This page chronicles my experiences with my Tempest cabinet. It doesn't have a happy ending, so if you're a big Tempest fan you should probably not read it ;)

I first got ahold of this cabinet in a small local arcade dealer's basement. At the time, it simply looked like an oddly shaped Rastan. I thought I recognized it as a conversion immediately, but I wasn't quite sure until later that it was originally a Tempest. I bought the game for $125, which I thought was a pretty good deal for a Rastan that had been a Tempest at one point. I loved Rastan as a kid so I was pretty thrilled to even have a Rastan.

The cabinet was pretty nasty looking, though - it had had a credit button drilled into the front lower paneling, and the monitor bezel had been fixed into the cabinet with duct tape. Yuck! When Bill and I finally went to pick it up (along with a bunch of other games chronicled elsewhere) it was probably the heaviest game there, with the possible exception of the System 1 Indiana Jones cabinet. We loaded it into the truck with the others - boy, it was sweet - we filled an entire U-Haul truck with games that day. Got it home powered it up and played for a while happily.

Curious about the guts, I opened the back up and shazam, my suspicions were confirmed when I saw the original Tempest dip switch/technical info sheet stapled to the back. I didn't think much of it, I figured it was LONG gone past any hope of restoration anyway, especially since I didn't really want Tempest badly enough to buy the monitor, boards, art, control panel, etc, etc.

Later, I noticed a bit of paint showing through the black overcoating and wondered if possibly the sideart was intact under it - I got some of my paint stripper and went to work. I uncovered the start of the original Tempest artwork in VERY nice shape. I never expected to fully restore it, but I thought it'd be neat to have some cool sideart for my Rastan. So I started stripping away. It took a long time and a lot of elbow grease but I never finished - I was too demoralized after making a few gouges in the artwork. DOH! It could have been beautiful if I had been a bit more careful, and done it all in one session, but oh well, live and learn.

In the meantime I had replaced a few bulbs, fixed a button or two, replaced the power supply, and generally gotten the cabinet in a little better condition. It was a one-player control panel, so I didn't think it would work out for a swappable JAMMA cabinet, and eventually I even got a better cabinet to play Rastan in anyway. I removed the game, marquee, monitor bezel, and put them away for later.

The cabinet got moved into the garage when I bought my house, and stayed there for months, untouched. I just about lost the game when I was moving, when trying to roll it up the ramp into the truck with the dolly, one of the supports on the dolly bent and the cabinet nearly toppled over from the ramp and smashed on the ground. It was a mess as it was, as the parking lot had been repaved and it was a scorching day and the asphalt was not very solid, and the weight of the tempest on the dolly was leaving grooves in it. After a few failed attempts at trying to get the dolly wheels onto the ramp, there were several large gouges in it as well. :) Moving my arcade games was another adventure entirely, though.

In the spring of 2000, I didn't really feel any interest in it anymore and had plenty of other games to worry about as well, so I decided to get rid of it. Nobody was really interested in it, but then I came across an evil idea. I thought the cabinet sides would make a really neat workbench or bar if they were restored a bit more, polished up, and given a coat of polyurethane or something. Bill needed a spare monitor as well, so I sold the cabinet to him for $50. He was able to scrap it for parts and probably make twice his money back, more power to him ;). But he took the sides off, and someday one of them will be in my basement or garage as either a workbench or bar. Don't hate me for destroying the cabinet - at least I didn't burn it, and the spare parts were distributed to those who needed them, and the sides, well, they'll be nice decoration. :)