When I was stateside last month Tim was talking to me about a couple of his arcade game projects—he is always working on something cool. The one I won’t talk about here is pretty wild, it basically allows you to hack into the video and audio signals of an old gold arcade cabinet and stream it out online while someone is playing (reclaim Arcade meets Reclaim Video). But I’ll let Tim explain that in detail given it is something special. Just the other day he got online high scores working for one of our newest cabinets, namely Popeye. These high score save kits built for specific cabinets allow you to save high scores after restarting the cabinet (a feature not available to many of the earlier machines) as well as enable free play on certain cabinets that may not have that option. What’s more, for certain games like Popeye that have a free play option that does not use “attract mode” (when the screens shuffle to prevent burn-in) a save kit allows you to override those settings. The following video from the folks at Canadian Arcade explains this quite well and even takes you through the installation of a save kit on Popeye:
Now, you can actually buy a save kit that also allows you to collect and push the high score data collected to the arcadehighscores.com website.
So, not only are we able to enable free play on Popeye now, but we can also push the high scores to a Reclaim Arcade website that tracks not only top scores, but the most recent scores as well:
And looking at the site it looks like 9 other arcade cabinets we have currently (namely Pac-man, Tron, Asteroids, Defender, Kangaroo, Galaxian, Galaga, Track and Field, and Centipede) could also have high scores saved to this website. I love the retro-culture around arcade machines that re-imagine them for the web, this is some niche-ass retrofitting which makes it that much more awesome.
Pingback: The Year Reclaim Hosting Grew Up | bavatuesdays