The Remodel

by Sal, Galaxy Zone Arcade — 2026

The arcade that wouldn't die

Short version, if you want the long one it's got its own page: I opened Galaxy Zone Arcade in 1978 on SE Foster Rd with six cabinets and a change machine that hated nickels personally. By '82 we had sixteen machines and a line out the door. By '95 the mall had emptied out and I closed the doors, but I never sold a single cabinet — I put all sixteen in a storage unit in Gresham and paid rent on them for thirty years like a stubborn old man. Last year, at 73, I rebuilt fifteen of them as a website using something called Claude Code. This year I turned 74 and did it again, properly. That's what this page is about. (Full story, cat included, is over on About Sal.)

Why remodel?

Because last year's job worked, but it worked the way a cabinet works when you've patched it with whatever wire was closest. Every single game had its own tangle of extension cords running behind the machine — my way of saying each one was coded its own way, none of them talking to each other, so fixing one thing in Pac-Chase taught me nothing about fixing the same thing in Brick Breaker. Some cabinets ran like they'd had three espressos — Retro Tennis on my nephew's fancy new laptop played like a 45 record spun at 78, because nobody told the game to care how fast the computer's clock was ticking. And you could not, under any circumstance, play a single one of these machines on a phone. Not one. My granddaughter tried and gave up. Also — and I didn't even know this was a problem until the robots told me — the sound man was leaving amplifiers running all over the building. Every game that ever made a beep left its little audio gadget switched on forever, even after you walked away. Sloppy. All fixable. So we fixed it.

The crew

This time I didn't just hire one robot and wing it. One robot drew the blueprints first — the wiring diagram for the whole building, so to speak. What buttons do what, how the sound works, how the screen handles a phone versus a monitor, what a high score looks like when it's saved. Call it the engine, call it the rulebook, I call it "the one thing every cabinet has to agree to before it gets plugged in." Then a crew of robot builders split up the floor — each one took three cabinets and rebuilt them to that exact same spec, nobody freelancing. When they were done, an inspector walked the whole floor, played every single game, and made anything that rattled stop rattling. One power grid. One rulebook. Sixteen cabinets that finally belong to the same building.

The magic spells, 2026 edition

Here's roughly what I typed to get this thing built. Roughly.

Before we touch a single game, build the shared engine every cabinet in this arcade has to use. Fixed-timestep game loop so nothing runs fast or slow depending on the computer. One shared audio system, one AudioContext, so we're not leaking sound gadgets all over the building. Touch controls that show up on phones automatically. One visual language — same fonts, same neon, same overlay screens — so every game looks like it belongs in the same arcade. Write it once. Everything else builds on top of it.

Now rebuild all fifteen working games against that engine. Split the work into five builders, three cabinets each, same blueprint, same rules, nobody inventing their own version of anything the engine already handles. Keep every game's original feel — Pac-Chase still chases, Retro Tennis is still Pong — just rebuilt on the new wiring instead of the old duct tape.

Walk the floor. Play every single cabinet, on a laptop and on a phone, sound on and sound off, motion on and motion reduced. Anything that rattles, doesn't touch, or throws an error in the console — fix it before we open the doors. And leave the sign out front looking like it means it.

What's actually better

One shared engine instead of sixteen separate tangles of code — fix something once, every game gets it.
Real physics timing (that "deltaTime" word again) so a game plays at the same speed on my old laptop and on anything newer.
Touch controls, actually working, on actual phones. My granddaughter approves.
Pause works the same way in every game, because it's the same code doing it.
One sound system for the whole building — no more leaving amplifiers running after you leave the room.
High scores that survive — they're saved right there in your browser and they don't wander off.
Real accessibility — keyboard, screen readers, focus you can actually see, and everything calms down if your computer says you'd rather it not move so much.
And the thing I actually wanted most: the whole place finally looks like ONE arcade. Not just out here in the lobby — inside the games too.

The crate

One more thing, and I'm not going to make a big production out of it. A crate showed up at the loading dock on a rainy Tuesday, middle of all this. Had my name on it. I signed for it. I'm not going to tell you what's in it — go look at the floor.

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