Read Before Reading

Speak Arcade & Broadcast

This site talks the way the hobby talks, which means it uses a lot of words without stopping to explain them. Here they are explained — the cabinet side first, then the glass. Nothing on this page is a secret; it is just the vocabulary nobody hands you at the door.

The cabinets The glass

The cabinets arcade and pinball

Upright: The standing cabinet everyone pictures: monitor at eye level, controls at the waist, marquee over the top. Four of them live in the garage row.
Cocktail: A table-height cabinet with the screen facing up through the glass, built for bars and pizza parlors where people sat down. The Red Tent is Nintendo's two-screen version.
Candy cab: The Japanese style of cabinet: molded plastic, sit-down height, pastel colors, and a monitor that usually rotates for vertical games. The pink Mini Cute is the smallest one Capcom made.
Widebody: A cabinet built wider than standard — for a two-player control panel on an upright, or for a bigger playfield on a pinball machine. Mario Bros. is the one; Indiana Jones is the other.
Dedicated: A cabinet built by the manufacturer for one specific game, with that game's artwork and controls from the factory — as opposed to a conversion, where an operator swapped a new board and marquee into an old cabinet.
Marquee: The backlit sign across the top of an upright naming the game. Original ones are printed on translucent plastic and are among the first things to crack, fade or go missing.
Topper: On a pinball machine, the decoration mounted above the backbox. On a PlayChoice-10, a printed sticker on a metal stand that announced which game was new inside — nineteen of those are here.
Instruction card: The printed card fixed beside the controls that told a player the rules and buttons. On Nintendo's VS. cabinets it changed with every board swap, which is why the unused ones are collected.
CPO control panel overlay: The printed sheet laminated over the control panel, carrying the artwork and the button labels. The part hands wear through first, and one of the first things replaced on a restoration.
Side art: The printed graphics on the sides of a cabinet. Originals are screen-printed or applied as large decals; reproductions exist for most popular games and are a normal part of a restoration.
JAMMA: The standard connector and pinout the Japanese arcade industry agreed on in 1985, so one wiring harness could power and drive almost any game board. A JAMMA cabinet takes a JAMMA board; a pre-JAMMA cabinet, like the Nintendo uprights here, needs its own wiring or an adapter.
PCB the board: The printed circuit board that is the game. Swap the board and the cabinet plays something else. Original boards are collected in their own right, some for absurd money.
Multi: A single board that carries a whole library of games selectable from a menu, usually a flash-storage kit fitted to genuine period hardware. The Darksoft kits in Big Blue (CPS-2) and the Mini Cute (CPS-1) are the ones here.
CPS-1 / CPS-2: Capcom's arcade hardware of the late eighties and nineties — the CP System ran Street Fighter II and Final Fight; the CP System II ran the Alpha series, the Marvel fighters and Progear. Both take a JAMMA harness.
Suicide battery: The battery on a CPS-2 board that keeps its encryption keys alive. When it dies, the board forgets how to run its own game — it "suicides." The reason a multi with no battery is worth having.
VS. System: Nintendo's 1984 arcade platform built on NES-grade hardware, with games on swappable boards. It came as a single-screen UniSystem and a two-screen DualSystem; one of each is here.
PlayChoice-10: Nintendo's later arcade system that held up to ten NES games on swappable cards and sold time rather than lives — a quarter bought a countdown, and you could hop between games while it ran.
Interchanger: A switcher that lets one VS. cabinet hold two boards and choose between them without opening the door. The UniSystem runs one, so it plays both VS. Super Mario Bros. and VS. Duck Hunt.
Attract mode: What a machine plays to itself when nobody is: the demo loop, the high score table, the title screen — designed to pull a passer-by across the room.
Free play: The operator setting that removes the need for coins. Every machine here is on it, which is why the coin doors are decorative.
Shop-out: Pinball's word for a full service: playfield stripped of every part, cleaned, rubbers and bulbs replaced, mechanisms rebuilt, reassembled. Not every machine needs one — one bought new from the factory never did.
Playfield: The wooden surface under the glass where the ball lives, with all its ramps, targets and toys. The single most expensive thing on a pinball machine to replace.
Backglass / translite: The illustrated panel in the backbox. A backglass is painted on glass; a translite is printed on plastic film behind clear glass. Originals fade, flake and crack, so good reproductions are prized.
DMD dot matrix display: The orange dot display in the backbox of a nineties machine. A ColorDMD is a drop-in color replacement for it.
DCS: Williams' Digital Compression System, the 1993 sound hardware that replaced tinny sample playback with something close to a film soundtrack. Indiana Jones was in the first year of it.
Magna-slings: Magnetic slingshots in place of the usual rubber ones, which grab the ball and throw it somewhere you did not plan for. Stern's Ghostbusters Premium and LE have them, and everyone has an opinion.
HUO home use only: A machine that was never on a commercial route — bought new and kept in a home from the first day. The most valuable four letters in a pinball listing.
On route: The working life of a coin-op machine: placed in a bar or arcade by an operator, serviced on a schedule, and moved when the earnings dropped. Route wear is where most of the damage on a survivor comes from.
NOS new old stock: Old parts or printed matter that were never used — still in the drawer, still on the backing paper. The instruction cards on the card wall are NOS; that is the whole point of them.
KLOV: The Killer List of Videogames, now the Museum of the Game: the reference database of arcade games and the forum where much of this hobby lives. The handle orlandu81 has been there a long time.

