Retro Play were asked to design and build three arcade machines for the Marvel Stadium in Melbourne
The machines were placed inside the new Marvel Gamer Zone room at the internationally acclaimed stadium
I was delighted to have been entrusted with such an amazing project
David Gilmore, Retro Play
OVER COMING SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGES
The brief was to design and build arcade machines that had one game on each machine. It became apparent pretty quickly that we were going to have to use some of the original Marvel arcade games from the 1990's. Although Marvel (Disney) owned the copyright to the Marvel brand it was unclear who owned the rights to various other aspects of the original games. We were able to obtain the original digital copies of the Marvel games but we would have to seek permission from various different rights holders to use those digital files, Capcom, the original game producers of the 90's classics such as Marvel vs Streetfighter would have to be consulted. It was looking like the entire deal could fall through as the permissions could take months. So we decided to purchase some of the original Capcom arcade boards and interface them with new controls and of course a new screen!
We were able to wire the original arcade boards to brand new monitors using a clever converter board that takes the original VGA signal from the jamma harness and converts it to HDMI.
Original Capcom arcade game board fitted to a newly built arcade machine for Marvel
The next challenge was the coin mechanism Marvel wanted us to use. Marvel insisted on a specific digital acceptor made in by an Australian company, which was great! But there was one problem...No body made a coin door to accept the unusual size of this brand new digital coin acceptor ! "Just make one they said" - so we did
Custom made coin door
