The year was 1982. The movie "The Wrath of Khan" had just hit the screen and the tears had rolled down my face when my hero heroically sacrificed himself to save his friends and his ship. Like so many others, I thought that my Star Trek universe had shattered. Just when I thought it was all over and there was no hope, along comes...

Sega Star Trek : The Arcade Machine !!!

I must say that I am particularly proud to own a Sega Star Trek arcade machine. I remember very well playing this game in the local arcade of my town back in 1982. I was quite impressed with the bright colorful vector graphics and the realistic speech effects. Also, having two types of weapons and two types of ship propulsion combined with the high resolution spinner control dramatically improved game play over the majority of other games.

Although the game theme was officially licensed, the voices in the game are not those of the original Star Trek actors. The voices do capture the spirit of the characters that they represent. To my knowledge and dismay, Spock and Scotty are the only characters represented. It would have been nice to hear voice effects from a Klingon ship captain, a starbase under attack, and the obvious main characters McCoy, Sulu, Checkov, and Uhura. Hearing the voice of Nomad would have been great ("Ster-a-lize Im-per-fec-tions!"). Back in 1982, having any voice effects at all was considered high tech so I'm not really complaining. Voice effects required a great deal of electronic memory and other resources so it simply wasn't practical to go overboard.

Star Trek, the arcade game, was available in several different cabinets and kits as follows:

• My machine, shown above, is the upright Sega Converta-cab. Besides Star Trek, this cabinet was also used for other G80 platform games such as Space Fury, Tac/Scan, Eliminator, and others.
• The cockpit version is a dedicated cabinet dubbed "The Captains Chair" and is the most memorable for most people. It is typically considered the most collectable but most people lack the space (no pun intended) to keep one at home and even fewer have the skills or the resources to properly restore one. However, some serious collectors have done some truly impressive full restorations.
• Another dedicated Sega cabinet is an attractive upright version that is very similar looking to a Williams Robotron, Joust, Sinistar, or Bubbles cabinet.
• Star Trek was available in 3 forms of a kit designed to allow an operator to convert an Atari Asteroids, Atari Tempest, and Konami Scramble into full featured Star Trek machines including full cabinet artwork.

I like to add castor wheels to the bottom of the machines in my collection. Typically, this involves simply drilling some bolt holes into the floor of the cabinet, installing bolts up from the bottom and nuts from the inside. In this case, there are compartments for two coin boxes located at the bottom front corners of the cab. If bolts with retaining nuts were sticking up inside the bottom of the cab, they would be in the way of the plastic coin boxes. At the rear of the cab, access to the inside bottom panel is blocked by the non-removable panel that the electronic hardware sits on. It is simply not practical to install bolts up through the bottom of the cab. The solution that I went with was to first cut a 1" thick plywood panel that fits the bottom of the cab. I rounded the bottom edges using a 1/2" round router bit and then painted the panel black. I then drilled 4 holes for each wheel into each corner of the panel and installed blind T-nuts on the upper side. After attaching the new panel to the bottom of the cab using #10 wood screws (pre-drilled), I installed the wheels using 1" long hex-head bolts with flat washers and lock washers. I like the wheels and I intend to keep them on the cabinet, but it does add about 3.5" inches to the height of the machine. Another potential problem is that the cabinet is a bit top-heavy and it is easy to tip over. I prefer to position new wheels as far into the corners of the cabinet as possible to achieve the maximum stability. In this case, the cabinet has 45° corners at the bottom, both front and back, and this brings the wheels toward the center of the machine by about 4 inches. While pushing the machine across deep carpeting, I find that I have to be very careful to push the machine from the bottom as much as I can so as to not tip the darn thing over. It is just fine during normal game play.

 

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