Star Wars Arcade

This was found off a local Craigslist posting. After contacting the seller I found out that the game was on location in a laser-tag type establishment not too far away and decided to stop by and check it out. When I got there I was amazed; I have never seen the arcade version and only played the game on the Sega 32x. I coined it up, played a game and knew immediately that I wanted it.

Correspondence with the owner was soley thru email and was difficult as he was unwilling to provide me with his contact # and was never in any of his stores. The original asking price was $1000 but I knew I wasn't going to pay that. I decided to make a play for $500. After a week of not hearing back from the seller I figured I somehow insulted him. The day before I was going to send him an email asking if he considered my offer he replied that he would accept.

I recruited the assistance of couple of friends; a fellow co-worker (Jeff) and fellow KLOV member and arcade collector (DJDNS). It took two pickup trucks and some muscle to lift the components but everything worked out.

Once home we quickly unloaded the game. Darryl (aka DJDNS) took some measurements and determined that it would not fit thru the doors and into the gameroom without further dissassembly. I decided that for the meantime we would assemble in the garage and I would tackle moving it into the gameroom another day.

The game looks and works really good. It shows some signs of being on location (ie. soda spills. nicks here and there) but should clean up nicely. There is also a little problem with the convergence on the monitor that I will need to adjust.

This thing is H-U-G-E!!! It measures approximately 100" x 60"! After some measurements and a week of trying to determine how to set it up in the gameroom I decided to look into displaying it thru a plasma. After some research and inquiries on KLOV I found out there was a way. I purchased a RGBS to VGA converter and decided to use a spare 50" HP plasma in the rec-room.

KLOV member PCJohn was indespensible with his assistance and knowledge setting up the converter and configuring it to display correctly. Below are his directions with some of my added tips.

The card should come with 2 connector cables, a 6 pin for the

video and a 2 pin for the power.

The 2 pin connector hooks up to 5 volts. (I tapped in to the +5V and ground coming off the switcher in the bottom of the game)

With the 6 pin connector, tie off the yellow lead, you shouldn't need it. Clip the end of the video 5 pin connector going to the card cage (I had a cut 5 pin connector in my scrap box that I used instead of cutting into the original wiring harness), match up the red to red, blue to blue and green to green. Connect the white from the game (sync) to the gray (may be white) on the converter. The last wire from the game is ground which connects to the black wire on the converter. Connector your power connector to a 5 volt source (I think you can use 12 volts too - I did not confirm this).

There are 2 VGA output connectors, connect either one to your monitor or TV.

Once you turn it on you need to do a little tweaking. You should immediately see some Chinese lettering appear on top of the screen.

After a second you will get a picture or a NO SIGNAL message. Press and hold AUTO for a second, usually this will get everything going (Auto button didn't do anything for me, perhaps I didn't hold it long enough. I had to press the SW button until I got to RGBS). Now go into menu and you'll have to fiddle around to get the thing into English (It's the last option). Once you get into English you can change the resolution, adjust the screen, etc.

Go into the setup menu, find the options that say CLAMP ST and CLAMP SP. CLAMP ST should be set to 03, CLAMP SP should be set to 04. If they are already set to this, then try increasing the settings by 1 digit. SP should always be higher than ST.

Within an hour of receiving the converter I had the game up and running thanks to PCJohn.

Next hurdle was to move the game into the gameroom. As I mentioned earlier it would require disassembly for it to fit thru the door into the gameroom. A buddy (and fellow Star Wars fanatic) visited me for the weekend and offered to help get it into the gameroom. I do not think he really knew what was going to be involved but approximately four hours later, and after completely dissassembling the game, it was in the gameroom and re-assembled (sorry, no pics).

Finally, I again recruited fellow KLOV member and home theater guru, Darryl (aka DJDNS); this time to wall-mount the plasma. After a couple of hours the plasma was up, we connected the game and positioned it. The moment of truth was upon us as I was nervous that the game would flake out after the move. I powered it on and...