Ultimate Arctic Thunder

(c) 2003 MIDWAY GAMES

CONDITION WHEN PURCHASED: C+
CURRENT CONIDTION: B

A couple weeks ago I noticed a local operator I know had posted on craigslist that he had a few projects he wanted to part with.  Among the projects listed was an Arctic Thunder… it was listed,  like the rest of the games available,  as a non-working project.  After speaking to the operator about the game,  to the best of his recollection it was among a group of games he ended up with as the result of a buy-out of another route.  He said he’d had it for at least ten years and that he’d moved it probably twice as many times… but that he’d never gotten around to seeing what exactly is wrong with it.  He estimated that it was likely the monitor… it seemed,  in his experience,  to “always be the monitor”.  My guess is that he was just prepping me for what could,  potentially,  be the worst situation (depending on the game).

The price was right (a cool one hundred bucks)… It was getting late so a pickup with the trailer the following day would be in order.  I paid the man his hundred bucks,  made arrangements to be there at 9AM and went home.  The following morning I picked the game up without much issue… it’s a bit of a beast but with the excellent wheels that they use,  maneuverability isn’t so bad.  Because I have a low trailer we decided to load it up in a single piece rather than separating the seat from the cabinet. It took a little heaving,  and a decent sized piece of plywood to get `er up in to the trailer,  but getting it down was a one-man job… again,  thanks to the superb caster-wheels used by Midway.  Getting the game in to the arcade was as simple as opening the garage door and rolling it in.  It’s times like these that having a garagecade versus a basement arcade put a smile on my face.

Once inside it was time to start playing around.  Being that I was going in blind and had exactly ZERO idea what I was getting myself in to,  I figured it would be prudent to pop open the back and take a look before I just plugged in.  I figured there may be some loose parts… hanging wire… who knows.  Opening the back revealed a tidy (albeit somewhat dusty) compartment.  It didn’t look like anything had come loose in the years since it was on location… so with that somewhat excited feeling I get in my stomach when I venture in to the “unknown”,  I plugged the game in and fired it up.

What happened next put a smile on my face from ear to ear.  No… the game didn’t just fire up… it wasn’t quite THAT simple,  but what I was greeted with was a Wells Gardner D9500 “no-signal” screen… the monitor worked!  Not only did the monitor work… it looked pretty damn fantastic as well.  In addition to the monitor working,  it appeared the force feedback PCB fired up… as did the marquee.  The PC within the game (for this game does run on a Windows 2000 Industrial strength PC) did absolutely nothing… which too was likely good news.

Why good news you ask?  Well,  because when a PC … or even many arcade PCB’s do absolutely nothing at power up,  chances are pretty good that the issue is power supply related.  With a PC like this one,  it’s incredibly easy to swap in an ATX power supply that most of us have lying around somewhere.  It took me longer to locate an ATX supply out in the shed than it took for me to swap cables to test.  I was reminded (thank you Gamefixer!) on the AHA forums that the CR2032 coin battery would need to be replaced as well or I would have to manually fire up the system each time as the BIOS settings wouldn’t save. After replacing the battery and swapping in the power supply I got to the point where I was wondering… OK… now how do I fire this up?   Evidently Midway didn’t see it as “necessary” to add a momentary switch to their PC cabinet.  SO,  with my trusty flat head screwdriver I shorted the two pins for power up directly on the motherboard and held my breath…

The system fired up… up came the Windows 2000 screen… then a countdown while it checked components, etc..and then it loaded up to… ARCTIC THUNDER!! Now,  it was the original Arctic Thunder,  mind you… not the Ultimate Arctic Thunder version that was on the marquee,  but there it was… a working game!  Well… mostly working… as you will soon read…

The game software worked 100% but there were a few little issues.  The brake light, start lamp and power lamps were all blown and needed replacing.  The power lamp still wasn’t working after being replaced… however I did find a broken wire when I was hunting down the other more pressing issue.  That issue was that when I moved the steering left and right,  it also increased and decreased the throttle.  I figured there had to be a broken wire grounding out or something.  I took the entire steering assembly apart… which is where I found the issue causing the power button to not light up.  I fixed that issue but the throttle/steering issue persisted.  If I disconnected the throttle from the pot,  the steering worked great… but as soon as I connected the pot,  the steering sensitivity diminished greatly and the throttle would also go up/down with left/right turning… Hmmm… I followed the wires back from the controller (there are only 4 total…2 signal and 2 ground)… and what I found was that some genius… obviously in a hurry,  and probably on location,  had miswired the ground for the throttle DIRECTLY TO THE SIGNAL OF THE STEERING LINE.  Yup… you can see it right there in the image below.  As soon as I removed the ground from the signal pin and attached it to the ground pin right next to it… amazing… the steering/throttle worked perfectly!

The only other pressing matter I have with the game is that the CPU fan is noisy as hell and is in need of replacement.  I have a new fan on order from Amazon which will be here tomorrow likely.

Now,  the game worked great as-is… but I am very rarely happy with “good enough”… so I started poking around the net.  I was told by more than one person to keep my hard drive safe as they couldn’t be imaged… so I was surprised to see an image available online that claimed to be usable on any IDE hard drive.  I downloaded it and installed the image on a brand new 80GB hard drive.  I then found a thread on KLOV about the availability of a CHD file decodes to an ISO that can then be burned to use to upgrade the hard drive from Arctic Thunder… to Ultimate Arctic Thunder which includes 2 additional tracks and 2 additional sleds…. after a bit of fussing,  I managed to get the system to recognize the IDE CDROM and I updated the system via the UPDATE option in the UTILITIES section of the service screens.  It recognized the CDROM … then automatically updated the system.  A reboot or two later and I was running Ultimate Arctic Thunder!

To make things even sweeter,  my 9 year old has taken a liking to the game as has a couple of his friends.  I love seeing the kids playing the games… 🙂

UPDATE 09/27/18: I’ve spent the last couple days trying every which way I possibly could to get this CF Drive/CF Memory card I picked up via Amazon to work with this system and I’ve failed at every corner.  I’ve gotten to a point where I have an image that will decode to a hard drive successfully and it will work fine… however when I decode to the CF Memory card… successfully… when I attempt to use the CF Drive,  right after the Windows 2000 load screen pops up,  the progress bar will go about 1/3 of the way and then will BSOD with an error something akin to “BOOT DRIVE NOT DETECTED”.   I’ve given up… I’ll stick with the hard drive.

More Photos:

Please share...