Galaxian Cocktail Restore

This is a project that I finished in the spring of 2009. It sold almost before I could get it finished. A co-worker knew that I had been repairing old arcade games, and one day asked, had I seen any of the "sit down - two player tables".

I purchased this non-working game in Tampa, on a Sunday morning. It had been converted, rather poorly, to a Ms. Pac Man. My hope was that I could simply do a few repairs and sell the thing off in working condition. I later found that the internals were a total rat's nest of old wires, and the monitor was basically toast, due to the previous owners repair attempts.

I knew that the game had originally been a Galaxian. So for a time I considered trying to locate a Galaxian PCB and controls. That would be the right thing to do, but would probably end up being worth less than what I gave for it. So instead I opted to install one of the Multicade boards into this cabinet, rebuild the control panels and replace the glass top and artwork. The game would retain most of it's original look, I used reprinted Galaxian Artwork, but would play 48 classic arcade games.

I gutted the cabinet and repainted all of the black areas. I cleaned the outsides with a scrubby and some Simple Green. After this I was amazed at how good the wood grain laminate looked.

Everything had to be rewired, so I started with the power supply and transformers. From there I was able to use most of the old parts, including the switch and fuse holders.

I mounted the new Multicade Gameboard and wired the entire cabinet. I had an extra monitor and used it to replace the damaged one that had been in the cabinet previously. As you can see, I was quite happy with how it was all coming together.

The original control panels had been drilled and re drilled several times. So there were a lot of extra holes that were causing problems. I had to rebuild two new control panels from scratch in order to have the buttons and joystick placed in the proper positions. They turned out better than expected.

Later, I covered these with a generic blue laminated material that could take a lot of abuse. The blue happened to match the blue used in the new Galaxian under glass artwork that I ordered from Arcadeshop.com.

I learned a lot about hooking up the wiring and building control panels from this project. The game looked fantastic when it was completed and I actually hated to see it go.

Here is the finished game, complete with lighted control panels. As you can see it retained much of it's retro late 70's look. The new owner set it to take coins and has it setting in a prominent place in his new gameroom.  If you would like to see more detailed photos of this project, click on the slideshow above and to the right of this page.