Max-A-Flex
Atari home hardware
in an arcade cabinet
In the early
eighties, at the height of the arcade video
game craze, everybody with a bit of technical
knowledge wanted to make video games and cash-in
on the action. Every arcade video game company
in the world was trying every type of gimmick
imaginable to come up with the next Pac-Man
or Asteroids. When they weren't able to, they
sometimes decided to try other ideas to appeal
to both players and operators. Putting proven
home console or computer games in arcade cabinets
and making it easy to change the cabinet into
a new game was one of those ideas.
Several companies
tried it. Nintendo was the only one which had
any success with its UniSystem and PlayChoice-10
systems. The idea never really took off and
the other attempts at home hardware-based arcade
systems from companies such as American LaserGames,
fell into obscurity. Atari never saw it as a
good enough idea to try it directly, although
a spin-off company, Sente, developed the SAC-3,
based on Amiga hardware, but never released
it.
Atari did, however,
give license to another company, Exidy, to release
an arcade system with an Atari computer inside
- an Atari 600XL to be exact. Exidy contracted
First Star Software to develop cartridge based
versions of four of their games to be used for
the system. The
titles were Boulder Dash, Bristles, Flip and
Flop and Astro Chase. They called the system
Max-A-Flex. The four games were only released
in their cartridge form for this system and
are therefore quite rare and collectible by
Atari home system collectors. They will play
just fine on an Atari 800 compatible computer.
Most collectors don't know the reason they are
so rare.
Exidy designed
the Max-A-Flex system by removing the keyboard
from the 600XL, mounting it to the side of the
cabinet with its original power supply, installing
a composite video to RGB converter (to use a
regular arcade monitor) and creating a custom
controller/timer/audio amp circuit board that
plugged into the keyboard interface connector.
This was wired to arcade controls and the coin
door. When a quarter is inserted into a slot,
an amount of time determined by dip switch settings
on the controller board is added. While the
timer is running, all controls are active and
you can control the game via Start, Select,
Option, an 8-way joystick and one button. When
the timer gets down to 10 seconds of play remaining,
the control board starts beeping a progressively
higher pitched beep and flashing the "insert
coin" and "extend play" lights.
When the timer gets to zero, the controls become
non-functional, but the game does not reset,
so you could add more coins and continue playing.
Exidy used a
pre-made cabinet used by several arcade game
companies, such as Sega, for Pitfall 2 (a remake
of Pitfall, not a console-in-a-cabinet), seen
at http://www.arcadecollecting.com/pitfall2/pitfall2.jpg. Generic
arcade-theme artwork was created by their art
department for the cabinet and game-specific
marquees were made for each of the four titles.
The system was
a huge flop. The idea was decent, but only Boulder
Dash was even mildly popular and the other games
weren't big sellers even on the original home
systems. Exidy didn't have a huge library of
titles it could crank out for the system and
so couldn't use sheer numbers of titles alone
as a selling point like Nintendo did. Hardly
any cabinets were put into circulation and barely
anybody knows it even existed.
Boulder Dash
is one of my favorite games and I always found
the two other arcade ports of it to be lacking.
I had heard of Exidy's system from some of the
hard-core arcade game collectors, but had never
seen one, but kept my eyes out. Finally, the
Boulder Dash I was looking for showed up on
eBay in late July '02. Apparently not many other
people had heard of or cared about it either.
The bidding didn't go crazy and I was able to
pick up the cabinet for about the going market
rate for any of the non-classic games you see
selling on eBay.
More pictures
and the story of how I acquired my Max-A-Flex
cabinet can be found on my web site, http://www.arcadecollecting.com,
hidden under the "Games in my collection
-> Boulder Dash" link.
Tim Lindquist tim@arcadecollecting.com
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