Weekend Pickup! Sega New Astro City Candy Cabinet

For as long as I’ve been in this hobby, I’ve always loved the look of Candy Cabinets. Designed and built by Japanese manufacturers, and intended for the Asia-Pacific market these low slung cabinets with large 29″ monitors are essentially ‘dumb’ shells. But they come to life when a game PCB is placed into them. Think of them like a home console and TV requiring a disc in order to play a game.

The cabinet provides the screen, joysticks and buttons and usually comply to the Jamma standard – a ubiquitous arcade platform that many companies released games for during the 80s and 90s. This provides arcade operators with a very cost-effective way of managing their inventory. when a game becomes unpopular, rather than having to buy a complete new game, owners simply buy a new PCB board. Remove the old one, drop in the new one and away you go.

Taito and Sega are regarded as the kings of Candy cabinets, with the latter releasing various styles of their ‘City’ line of machines. If you want to read a brief outline of Candy cabinets and what they are, I’d recommend checking out this article.

I went through a phase of selling off a ton of parts recently, and amassed a good pile of cash, which I had in mind to spend on something new. As luck would have it, someone listed a Sega New Astro City Candy cabinet on eBay here in the UK at what looked like a sensible price. Sensing I might lose out if I dithered about it, I hit the ‘Buy Now’ button, paid my money and made arrangements with the seller to collect the machine the following weekend.

It was a long drive up the M6 to the sellers house, and once there, he showed me around the cabinet, we loaded up onto my van, and I cruised back home as carefully as I could, ensuring my newly acquired machine didn’t rattle around in the back too much. Once home, it was time to unload:

The clean lines of the Astro City make it a very appealing cabinet for home use. The main difference between these Japanese cabinets and traditional Western cabs is the extensive use of plastic, and of course the player height. Candies are designed to be sat at rather than stood in front of:

The paint work is definitely something I’m going to have to look at, but other than that, I have few complaints.

Being Jamma compatible, I was able to grab an old 19 in 1 board I had lying around and throw it in the cab just to test everything was working OK:

So there you go. Super pleased with my new acquisition, and after 13 years of being in this hobby, I now finally own a Jamma cabinet!

It’s early days, but I think I’m going to strip everything out, and send the panels off to a local powder-coaters and get everything done properly. More on that in a later post.

Thanks for visiting this week.

Tony