Hellomat in da house

To be honest: This is nothing new. I have my good, old Hellomat for about 11 years by now and haven’t played much. I obtained it back in 1997, where internet was something new in germany. A search on fireball (or was it yahoo? What was hot before google?) revealed very few information about arcade cabs. A couple of friends of mine helped me to get things started.

From a motley collection of sources I gathered all the parts to build a mame cab. A 120mhz pc, 80mb hd, 128mb ram, a hacked keyboard and 2 button joystick made my day. We even managed to get the monitor hooked up to a TVGenie – an seemingly ancient TV card. Along with ArcadeOS and about 2 days of configuration my cab was ready to go. A couple of month later the pc crashed at random stages and I lost interest in fixing it… till now. Working on the DANs sign for my arcade corner I thought it would be good to have a running cab in it, before putting up the decoration.

Through the years, the color layers on the marquee have cured and started to come off. I sat down and traced the whole thing in Illustrator, in order to preserve it. Kind of tricky as one of the layers is vacuum-metalized mirror coating – hence, all colors where applied separately, layer by layer. Last was a white backlit material, that is now responsible for the decay.

To cut a long story short. You can get the result of my work from here >localarcade.com
As you can see above, I did a MAME version for myself, trying to suite the design and create a mame logo that fits the look. I like it, but my selfmade maquee will never look as good, as the original because of the original metal mirror color, that I am unable to reproduce. Maybe there’s a way to print on a mirror…. I will need to call my printshop.