Giving a Rare Belgian Arcade Game New Life
Overtinker acquired a rare Belgian arcade game machine called Suffle-Ton and restored it to its former glory.
If we ignore the big-name video arcade games, like Pac-Man and Street Fighter II, most arcades are full of more bespoke machines with names you don’t remember made by manufacturers you’ve never heard of. But there is something special about that and many of those machines have a great deal of charm, as they were made by passionate people. That certainly describes Suffle-Ton(or Shuffle-Ton), which is an obscure Belgian arcade machine based on a traditional game called bakschietbak. To keep its history alive, Overtinker gave an old Suffle-Tonarcade machine new life.
There isn’t much information out there about the Suffle-Ton arcade machines, because not many were made. The manufacturer appears to have been a family-run operation and the total number of machines sold could probably be measured in the hundreds — or even fewer. So, when Overtinker came across a Suffle-Tonmachine in fairly good condition, he knew he had to restore it.
The problem was that Overtinker’s Suffle-Tonmachine was missing all of its electronic components. The cabinet and play board were in good shape, but there wasn’t any hardware to keep score. The point of the game is to toss or slide heavy metal pucks (called coins) through holes and the holes have different point values (similar to Skee-Ball). Scorekeeping is, therefore, a bit complicated and quite important.
The Suffle-Ton cabinet has a large window for the scoreboard and Overtinker decided to put an LCD monitor behind that window for the score display. For that reason, he chose a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ single-board computer as the brain of the machine. That can read inputs via the GPIO pins and output a video signal to the monitor. It detects successful tosses using infrared break beam sensors mounted on 3D-printed chutes below the board holes. The thrown coins collect on a ramp behind a door and the Raspberry Pi can release them by charging a solenoid to lift the door. Finally, some WS2811 individually addressable RGB LEDs add some decorative lighting flair.
With the hardware all ready, Overtinker was able to program the gameplay functionality. He programmed the software with Pygame and even based the scoreboard graphics on some reference images of original machines — though he did take some liberties to give it a little bit of modern style.
The completed machine looks absolutely fantastic and seems to work as intended. But most importantly, Overtinker has kept a bit of arcade history alive for future generations to experience.