Retro Games Party

29/08/2021

29/08/2021

16/09/2020

Hello everyone. We’d like to share a little piece of news with you today.

Those of you who have been attending our expos over the past nine years may be aware that the arcade machines on display have been provided by one company – the brilliant Retro Games Party. As our events have grown, so has the arcade section and the RGP team have continued to excel themselves each year by adding new machines to each successive show.

Unfortunately COVID19 has had a devastating effect on the events industry and last month we were saddened to hear that RGP had lost their premises, were struggling to house all their machines and the future of the company looked uncertain.

However, after several weeks of negotiations with James and his team, we are delighted to be able to announce today that RGP will be merging into Replay Events with immediate effect.

So, what does this mean for everyone? Well, firstly it means that all the arcade machines you love playing at PLAY Expo are all safe and will continue to be taken to our events. Housing and maintenance of the machines will become our responsibility, which frees up RGP to continue to provide support to the wider arcade community through the repairs and refurbishments side of the business.

Those of you who know James and his team personally will be pleased to hear that they will continue to manage the arcade section at all of our future expos and other regular events such as NERG in the North East. In that respect nothing will change.

The only aspect we plan to change is the number and variety of machines we have at our events. We know that the arcades are one of the most popular aspects of our shows so we have already begun importing a large number of classic machines from overseas so that, once we are able to safely resume events we can bring an even bigger arcade offering to PLAY Expo and the other events we support.

And for the first time we also plan to be able to give you - the attendees - the chance to vote for which machines we bring to our shows via our social media channels. Our plan is to bring some of the more unusual machines to events and to give you a wider choice of arcades to choose from.

We hope you are all coping with the COVID19 crisis however you can. We can’t wait to get back to running expos and being able to expand on our already great arcade section. We really do hope to see you all very soon, until then, keep yourselves safe.

The Replay Events and RGP Team.

10/07/2020

We’ve placed a load of DVD’s and books in our eBay store go take a look. Some rare Dr Who and many others. All on buy it now. Combined postage etc etc...

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?sid=retrogamesparty

Shop eBay for great deals on !

26/06/2020

Another repair yesterday but a quick story about how things fail unexpectedly.

I bought an Asteroids Deluxe PCB on behalf of a customer known to be not working, i toiled over the board for weeks on and off and got it to start up but with some vector drawing problems. In the end I sent it off to my great friend Mark at RetroClinic who just has a knack with these boards who fixed the last faults and sent it back. Mark, like us, does a quick private video to show a board working.

Board arrives back with us and we fit it to the cabinet and it doesn’t work - bear in mind we’ve tested the rest of the cab with another board so other than some cleanup it should have been good to go.

Using test mode the cabinet produces a constant beeping but nothing on screen.

I found an EPROM had died again and replaced that - at this age thats quite common so no big deal.

I spoke with Mark who was happy to warranty fix the board and he asked if i’d checked a couple of things. I decided to do a quick check and found that a signal (/STOP) wasn’t working, tracked it back and found the chip that made that signal and fixed it and the game works.

This is very common for a game to work and then stop working.

The industry runs on fixed fee repairs and this one has been going on for months but its finally over. We’ll be massively out of pocket on the job as our customer was quoted the cost of repair and we have to stick to that. If we’d been working on an hourly rate the customer would owe us thousands and the machine would be worth far less.

Its another one out of the door now once we agree a final cost or more to the point a final loss for us.

22/06/2020

A quick fix of a Capcom Gunsmoke PCB as well today.

Picture one shows the problem where background graphics repeat themselves.

No known schematics available for this board so had to use my video probe (video coming soon) to figure out what bit of the board was what.

I’d repaired a Black Tiger with a similar issue a few months ago so the hardware is fairly similar.

Looked for chips connected to the roms in column 1&2. Knew this would be the addressing to the roms as the output was bad on the video probe (if the picture is bad later down the circuit you know the input is good at least).

Found a bad 4-bit adder (LS283) at 11D with an output that didn’t look right. Piggybacked the chip and graphics went to normal.

Replaced and soak tested and told customer.

Result!

22/06/2020

Two Paperboy PCB’s sorted today. One needed just a general cleanup and test. The other had four bad EPROM’s - one on the CPU board and three on the video board.

19/05/2020

I want to update everyone on our business during the Covid19 pandemic.

We have now mothballed the entire business with a small exception until the government allows festivals and events to start taking place and additionally the public is not scared of going to them.

The exception is we are still performing PCB repairs via mail in.

We are not taking in machines at all as we have no workshop anymore.

We will only respond to enquiries via our website and the phone has very limited cover. The facebook mailbox cannot be turned off unfortunately and will not be answered - please use our website contact forms to get in touch with us.

We do not and have never repaired fruit machines. Please search for a leisure services provider for these - a list of known ones we have recommended is on our website in the repairs section.

We are not taking in monitors for repair.

We can repair the following PCB’s:

Space Invaders
Pac-Man & variants
Most ATARI boards upto 86
Williams boards (Defender, Robotron etc)
Most other early board sets upto 87/88
And many others.

We don’t repair: Konami Simpsons and same series (Turtles, Xmen), SEGA Model 1/2 etc. Anything riddled with surface mount custom chips, NAOMI system boards.

When our ability to help changes we will update facebook and our website.

