are tremendously wealthy and using the loss to write off other business gains? Or maybe it changed hands through inheritance, so the owner doesn't care about recouping the initial investment? Or maybe I'm overestimating the remaining value, and the thing is already a total loss?
This is all speculation. But it would be very interesting to learn how such a large venture was left to rot...