#palatron

Howdy folks! Today is the big day that the Palatron will be unveiled. This afternoon, dozens of fine folks from several creative industries in The Hague will join us for some coffee and a beer. All that to witness the official opening of The Hague’s very own Winnitron 1000!

For all you people living under a rock, the Winnitron is an arcade cabinet with new-skool indie games. It is stuffed with brilliant contemporary gaming gems from all over the world.

The past days have been hectic and we barely met the deadline. But we made it, and these pictures tell it all!

Look, here it is all painted and shiny:

Hmm, still missing a control panel though. I’ve seen it around here somewhere… Ah! Niels is playing with it:

Niels, stop that! You’re supposed to be applying T-molding.

That’s better. Keep up the good work!

Wow! Great stuff guys! Still no controls though. Where’s Tijmen? He’s great with that sort of thing. TIJMEN!!!

Great, guys. Get wiring.

Looking good! Meanwhile in the arcade cabinet…

Niels is making nice progress with the hardware, and small wonder…

He brought his father for backup :-). At this point Tijmen and Guido decided to have some sort of tea party:

After that it was assemblytime!

First a nice glass plate to protect the monitor:

And, of course, the controls!

Niels’ mom also tagged along for that finishing touch :-)

Let’s fire it up!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand…

IT’S WORKING! IT’S WORKING!!!

And there you have it. Our Palatron.

You’ll notice we left in the coin drop-system. We thought it would be nice to maintain a retro-look and figured the coin-drop would help achieve that (don’t worry it’s not operative, you won’t have to pay squat to play the Palatron). We also left this sticker on the back for the same reason:

So everyone can see that it used to be a Mortal Kombat cabinet.

So, the Palatron is finished. Well, it almost is. We still plan to add some graphics to make it even prettier. But we’re officially unveiling it this afternoon. Want to come play it? I, personally, accept all challenges to a game of Super Crate Box. And Fabian claims he can defeat anyone in a game of Nidhogg.

Come and have a beer with us and play the Palatron. You can register for the unveiling event here. Or you can just swing by at your leisure :-)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Fabian has challenged me to a game of Nidhogg.

Cheers!

We love the Winnitron! It’s an indie game arcade network with new games on old school arcade cabinets. (check out winnitron.ca for more information).

It is about time we built one and put it on display in the public spaces of the Caballero Fabriek in The Hague.

This project has only just begun and it’s already been loads of fun. We dug up an old arcade cabinet (Mortal Kombat 3!) and picked it up in a van that was too small. This resulted in us cruising over the highway with an arcade cabinet sticking out the back. That distracted a lot of people from driving. We weren’t paying much attention to the road either. All four of us (Guido, Tedo, Fabian and Peter) were preoccupied with looking over our shoulders to see if the cabinet wouldn’t slide out. But, we made it!

Here’s us, unloading the behemoth:

Next, we tore out all the hardware. Here you can see Guido and Niels working on that:

Use the parts to pimp the office a bit:

And what you’re eventually left with is an empty cabinet ready to be filled with new hardware and Winnitron’s software. Meanwhile we’re using it as a puppet theatre:

Expect more blogs about the progress of this project. And if anyone is interested in the hardware we tore out, it’s for sale.

Stay tuned! Winnitron is coming!