Crystal Castles Project

This is a game I never expected to own.  After finishing up the Asteroids Deluxe, I was looking for a nice simple project.  This was offered to me by brew_miester on the Village forum.

The game actually works, so that's a major relief.  This cabinet is considered by many to be one of the best looking of the early Atari games.  Sadly, all of the artwork on this cabinet has been damaged in some way.  The front kick plate is faded and has two lock bar holes.  The control panel and marquee are both cracked and flaking badly, and the bottom sides of the cabinet have both water damage and smashed corners.  There is also a split in the front panel just above the coin door.

I looked online and found the control panel overlay and the marquee had both been reproduced.  I believe the side art and kick panel graphics are available also, but that would put this project's budget much higher than I am willing to go at this time.

Since this cabinet is going to be for playing, and not for marveling at, I decided to clean it up the best I could, but try to keep costs down.  It's best to have a plan when doing these restores, so I decided to just fix the cabinet, replace the control panel and marquee artwork, then repair and replace the poorly functioning trackball.  Also, the back door is missing, oh joy!  In the end, I hope to have a nice looking game, it won't be perfect, but I'll have the option to make it perfect in the future should I ever decide to go that route.

Here are a few of the before shots.  Everyone loves the "planking" of the back door area.

When starting a project like this I prefer to look on the positive side, and this cabinet has a few thing going for it.
1. The game works, the wiring and power supply are original and "un-hacked".
2. The majority of the side art is in reasonably good condition.
3. The control panel and coin door are not badly rusted or dented.
4. It's a great classic game made by Atari.