![]() Then came a momentous breakthrough.Ī Sky Skipper arcade PCB (printed circuit board) converted to run a different game, Popeye. ![]() Meanwhile, Crowley sold the second Sky Skipper PCB to US arcade collector Whitney Roberts, with the agreement that Roberts would help in the restoration project. ![]() But the flyer photos were in black and white, so Cotton could only make a best guess at what the original colours might have been. He asked Olly Cotton, the owner of Arcade Art Shop in Cornwall, south-west England, to recreate the original Sky Skipper cabinet artwork based on the arcade flyer. Then, Crowley set about recreating the cabinet by repurposing an old Popeye machine, which shared the exact dimensions of the Sky Skipper original. But eventually Whiting got around it and was able to download the MAME code on to the board, enabling it to play Sky Skipper for the first time in nearly 25 years. The hardest part was working out how to bypass the security chip, designed to prevent the PCB from being copied. “And gradually, over a month, he kept calling me up to say ‘I’ve got a bit of progress’,” recalls Crowley, as first the graphics then the sound sparked into life. ![]() It would be next to impossible to reverse-engineer one board on its own with no schematics, but with two identical boards, Whiting could cross-reference between them to painstakingly work out the functions of each chip. He now had his hands on one of the rarest circuit boards in existence.Ĭrowley then bought the Swedish Sky Skipper board, and handed both PCBs over to his engineer friend, Mark Whiting. While picking through piles of ancient PCBs, Crowley came across one labelled Popeye – but closer inspection revealed that the board was inscribed with the code TNX01, the same code as the repurposed Sky Skipper PCB board in Sweden. “It’s not a raid where you wear balaclavas or anything,” he says over a video call: instead, it’s the term collectors use when hunting through the warehouses of defunct arcade operators in the hope of rare finds. Not long after that, Crowley went on a raid in the north of England. But no schematics for the board existed, and it seemed there was no way to reverse-engineer it to run Sky Skipper.Ĭollector Alex Crowley at Arcade Archive. Then, a Sky Skipper PCB that had been converted to run Popeye suddenly came up for auction in Sweden. But, mysteriously, the game had been uploaded to MAME – an emulator system for arcade games – in 2002, which proved that an original Sky Skipper PCB (printed circuit board) must be out there somewhere. All he had was a flyer showing photographs of the machine. He’d already managed to bag a few real rarities for his collection, such as Sheriff and Space Launcher, but he was most intrigued by Sky Skipper since there was so little information on it. Almost.īack in 2015, Alex Crowley had developed a passion for collecting old Nintendo arcade machines. Sky Skipper had in effect been erased from existence. With the game deemed to be a dud, Sky Skipper was never officially released, and NOA later repurposed the cabinets’ circuit boards to run the 1982 game Popeye, much as many of Nintendo’s earlier Radar Scope cabinets had been reborn as Donkey Kong machines. Not ideal for an arcade experience that needs to be grasped within the first few seconds. But it was also confusing: both the playing cards and the gorillas leap into the air, and it’s not immediately clear which things players need to collect and which they should avoid. The graphics were certainly startling for 1981, featuring a riot of colours and a screen-filling star explosion when the biplane crashed.
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