RoadBlasters (Steering Yoke Conversion)
Arcade Hardware Hacking: Part I
Arcade Hardware Hacking: Part III
Temple of Doom was a great introduction to the Atari System 1 logic board, and as it turned out was very easy to adapt to the JAMMA standard. With the exception of inverting the directional buttons (and the ridiculous number of repairs I had to make to the board), everything was super straight forward and amounted to simply mapping pins on the logic board to JAMMA pins with the help of the schematics. But Temple of Doom isn’t the only great game released on this platform. System 1 is a modular platform; Atari was able to save a lot of money by shipping out new cartridge PCB kits to arcade owners. These kits typically came with a new marquee and control panel so if you already owned an Atari System 1 cabinet, you could swap out games pretty easily without having to freight an excessively heavy cabinet. Once games lost popularity, they were just dead space in the arcade. This cost square footage, and also a great deal of electricity to run all day. Atari’s approach to game refreshes (which predated JAMMA by a few years) made it easy for arcade owners to save money and space. The System 1 supported a handful of games including Temple of Doom, Marble Madness, Road Runner, and the focus of this post: RoadBlasters.
RoadBlasters was one of my favorite racing games (next to Outrun, which will forever be crowned the best), and was also a System 1 platform game. Unlike Temple of Doom, there’s no joystick. The controls are very nuanced, as they are with many arcade racers, and included a steering yoke and foot pedals. You can imagine this was handled very differently electronically than a racer you’d play on, say, NES (like Rad Racer, which I grew up on). It’s not a very popular game for home arcades because you typically need to own the original steering yoke (or a compatible aftermarket one, if such a thing exists) in order to play it, which means a dedicated machine or something hacky. I’ve always found at-home steering wheels and pedals a bit dumb anyway, and prefer playing a racer with a gamepad or joystick. I’m certainly not going to buy some old arcade yoke (or a complete cabinet!) just to play a game. They’re charging some stupid prices for these too, because they can.