from Hacker News

Restoring the Galaxian3 Theatre 6, 1992 six player arcade machine

by countrymile on 4/19/25, 9:22 AM with 52 comments

• by mrandish on 4/19/25, 5:49 PM

  Such a wonderful effort to see this rare game being restored as well as being accurately preserved. Of the future actions discussed at the end, this one seems most important to me:

  > Investigate a solid-state replacement for the LaserDisc players.

  Those laserdisc players are cantankerous, mechanical beasts and even the industrial grade ones will likely be a constant point of failure across enough 80-hour operating weeks. While laserdisc based games were fairly rare, in the aggregate there were still quite a few notable titles made (led by Dragon's Lair (1983)).

  It would be terrific for the preservation community if someone made a solid state replacement based on an SBC like a Raspberry Pi. Fortunately, most of the games used a handful of fairly standardized serial protocols to communicate with the disc player. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard, especially using FFMPEG to drive the actual playback and the serial input could have a scriptable command parsing and translation layer. There weren't that many different commands a laser disc player could do. Basically, the usual start/stop/pause/ff/rew as well as chapter and frame seeking with simple loop.

• by lordfrito on 4/19/25, 12:31 PM

  Way back in 2007 someone found one of these, disassembled it(!), transported it(!), rebuilt it(!). Long story but full of great pics. [0]

  [0] https://www.dragonslairfans.com/smfor/index.php?topic=231.0

• by cadamsdotcom on 4/19/25, 1:48 PM

  Congratulations on a very successful restoration and thanks for writing such a beautiful deep dive.

  The work put in here is a perfect example of how motivation can be so much stronger if it’s for the love, done by volunteers, than for any amount of money.

  It also evokes the Penn & Teller quote, “Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

• by hinkley on 4/19/25, 5:33 PM

  One of the things I would change if I could go back to childhood is to find the money and the people to play more Gauntlet. When I was in high school I became friends with a guy who knew where all of the co-op games were on the college campus just down the street from our school.

  Most of the arcades I knew of were too small to house a beast like this, but I would have watched the hell out of this one.

• by austinallegro on 4/19/25, 8:32 PM

  The 28 Player version was resident at the Namco Wonder Egg theme park for years. Not sure what happened to it.

  Sega G-Loc 360 and WEC Le Mans (the blue cabinet version is rarer than the red one), Namco Drivers Eyes (the full F1 Car cabinet) and the Sega Hologram Time Traveller machine were all great arcade machines bitd too.

• by wyldfire on 4/19/25, 3:06 PM

  These days, it seems like one of the best multiplayer arcade games is "Killer Queen" [1]. It'd be nice if there were more games like that. It offers a gaming experience that's more unique to the arcade IMO.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Queen_(video_game)#

• by doublerabbit on 4/19/25, 3:59 PM

  You can feel the sadness from the first picture with the tarp. Such hobbies of restoration will end, the "built-to-last" has lost it's charm and it's sad. We have grown up with such high expectations for an object; "It must have X, Y, Z" turning the future is a blessing and a curse. I guess it was the way for it to be.

  You have a pocket device more powerful than Apollo 13 yet to actually preform restoration upon it is near-impossible. That itself will be a skill replaced by AI and as more future devices become completely unserviceable, all of this will just fade in to the darkness. It's broke, throw away and buy anew.

  Young folk today are dumbfounded on how to top-up their oil, change their wheel for their car, I do ask is this as intended?

• by liendolucas on 4/19/25, 6:15 PM

  Dumb question out of ignorance. In electronics when you have absolutely no idea where something is failing is it possible to apply kind of a binary search in the circuit to either spot or discard a failing section? Is this an effective way to search for problems in electronics or are better ways to do it? Perhaps is a very stupid question but I had it in my mind for some time.

• by ljf on 4/19/25, 9:44 AM

  Perfect reading with an easter long weekend coffee - I love well written and interesting stories like these.

• by timcobb on 4/19/25, 12:45 PM

  > a 28 player behemoth that debuted in April 1990 at the International Garden and Greenery Exposition in Osaka, Japan

  Why would an arcade game be debuted at a gardening and greenery expo?

• by squeedles on 4/19/25, 12:10 PM

  Wow! Great deep dive! I haven’t seen S100 boards in the wild since we retired our rack mounted 1980s Sun 2 decades ago (also 68020-based)

• by flir on 4/19/25, 12:14 PM

  Have played that (not that cab, a European one). Was, indeed, a world of fun.

• by dukeofdoom on 4/19/25, 3:12 PM

  I have an old Xbox 360, and a projector. Any multilayer games for get togethers. I'm actually building a backyard tki bar soon. Would be fun to add this for parties as well.

• by glimshe on 4/19/25, 11:42 AM

  Amazing. Why aren't we building things like this anymore?

• by m3kw9 on 4/19/25, 1:27 PM

  The arcades these days have almost zero wow factor, stuck in the 90s, I’m sure these machines were nothing short of fantastic if you first play it back then.

• by arronday on 4/19/25, 6:39 PM

  Great that this was kept inside and roped off instead of being found in an abandoned warehouse.

• by WarOnPrivacy on 4/19/25, 9:05 PM

  I believe Fun World in the article is Fun World Game Center in Nasuha, New Hampshire.

  ref: https://www.coastingwithculture.com/2017-northeast-trip/part...

• by unleaded on 4/19/25, 11:50 AM

  very sorry to post something tangentially related but does anyone know what happened to that ridge racer full scale machine? Can't find anything on it past 2022.