New High Score

Just had a great game on WCS almost beating my Grand Champion score....3.5 Billion in the end. I beat Germany 5:4 in the world cup final with a goal as the air horn went off and then beat them again through multiball.

World Cup Soccer at night

Thought I'd post a few pics of the WCS pin when it's illuminated:

I'll put up a short video of the whole Kitchen Arcade soon and then I've got loads of pics from when I took the machine to bits for cleaning and fixing so I'll start posting those along with some info on what I did. I'll also get round to updating the World Cup Soccer High Score table tomorrow :-)

The New and Improved Kitchen Arcade

A new addition to the Kitchen Arcade means I've got both video games and pinball covered

It's a World Cup Soccer 94 pinball machine made by Bally Williams to celebrate the World Cup that was held in the USA that year....won by Brazil I think. It's in good condition for a 17 year old machine and has only really needed cleaning and a few minor fixes since I bought it. I'll go into more detail on how I took it to pieces, cleaned and fixed it in future posts as well as give some more info on the rules of the game and how I'm getting on with it. For now here's a few more pictures:

A new addition

It's been a while since I've posted anything but I'm pleased to say that the Kitchen Arcade has expanded recently with the addition of a World Cup Soccer 94 pinball machine. Pictures and info will follow shortly as well as a minor update the to layout of the blog.

Some HyperSpin Themes

I've been spending a lot of time learning how to use Photoshop recently so I could create my own themes for HyperSpin. The themes are what you see when you navigate to a particular game or system within HyperSpin and are the key thing in customising the look of the Kitchen Arcade. Below are some photo's of what I've come up with so far:

Great 100 Mile Rally

Battle Garegga

I've also started playing a quite a bit of Gyruss and I'll post my first go at a review soon...when I stop messing about in Photoshop :-)

Pictures of the Kitchen Arcade

Dreamcast Update: I've managed to get nullDC working and successfully booting games so Jet Grind Radio is now playable on the Kitchen Arcade.

Whats running on the Kitchen Arcade?

The whole point of replacing the PC in the Kitchen Arcade was so it could run the HyperSpin front end and a number of different emulators. Installing HyperSpin was really simple and there's full instructions on their website (link shown in My Favourite Gaming Sites at the bottom). The site also includes help on getting some of the more popular emulators running as well.

The current list of emulators running on the Kitchen Arcade is:

• MAME - Arcade games
• ZSNES - Super Nintendo
• Nestopia - Nintendo Entertainment System
• Project 64 - Nintendo 64
• Virtual Boy Advance - Gameboy Advance
• Stella - Atari 2600
• Kega Fusion - Sega Megadrive/Genesis

I've also got some jukebox software installed so I can listen to music when cooking and washing the pots :-) I'm in the process of trying to get the Sega Dreamcast emulator nullDC working as well but it's not quite there yet. It keeps crashing when I try and boot a game but I think I've had a bit of a breakthrough this evening so hopefully it won't be long before I'll be playing Jet Grind Radio!

I'll put some more pics of the cab up next time.....

The New PC

I needed to replace the aging P4 system in my arcade cab if I wanted to run HyperSpin to the level of quality I was after and chuck some other emulators on there. I already had a spare 600W power supply that I could use so placed an order for the following bits to build the new machine:

• Intel Core i3 540 CPU (3.06GHz)
• Gigabyte H55M-UD2H Motherboard
• 4Gb Corsair XMS3 DDR3 RAM (2x 2Gb)
• 500Gb Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive
• Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler
• Coolermaster Elite 360 Case
• Samsung DVD Drive

It all went together pretty easily, although the CPU cooler is a tight fit in that case, and the system posted first time :-)

Once I'd installed Windows I spent a bit of time overclocking it to see what I could get out of the CPU. At the moment I've got it running at 4GHz with headroom to go higher if needed, but tbh nothing I've put on there so far has come close to struggling and the system's running quite cool so I think I'll leave it for a while. The only other work I've done is to wire the button in the arcade cab, which is top right in the pic (Push to Eject Coins), to the Power On/Off header on the motherboard. So now, when the cab is sealed up, I can turn  it on and off using the old coin return button :-)

That's it for the hardware, HyperSpin and emulators are next........

My Arcade Cabinet

For many, many years I always wanted my own arcade machine and for a long time I was thinking about building my own cabinet either from scratch or from the remains of a dead cab. I spent ages reading books and looking on the net trying to learn everything I needed to start the build (BYOAC was a great source of info - link at the bottom). The problem was I always found something got in the way of me actually starting chopping up wood, with the biggest issue being where could it go once I'd finished.

Then last year, a guy at my work recommended a company on eBay who were selling reconditioned machines running MAME for a very reasonable price. Not long after this, the large plant in the corner of my kitchen had an unfortunate accident and suddenly I had the space ;-) The deal was sealed.

A couple of weeks later this turned up on the back of a truck:

The great thing was, because the PC was already setup it was just a case of plugging in, chucking some ROM's onto it and I was ready to game. Over the next few months I added more games to the MAME build and messed about with the mameWah frontend to make it look a little less basic when it started up but I couldn't do much more as the PC inside wasn't that powerful. Also, Radiant Silvergun was really choppy and as that's one of my favourite games I needed to do something to fix it.

I came across HyperSpin on Youtube and decided that I was going to build a new PC to go in the cab, one that could run Hyperspin, all my MAME games and any other emulators I wanted. I ordered some parts and waited for a delivery......

The First Post!

Ok, so it's quite late and I've got work tomorrow so I'm not going to put much in my first post. This is the first blog I've ever done so I'm not really sure what your supposed to do for your first post :-)


The idea of this blog is, now that I've finally got the arcade machine in my kitchen working just how I want, to post info and reviews on all the different retro games I'm able to play. I'll also give some info on the machine itself   and how I got it configured as that has taken a fair bit of trawling the web and may be of help to others who are trying to do the same thing.


I'll start with some info about the machine tomorrow and maybe some pics.