SITE UPDATES - December 12, 2012

In-Game Artwork: 4 new games; 6 games updated artwork

For admirers of arcade artwork, Christmas comes early this year. I finally hunkered down, and got a whole bunch of stuff done in the last few weeks. Here we go...

• So a LONG time ago, alien_mame bought and scanned the bezel for the JPM version of Monopoly. Half the fun of the game is the different lamps around the gameboard as you play. To actually make the lamps work properly, I took a different approach, and created the bezel in layers, so that the lamps would stick out better. Don't worry... the full version of the bezel is in the file, for prosperity.
  
• I've been wanting to add the proper color overlay to Space Zap for a long time, once a collector contacted me that there was a B&W version, but then that collector never got back to me with the artwork. Recently, joey35car pointed me in the direction of someone that had that cab. I reached out, and he obliged, so a big thanks to Keith at Keith's Arcade for scanning his overlay and sending it to me. It really does look nicer now.
  
• Trebor had pointed out a small glitch in the bezel for Ghosts 'n Goblins this year. When I went to look at it, I realized just how BAD the bezel looked. It totally wasn't up to snuff compared to the stuff that we normally release. So... I re-did it. And it was good practice for me; seems like I know what I'm doing now, so now that almost no one is left helping me, I'll still be able to churn out really good artwork regularly.
  
• This year, Dave at http://www.robotron-2084.co.uk/ restored his Space Invaders II cab. He scanned and vectored the bezel/control panel, and was kind enough to send it to zorg for safe keeping at his site, so this is now in MAME.
  
• KombatMAME at BYOAC scanned and cleaned up the marquee and instruction card for Wrestlemania; these have been added.
  
• Just found out that in the Taito version of Space Invaders, the overlay for the saucer area is purple, not red like the Midway version. This has been fixed. You don't have to download the whole file; you can just download the new LAY file and replace it.
  
• I took a bunch of pictures at CA Extreme last year. One of the games that stuck out on me was Gee Bee. The actually overlay is different than what is in MAME today. I verified by checking a few other cabinets around the internet. Looks a lot cooler now. I'll submit it later to update the internal MAME version, with some slight alterations (since there are diagonal shapes in it).
  
• Found a good photo of the instruction card for Alpine Ski, which has been missing since forever, so that's fixed now.
  
• So right after I finished GNG, for some reason I decided to go back and look at Super Pac-Man. And... O M G... there were so many things wrong with it... just click here to see. Sad thing is, even the official repro that is sold today has some of these mistakes. At least it'll be right when you play it in MAME. And since I was at it, I had good photos of the cabaret version, so I added that one in also.
  
• And to end the year of with a bang... I think Video Pinball has been "the community's" most requested artwork since everything changed in MAME 0.107 over six years ago. I've been holding off on adding it all this time, because someone has been "working on the perfect version" of this artwork since before I started on this project. I'm tired of waiting, and the game is simply unplayable without artwork, so I'm doing something about it for now.
  

  Thanks go to TrevEB for taking some pretty good photos of the backdrop lit up in a cabinet. I tweaked it as best as I could to line it up with the game screen (good thing with the game in service mode, it lights up nine spots that show you how to line the screen with the artwork). Also, thanks go out to Andy Welburn for scanning the bezel so long ago for us, which zorg finished some time ago. So now, we can all play Video Pinball again.
  

  When the perfect version is finally finished, I'll more than happily replace this version.
  

That's probably going to be it for 2012 (unless Mikonos finally sends me the four pieces he finished four months ago). Have fun with the new stuff, and we'll have more goodies coming soon.