Digital Restoration Book
As I get further involved in this hobby, my interest in restoring these machines has grown to where I can't leave a machine as-is. Even though it may be clean, it's just not enough. Disassembling all the components and then determining the best way to restore them is quite a satisfying challenge.
On these machines, a huge part of the appeal and "personality" is the playfield design. Unfortunately, this area also easily suffers from the effects of time and wear. Such as fading and water damage. A few of us have reproduced playfields using adhesive vinyl with excellent results. Now there is a book entitled "Digital Restoration Secrets: Restore Antiques, Arcade Games and Pinball" available from Amazon and gamerroommag.com.
I just received my copy and I can tell you it takes all the guesswork out of how to go about reproducing labels, stickers, graphics, etc. The focus is on doing this digitally using either a scanner or photographing the object and uploading to a computer. The author describes how to do this in general and then offers a couple of tutorials using Photoshop and Adobe. Just a few of the things revealed are what files to save your images in to suit print shops, the correct color scheme to be used so that the printed copies will faithfully represent the original, pitfalls to avoid, etc.
For those interested in complete refurbs, this book is a huge time saver. I wish I had it when redoing my Jan Ball as I had to start over many times on the cel art simply because I didn't know the correct files and formats to use and wasn't aware of the many editing shortcuts available. There's also an interesting section on how the author got into doing this in the first place. It involves another of my great interests and that is 80's era arcade games. I had several in my house some years ago and enjoyed them quite a bit. The book details how at the time, there were no places in which to get repro arcade graphics so he created his own and his business was born.
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