Info
I fell in love with this game after playing it in MAME and decided to try putting
together a full cabinet. It's a funny trackball game where you control a clown's
head, bouncing his nose off his face in pseudo-3D, eating food between bounces.
Cool! A little research and I found out it came as a kit for a Bally/Sente SAC-1
cabinet. The SAC-1 is a big, honkin', monster metal cabinet that weights almost
as much as a Discs of Tron. It's got a wonderfully mid-eighties science fiction
shape to the cabinet, reminiscent of the Star Trek cockpit cabinet.
I started collecting parts by first buying a motherboard and cartridge from
a Stocker. I then burned Snacks
'n Jaxson
ROMs and put them on the Stocker cart and hooked the whole thing up to my test
setup. It worked! Cool. That takes care of a PCB. Next, I needed a control
panel,
monitor
bezel and marquee and, most of all, a SAC-1 cabinet. I asked around and a friend,
Stephen Beall, happened to have a control panel he gave me. It was pretty
beat,
so I scanned and redrew it. It turned out very nice. It came with a trackball
interface board, but it did not work. Next, I scoured all the online arcade
game dealers and found two listed Snacks 'n Jaxson marquees in stock. The first
was TNT Amusements in PA. I ordered and it arrived quickly, but was in terrible
condition. It is made of a flexible mylar material with the artwork reverse-screened
onto it. Not the best material to screen art onto. It was badly flaked and
getting
worse with handling. I quickly scanned it before it fell completely apart and
contacted the 2nd place that had them in stock, CP Distributing. I ordered
that
one and it also arrived quickly, but it was in just as bad condition. I scanned
the 2nd one and between the two, there was enough of the art intact to merge
them both into something I could redraw. I redrew it and it came out really
nice.
Soon, another San Jose auction came around and what did they have? Why, a big,
ugly SAC-1 cabinet making a silly-looking home to an E-SWAT. The owner must
have been bidding against me because nobody in their right mind would want this
monstrosity for the $125 I ended up paying for it. The monitor was in terrible
need of a cap kit and it was diiir-diirr-dirty. Oh well, it was the perfect
cabinet for my needs. I cleaned it up real quick-like, capped the monitor and
it looked pretty good.
Next, I needed a bezel. I saw someone advertising a Mini Golf for sale, which
I knew came in a SAC-1 cabinet, so I looked at his pictures and it had the bezel
I needed. I emailed him and offered him $40 for just the bezel and he accepted.
Whoo-hooo. We're styling now.
The side art was completely gone and I've never seen any NOS art for sale, so
I'll probably redraw it from a picture I have of what it should look like. (*update*
In May of 2001, a set of NOS right and left side art and a monitor bezel showed
up on eBay. I got it and applied it to the cabinet in August.)
I put it all together, found someone to sell me a working trackball interface
board, bought some lighted start buttons and silver-cones for them separately
and also bought some illuminated push buttons and some Nintendo mini chrome
carriage bolts to make the control panel complete. I think I now have the only
Snacks 'n Jaxson cabinet in the world. (Time for someone to build another!)
;-)
You can download the art I redrew from the CAGA section.