2005/2006 Namco's Rockin' Bowl-O-Rama is a great videogame addition to a gameroom. Post your thoughts here. In The Big Lebowski thread, several collectors have expressed an interest in Bowl-O-Rama.
(Topic ID: 256728)
Vancouver, BC
Here's the commercial version, with a more substantial base, stainless steel speaker panel and larger speakers than the home version.
Apart from those differences, the home version appears to be identical.
Retailers price functional examples with nice cosmetics in the $2,500 - $3,000 range. Good examples do show up for sale privately in the $1,300 - $2,000 range, although they have become more scarce in the last couple of years.
There's a working home version on eBay now in Indiana for $1,500.
3c08983b3356d15300f69ff894c9925d32864b24 (resized).jpg8eeca9544e395ce6e749618072f879dbf18928bd (resized).jpg
Fort Wayne, IN
Thanks for starting the thread! Excited to receive mine hopefully next week, I was going to go with the original look but fell upon one that had been put in a cabinet that will match my GoldenTee. Thought about buying that one in Indy for my office but not sure yet...
So somebody snatch that one up!
563C3AD9-AFEF-4FCD-A60C-EF10648C0362.pngA2EF9B65-7DDC-4C8D-9320-C3B494C34F14.png
Quoted from iceman44:Looks like a very clean shooter lane!
Love it Ice!! Lol
I was lucky ! I put a wanted ad up and a extremely cool pinsider sold me one . Commercial unit, dollar bill acceptor,
Hoping to build a bigger (ad on ) another
600sqft for pool table, pins, bowler, and a
Ultra arcade and possibly some driving games. Not many arcades in the Bay Area
Just FYI , I’ve reached out to the creator
Of the Big Lawbowski bowler. Cool guy but does not want to sell the Conversion because of legal BS, copyright etc which I respect.
Quoted from pinballkyle:It’s sweet I’ve heard the PCB’s are notoriously unreliable and hard to get parts for.
This is why I’ve shied away from picking one of these up. Lots of stories on KLOV about the hard drives crashing and they are not fixable. Maybe they aren’t as bad as what I’ve read? If not, maybe I will look into these again.
Quoted from Blitzburgh99:This is why I’ve shied away from picking one of these up. Lots of stories on KLOV about the hard drives crashing and they are not fixable. Maybe they aren’t as bad as what I’ve read? If not, maybe I will look into these again.
Namco still sells a large variety of replacement parts for Bowl-O-Rama. See link below.
While it is true that the floppy disc can fail, flash drive replacements are available on eBay for $75 and elsewhere. They can be tricky to install because the original software system was proprietary. That is the likely reason for the KLOV complaints.
Mine is still running strong on the original floppy disc. I do have a flash drive if it ever fails in the future.
Retailers have exploited this trepidation by buying up dead games on the cheap at auction, installing the flash drive and reselling at retail prices.
https://www.namcoparts.com/ECommerce/category/namco-parts/video-games/rockin-bowl-o-rama
Quoted from ZNET:Namco still sells a large variety of replacement parts for Bowl-O-Rama. See link below.
While it is true that the floppy disc can fail, flash drive replacements are available on eBay for $75 and elsewhere. They can be tricky to install because the original software system was proprietary. That is the likely reason for the KLOV complaints.
Mine is still running strong on the original floppy disc. I do have a flash drive if it ever fails in the future.
Retailers have exploited this trepidation by buying up dead games on the cheap at auction, installing the flash drive and reselling at retail prices.
https://www.namcoparts.com/ECommerce/category/namco-parts/video-games/rockin-bowl-o-rama
Don’t you mean hard drive that was converted to flash drive? I hope they didn’t rub off of floppy drive
I owned one for a year, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
The sound track and animations are a blast!
We had many in Florida group, sometimes hard to find a buyer.
Interesting that there would a bigger demand then we see here in State.
Quoted from whitey:I think this day n age anything can be fixed !
I agree with you on that my friend. But it seems most people these days don't want to go beyond rubbing a little Novus around.
Which is a shame as problem solving and a job well done can be the best part about this hobby.
Quoted from pinballkyle:It’s sweet I’ve heard the PCB’s are notoriously unreliable and hard to get parts for.
Can confirm, we bought one when they were new. The hard drive went bad after about a year, no biggie, namco sent us an advance replacement. Then a while later the Mobo went bad. The game security ties the software to the hardware, so it's not as simple as replacing the motherboard. Namco wanted $700 to even look at it, I'm not the numbers guy but I don't think the game had even made that in the few years it was on route. It sat in back for a while, and I'm pretty sure we eventually junked it. also the really nice kit stickers they sent with it looked like hell after a few moves.
I'm pins only in the collection, but the Bowl-a-Rama has really caught my eye! What a great looking game. Hopefully I'll pick one up some day. I'm sure there are plenty of Big Lebowski fans out there (like myself) who would give way too much money to have the converted game!
1 week later
Question?? So the creator of TBL conversion doesn’t want to deal with copyrights, legal BS probably the tax man. The list goes on . If this was done in small numbers is it that hard to do it legally ?
I still like my idea of selling the Flash drive and donating the money to a good cause or charity . Everyone Wins !