Thanks

20/03/2020

Hard times ahead with the coronavirus C19 epidemic and the forced closure of social gathering places meaning our hire business is now officially dead until this eventually passes or we go bankrupt waiting.

In the meantime we will be still performing repairs to video games via courier/post.

Specialists in repair of many vintage PCB’s

Restoration of machines.

Builds of replicas of classic machines.

Use our website contact form (not the page messenger we don’t monitor it) or call us on 0330 088 5690 during normal office hours.

We do not repair pinball, boxing machines or fruit machines!

03/03/2020

13/02/2020

They tell me that as a business page we’re not supposed to do bragging posts but this has been so long coming we thought we’d say % #$@&£! to the rules.

We backed this as high up as we could amd it was like watching stock values rise as it exceeded all its goal targets.

Can’t wait to get all the extras as well!

Well done to the Spectrum Next team!

10/02/2020

Wow! Utah Saints are coming to Play Expo Manchester in May! Think this tops a few guests for sure. Well done to the Replay Events guys for getting this on!

24/01/2020

Good to see Lee open again and getting some press coverage. Its hard for small independents to get noticed - well done!

Arcade Hub has dozens of vintage gaming machines including pinball

21/01/2020

Who's been? who's going? Its on until March 22 then moves!

http://www.retrogamesparty.co.uk/blog/the-lost-arcade-bristol.htm

05/01/2020

Who remembers video rentals?

Only 90s kids will remember this.

27/12/2019

If you’re an ATARI fan we highly recommend you check out this new article from The Arcade Blogger.

https://arcadeblogger.com/2019/12/26/atari-coin-op-archive-footage/

Well here we are, the end of another year. I should offer my apologies for the slowdown in posts in recent weeks – real life has been all-consuming with one thing and another so work on the b…

14/12/2019

Took delivery of 8 repro shells today for a customer. Thoughts?

20/11/2019

Who knows this all too well?

19/11/2019

Google to kill the physical console .... what do you think?

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-50453387

The tech giant's boss Phil Harrison believes its new service Stadia is a "leap forward" for gaming.

16/11/2019

How old are some of us now?

I'm... fading... away...

17/10/2019

20/09/2019

Please help support our friend Quang getting his game to a stand at EGX in October. This is a superb game in the making with a wicked control system - we’ve played the demo a few times.

Bex Trista Get Mao Mao Castle to EGX 2019! UPDATE:So you guys are AMAZING! and we hit the goal of half the money to get Mao Mao to EGX in a couple of hours!

11/07/2019

19/05/2019

Can you name all the problems with this photo?

Credit: AtariAge

28/03/2019

Nowhere near perfect yet but getting there #1985

24/03/2019

Desperately trying to catch up on some repairs after a lot of things have gone wrong this last few months... Bombjack PCB with an odd colour issue. Turned out to be a bad LS157 multiplexor partly failed in the colour circuit. Pics two and three show it fixed.
#1984

27/02/2019

https://www.facebook.com/PocketPixelDes/
Some great T shirts by one of our friends, Loads of geeky designs. A new one released each week.

Weekly pocket sized pixel art T-shirts.
£9 on 0-Day purchases, that’s 40% off the usual £15 price.
By Asobi.tech and CrookedHillCustoms

26/02/2019

Ever had an idea and then seen it done by someone else?

When i was in college, one of our required materials was a BBC2 programme - I think it was called The Thinking Machine. It had a clip from an Apple video called “vision of the future”.

https://youtu.be/JIE8xk6Rl1w

Watch that and then watch this video:

https://youtu.be/sHR8efUn3SY

Hardly anything in technology surprises or excites me nowadays but this I was intrigued by.

Whats your thoughts on both?

Apple Computer's 1987 vision of the future (approximately 2011) Published by http://en.inmoreau.com/632

21/02/2019

Listen very carefully - geek mode 11/10

17/02/2019

Ok retro fans - whaddaythink to this - discuss below.

04/01/2019

What’s your thoughts on this?

This is a couple of months old now but one commentor’s post made me laugh.

“We just want a way of playing old games without relying on 3 decades old hardware”

I’ll keep my 3 decade old hardware thanks - it runs way better than this modern rubbish being churned out of factories designed to fail.

Should genuine preservation of a format that someone (a company) has no commercial interest in its original form be legal or illegal?

Should company’s like Nintendo et al be forced to go after everyone or nobody rather than looking for easy targets?

https://www.polygon.com/2018/11/15/18097081/nintendo-rom-lawsuit-loveroms-loveretro-emuparadise

$12.2 million agreement likely a message to others

21/12/2018

Xmas treat - rare UK arcade footage from Cleveley’s north of Blackpool..

Mason’s amusements was a staple destination for me to offload my pocket money. They had an Ms Pac Man machine with a spectator monitor which was still there when I visited with a girlfriend in 1992.

Although the fit and lineup has naturally changed to meet current market, have a little trip down memory lane of a Northern seaside arcade.

21/12/2018

One can only hope... but can we have our long promised remake of Space:1999?

Jay Basu has come on board Universal's Battlestar Galactica reboot to pen the script for the reimaging of the television series created by Glen Larson.

20/12/2018

Wonder how long it takes to set this up?

Original Credit: Train Guy 659 (YouTube)

17/12/2018

Never ceases to amaze me this guy..

15/12/2018

In a world where.....

07/12/2018

Amazing 😊