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Time Machine: how a Minsk game designer made an arcade slot machine

dev.by visited the workshop of the Minsk game designer Arseniy Golovinsky , who with his own hands – not so much in the garage as in the kitchen – made from scratch an arcade slot machine called Multi Arcade Time Machine by loading into it a library of 250 “old school” games from the 1970s – 1990s.

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Arseniy is an architect by education, but he “did not take root” in the profession: he almost immediately went into game development, where he then worked as an artist, 3D artist, animator and game designer. This is his old hobby: he started playing the first toy Asteroids at the age of 7 (now it is also in the game library of his machine).

Around the same time, he became interested in arcade machines, which at that time were already more common in movies than in real life.

The history of arcade games began in 1971, when American Bill Pitts created the very first arcade machine with the $14,000 Galaxy Game game.

The first commercially successful project about a year later was Atari’s bouncing ball game Pong. This game is considered the beginning of the golden era of arcade games (late 70s – mid 80s). Popularity, say, game Space Invaders was so over the top during this era that coin denominations suitable for the machine were always in short supply in Japan.

In the USSR, slot machines were produced by enterprises of the defense complex, copying American and Japanese originals. The filling of the Soviet analogues was more complex and cumbersome, which did not improve the gameplay in any way, but complicated the maintenance of the machines. Today, these rare examples of Soviet game development, which were very popular, can be found, for example, in private museums in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Not so long ago, Arseniy came across a hoarder whose specialization is nostalgic gaming “antiques”: pinball machines, arcade machines, consoles, handheld games, etc. “I bought FL Gun Professional from Bandai Electronics from him. This is the Japanese version of the game GUN, 1981, an extremely simple, but reckless “shooter” game for two players. It started my passion for retro gaming machines. Around that moment, I realized that now a classic arcade machine is vital for me, ”recalls Arseniy.

A person who intends to get an arcade machine (although this is not the most common item on the average wish list) has at least two options: order it from the USA (cost $2000-3000 + about $1000 shipping) or from China ($1500 + about the same for shipping). But there is also a third way.

Last winter, Arseny delved into the study of “how people build it” in order to make an automatic machine with his own hands. Since the design of existing solutions did not suit him, he decided to develop his Multi Arcade Time Machine from scratch “for himself”, having studied the topic to the maximum on the Internet.

Everything about everything – studying the topic, designing, organizing production, assembling and configuring the “raw software” – took about three months.

“Everything is very simple: in fact, my Multi Arcade Time Machine is a cabinet, a computer, a display from an old LED TV, controllers, speakers, lights and a pinch of fittings,” Arseniy voices the “summary” of his arcade machine .

All parts of the case according to his drawings were cut out of MDF by a private “sawmill” (at the same time, they refused to cut holes of non-standard size or rounding there). According to the plan, the production was supposed to take 6 days. However, the quality of the work turned out to be a big surprise for the customer: “They rarely got everything right the first time. It was painful to look at: 80% of the jambs, not a single corner was sawn off correctly, the details of the fasteners were 5 cm larger.

It took a month to finish the hull.

Arseniy brought the prepared base to perfection on his own, risking “cutting off his fingers”.

Drawings based on space games that adorn the case, he drew himself, partly taking ready-made vector graphics – airplanes; the color and compositional solution was borrowed from the Space Duel machine gun.

A large global community of “crazy enthusiasts” has rallied around arcade games. They created the MAME arcade machine emulator, the project has existed since 1997 and combines “a ton of arcade bios of all time, well, or almost all.” This emulator was involved in the creation of Multi Arcade Time Machine.

Inside the “cabinet” is an ordinary computer from a commission shop: “We needed a more or less live processor. All other components are minimal. I came across this option: video Geforce GT 430, AMD Athlon ™ II x2 200 (2.80 Ghz), 4 Gb RAM and a 160gb hard drive. This is enough even for 3D games of the year 2000. And most importantly, for the Hyperspin graphical shell, which is written in Action Script 3.0 and is demanding on processor resources.”

If you wish, you can do all this not only on Windows, but also on Linux, Ubuntu, Mac, this emulator is even available for Android and Windows-phone.

The Russian-speaking community helped with setting up the Hyperspin graphical shell, which allows you to view video previews for games (one of the enthusiasts “got confused”: he made a video preview and posted it in open access), select a game and play directly.

Arseniy calls his pride an LED display from an old LG tube TV weighing about 40 kg: “Those games were launched on precisely such displays: large grain, pleasant lamp color – all this recreates the atmosphere of the era and allows you to play those games the way they played 20-30 years ago. ”

Installing and connecting this monitor was very difficult: “First of all, because of the weight. Secondly, the TV set is very high voltage, and just in case, we had to do active ventilation of the entire case. Thirdly, you can’t just output a signal to a TV set, you need a magic VGA to RCA box that converts the signal for TV. I was lucky to find one in Belarus, but they usually order from China. In addition, modern interfaces are designed for a resolution of at least 800×600, while in TV we have 320×240. I had to tinker with the settings so that the picture was pixel by pixel, without distortion.

The controllers were ordered through AliExpress and cost less than shipping them.

“These controllers have been made by the same factory in China for centuries. They are quite primitive, but very hardy. At the heart of everything is a microswitch, like this. The controller itself is one of the simplest Xin-mo Dual Arcade, the buttons are connected according to a simple scheme. Then the system sees all this as a normal gamepad.

Since the buttons arrived before the case was ready, Arseniy spent his free time studying the possible button layout: “I assembled several cardboard prototypes to test them. I settled on a classic Japanese layout, console height at 1 m and at an angle of 3 degrees.

The joystick is also made on the basis of microswitches: “It has 4 switches – 4 directions. In addition, we get a diagonal if 2 adjacent switches are clamped, for a total of 8 directions. There are also analog arcade sticks, but they cost 5 times more, plus the controller for them should be more advanced and also more expensive.

The old TV also became a “donor” of speakers: “The TV in those days was a full-fledged home media device. And given the sound quality in older games, the quality of such speakers is more than enough.

Since the computer, the monitor and the “title lamp” heat up, Arseniy used a system of three fans to cool the machine.

The resulting “Time Machine” eventually weighs about a centner.

“Crazy enthusiasts” who developed the emulator managed to collect a colossal library of 66,000 games.

Arseniy loaded a smaller library of 2 thousand games into his machine, which he then reduced to 250, according to the principle “less is better”: “Otherwise people get lost, don’t know what they want, and just play Mortal Kombat ,” he explains.

Each of the games needs to be checked: many simply do not start, and in this case it is most often impossible to find a working version.

The result is a real textbook on the history of games. For a game designer, this is both a visual aid and a source of inspiration: “Take any game that is popular today – do you think it is super-original? In fact, all this was already a year in 1983.

Of the hundreds of games released in 1970-1990, Arseniy singles out a very effective and original Qix , Frogger , Q*bert , Donkey Kong (he started the Mario series), Cold War-themed Missile Command , Robotron , Pac-Man 90 021 – the first game without violence . Also, according to him, Tapper is good, where you need to play as a bartender and pour beer. In total, among his favorites are about 100 games of those times: