Recent purchases

Just a little update about recent purchases I've made..

First of all, I found a Zaccaria power cable harness on eBay. I remembered that I had a broken connector in the backbox of my Magic Castle. But I did the mistake I often do: I bought something without ensuring that I actually need it. It turned out that I already had this cable in nice working order!

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Magic Castle #2

I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but I bought an absolutely beautiful Magic Castle from Germany last year.
...and then I sold it this summer. I'm not even sure if I have a picture of it.

I need to cut down on my collection, and my target is to sell the following games in 2011:
The Machine - Bride of Pinbot
Star Wars Trilogy
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Judge Dredd

Colour matching Turtles

I borrowed a Pantone wheel from a friend to match the colours on the TMNT playfield for the overlays I'm making. It wasn't that easy, however. It seemed the Pantone wheel didn't have all the colours I need, or did the playfield fade? I definitely couldn't find a perfect match for every colour, but it's better than nothing. The alternative would be me test printing colour samples, a very tedious job.

What surprised me was that the wheel didn't include CMYK or RGB values, just Pantone colour names. I Googled a bit and found some RGB values. Here's what I have so far.

The top (left) overlay:

Red: Pantone 199C (216,28,63)

Blue: Pantone Process Cyan C (0,159,218)

The bottom (right) overlay:

Yellow: Pantone 109C (249,214,22)

Solid red/orange: Pantone Warm Red (255,64,25)

I am starting to doubt the final results a bit, as I am going from "almost correct" Pantone colours through RGB conversion to CMYK. We'll see how it look when it's all done and printed.

Turtles playfield overlay

My Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pinball has a couple of areas with lots of wear. I'm trying to make some overlays to cover them. 

          

Stripping the playfield was more of a hazzle than I had thought. Quite frankly, I didn't like the Data East playfield assembly and fittings. I'm used to Bally/Williams games with at least some kind of bar to keep the playfield up, but it seems I had to hold this one myself while loosening the parts.

I used a cheap old Mustek flat bed scanner, but it seems it's not very happy with laying upside down. It all became very blurry. I don't know if it's because the scanning mechanism can't cope with being run upside down, or if it's the extra distance from the glass plate to the object being scanned.

Anyway, I was able to more or less recreate one of the worn areas in Illustrator.

I didn't care much about getting the colours right just yet, but I'm hoping someone can lend me a Pantone wheel later. However, I wasn't sure about the size of the thing. I believe I scanned it at 300 dpi, but I really can't know for sure. The Mustek scanning application leaves a lot to be desired. It even crashes when trying to aquire from Photoshop..

I tried scaling the vectorized artwork down to 1/3, but that was just a tad too small. Oh well, I will continue resizing and test printing until I get it all right, and then I'll print the overlays for real.