The glass monitors and signals

CRT: Cathode ray tube: the glass display every one of these games was drawn for. An electron beam paints the picture line by line on phosphor, which is why pixel art looks right on one and slightly wrong on everything since.
Trinitron: Sony's aperture-grille tube design, introduced in 1968 and used across its consumer televisions and professional monitors. Flatter vertically, brighter, and the reason the badge means something.
Aperture grille: The fine vertical wires behind a Trinitron's screen that steer the beam to the right phosphor stripe, in place of the shadow mask other tubes use. It lets more light through; the trade is one or two faint horizontal damper wires you learn to stop seeing.
PVM / BVM / LMD: Sony's professional families. PVM, Professional Video Monitor, the studio workhorse. BVM, Broadcast Video Monitor, the reference grade with hand-selected tubes and plug-in cards. LMD, the flat-panel generation that followed. The long version.
RGB: Red, green and blue carried as three separate signals straight from the console's video chip, nothing blended on the way. The single biggest reason these monitors matter to games.
Composite: The single yellow-plug video signal of the consumer era, with all the color information squeezed into one wire and smeared in the process. Not welcome on the monitors here.
Component: Video split into three signals over three cables — luminance and two color-difference channels — the analog standard for DVD and early HD. What the LMD wall is fed.
240p: The picture almost every classic console actually produces: 240 progressive lines, drawn every frame, at the 15 kHz scan rate of standard television. A CRT shows it with visible scanlines; a flat panel has to guess.
15 kHz: The horizontal scan rate of standard-definition television and of nearly every arcade board and classic console. A monitor that locks to it will show them natively; one that does not needs a converter in the way.
Multiscan: A monitor that locks to a range of scan rates rather than one — 15 kHz for a Super Nintendo, 31 kHz for 480p, higher for HD — on the same tube. The PVM-20L5 is the famous one.
Scanlines: The dark gaps between the lines a 240p picture draws on a CRT. Not a defect: part of how the art was meant to look, and impossible to fake convincingly.
Scaler / line doubler: A box that converts a 240p analog signal into something a flat panel accepts, adding processing and a frame or two of delay while it thinks. The signal chain here has none, on purpose.
SCART: The big rectangular European connector that carries RGB video and stereo audio in one plug. The retro-console world speaks it; Sony's professional monitors do not, which is why the next entry exists.
BNC: The twist-lock coaxial connector broadcast equipment uses, one per signal. A row of them on the back is the quickest tell that you are looking at a professional monitor. How to spot one.
SCART to 4 BNC breakout: The cable that joins the two worlds: SCART on one end, four BNCs — red, green, blue and sync — on the other, with an audio pair broken out beside them.
Sync: The timing signal that tells the monitor where each line and frame begins. It can ride on its own wire, on the green channel, or inside a composite signal; professional Sony monitors are far less fussy about which than folklore says.
Switcher: A box with many inputs and one or two outputs so several consoles can share a monitor. An auto-switcher picks whichever console is powered on, which is what makes a large collection playable rather than just owned.
Distribution amplifier: A box that takes one signal in and sends an identical, re-driven copy to many outputs — unlike a passive splitter, which halves the signal every time it divides. Behind the LMD wall.
Loop-through: A second connector beside an input that passes the same signal out again, so monitors can be daisy-chained. The last one in the chain gets a termination switch set to 75 ohms.
BKM card: Sony's plug-in input boards for the BVM and late PVM chassis. Each card teaches the monitor another signal format, so on these monitors the slots are the inputs. Several are on the wanted list.
TVL TV lines: The resolution figure Sony quoted for its tubes: how many alternating vertical lines the screen can resolve across a width equal to its height. A production PVM runs around 600 to 800; a BVM, around 1000.
SMPTE-C: The broadcast color standard for phosphors in North America. A monitor built to it shows colors where the mastering engineer put them, which a store-bought set never promised.
Geometry / convergence: Whether straight lines are straight and evenly spaced across the screen, and whether the red, green and blue beams land on the same spot. The first things to check on any tube, and the expensive ones to fix.
Degauss: The coil that fires on power-up to clear stray magnetism from the shadow mask or grille. If the corners of a screen have gone pink or green, it has usually been a while.
Burn-in: The ghost of an image a tube displayed for too long, worn permanently into the phosphor. Arcade monitors that spent years in attract mode often carry it; the ones here that came out clean are remarked on for a reason.
Zero scan / underscan: Showing the entire picture inside the screen edge instead of pushing the outer few percent past it the way a television does. A professional monitor lets you choose.
ISR: Sony's serial remote control system for professional monitors: one controller, a daisy-chained cable, and a whole wall of monitors taking the same commands. The reason a BVM has a remote port beside its inputs.
Audio monitor: A small self-powered speaker built to sit in a rack and let an engineer hear whether the sound is there and clean. Sony's AMS-100 units ride on top of the monitors here; the monograph is about them.
RGB mod: A board fitted inside a console that never officially output RGB — the NES above all — to make it do so. The NESRGB in the top loader on the consoles page is one.

Missing a word? Email orlandusarcade@gmail.com and it will get an entry. Several of the monitor terms above are also explained, with pictures, in Trinitron Fleet, Vol. 1.