In a universe far far away live a species closely related to the Galaxians, these ‘people’ were created by the Shoei Corporation for their “Galaxia” clone of the classic game. Some decades later I purchased a completely non-working arcade cocktail table on Ebay for a small-ish sum and here we start the journey to get something working.
My machine is the cocktail sit down version and my own looks a little worse for wear compared to the original (circa 1980 flyer)!
but I’m pretty sure the aliens from GalaxyX are in there somewhere…
Now if that isn’t cool side art I don’t know what is! (And you can even see it in the flyer above so this is the real deal). Now I know many people would consider this just a ‘bootleg’ and the licencing agreement if any between Midway and Shoei is not known I think it’s awesome.
I bought the machine in a non-working state, with no life from the monitor and/or the PCB and a look inside confirms the machine is a bit worse for wear… lots of mildrew type mould and much of the ply looks like it is separating due to decades of storage in a damp environment.
but most of the bits seem to be present including the coin box (locked!), coin mechanism, monitor and PCB etc.
There is a quality control label on the inside…
Now I know from a previous encounter that these Japanese cocktails use the Japanese calendar on their labels so we need to translate Year 55. The years are related to emperors and 55 is “Showa 55” so that dates the table to 1980 in the Western Calendar. 1980… what a year… I was doing my GCSEs… O-Levels… Number ones included “There’s no one quite like Grandma” by the St. Winifred’s School Choir.. we were so cool back then.
A peak at the monitor…
I really don’t know anything about monitors but it is clear we have some major issues here… when power is applied there is no life at all, the general state looks OK, there are signs of rust on the chassis but no major water damage; the tube itself doesn’t have major burn in. It’s a cute 14″ monitor… a job for another day.
On the other side of the table we see the game PCB angled down into the darkness, attached by two wooden runners, the board itself has a raised daughterboard with some UV EPROMs and generally the whole thing looks pretty crusty.
In further instalments we can look into each of the pieces and see if anything is salvageable.