Quoted from whitey:I still like my idea of selling the Flash drive and donating the money to a good cause or charity . Everyone Wins !
I’d pay big bucks for this conversion. I haven’t contacted the guy yet. Hoping he’ll consider the potential windfall.
Quoted from ZNET:2005/2006 Namco's Rockin' Bowl-O-Rama is a great videogame addition to a gameroom. Post your thoughts here. In The Big Lebowski thread, several collectors have expressed an interest in Bowl-O-Rama.
I remember when the commercial models were originally released.
They played great but were pretty expensive.
from what I remember they cost substantially more than a NIB pin so I didn’t end up getting one.
Very Cool retro style machines!
This thread really makes me wonder if I should have gotten one years ago.
Gotta go look for the original flyer,I think
A distributor had display models at Allentown or one of the other shows.
I bought 3 Non-working commercial deluxe units for $120 a 4-5 years ago and learned a lot. The USB image on eBay is just the game image burned onto an older thumb drive (most newer thumb drives seems to have issues booting the game and I haven't investigated it too much). Namco distributes the image on an SSD drive with a USB adapter now a days anyhow.
I've tried to clarify the hardware pairing on KLOV, but there is still confusion at times.
The IO card is what keeps track of hardware. Specifically, Bowl-o-Rama software v2.1.1 will send the MAC address of your PC motherboard's NIC as well as the BIOS serial number. If you have a version less than v2.0.11, the Bowl-o-Rama software also sends the serial number of your hard drive (IDE drive) to the IO card.
There's two major versions of this software that I've come across, the IDE / Hard drive version and the USB version.
Both versions are running linux distros. The IDE Hard drive version is fairly uncommon, and is running a full / bloated version of Red Hat Linux. The USB (thumb drive) version is running a very stripped down version of Linux.
One thing to note: Anybody who's machine originally came with the IDE hard drive has their IO card paired to it. This also means that you are running a fairly early version of the hardware Cosmodog used for this game (serial numbers less than ~800 from what I've seen so far) and cannot substitute the IDE hard drive for the USB (thumb drive) version or even another hard drive for that matter. You can technically get it to boot the thumb drive with some BIOS changes, but it will not run correctly as the motherboard is different enough from the driver support included in the thumb drive to not run properly. Also, the IO card is a problem.. Oddly, the game still runs the attract mode but shuts off all inputs instead of displaying the error screen. This may be some sort of logic error that the dev didn't plan for. Otherwise, it would be displaying the error screen.
If your game is still running a physical hard drive, I'd recommend taking a backup immediately. If that drive become corrupted, but hasn't actually suffered a hardware failure, you can recover it.
If you have the USB drive, you can use it interchangeably between games that already were booting with the USB drive without any issues. The only real issue I've come across is that something has changed in the USB drive hardware in the past few years that the old Linux OS doesn't like and renders the game unbootable (kernel panic). I've tried updating the bootloader on the USB drive, but it didn't make a difference.
As for the IO card, most people have the RED version, but there is now a BLUE version that was released in the last 3 years. From what I've seen, they function and lock to hardware identically. Interestingly enough, I've see several game chassis where the IO card had flaked out on a few of the USB versions of the game and lock all input, but still run the attract mode albeit very choppily. The only fix for this was to get a replacement IO card from Betson / Namco at $250 a pop.
I do have the USB image if anybody needs it (it came directly from the game dev). I also have an image of a backed up hard drive, but I never got the opportunity to test it on a corrupted hard drive.
Quoted from Wharhed:I bought 3 Non-working commercial deluxe units for $120 a 4-5 years ago and learned a lot. The USB image on eBay is just the game image burned onto an older thumb drive (most newer thumb drives seems to have issues booting the game and I haven't investigated it too much). Namco distributes the image on an SSD drive with a USB adapter now a days anyhow.
I've tried to clarify the hardware pairing on KLOV, but there is still confusion at times.
The IO card is what keeps track of hardware. Specifically, Bowl-o-Rama software v2.1.1 will send the MAC address of your PC motherboard's NIC as well as the BIOS serial number. If you have a version less than v2.0.11, the Bowl-o-Rama software also sends the serial number of your hard drive (IDE drive) to the IO card.
There's two major versions of this software that I've come across, the IDE / Hard drive version and the USB version.
Both versions are running linux distros. The IDE Hard drive version is fairly uncommon, and is running a full / bloated version of Red Hat Linux. The USB (thumb drive) version is running a very stripped down version of Linux.
One thing to note: Anybody who's machine originally came with the IDE hard drive has their IO card paired to it. This also means that you are running a fairly early version of the hardware Cosmodog used for this game (serial numbers less than ~800 from what I've seen so far) and cannot substitute the IDE hard drive for the USB (thumb drive) version or even another hard drive for that matter. You can technically get it to boot the thumb drive with some BIOS changes, but it will not run correctly as the motherboard is different enough from the driver support included in the thumb drive to not run properly. Also, the IO card is a problem.. Oddly, the game still runs the attract mode but shuts off all inputs instead of displaying the error screen. This may be some sort of logic error that the dev didn't plan for. Otherwise, it would be displaying the error screen.
If your game is still running a physical hard drive, I'd recommend taking a backup immediately. If that drive become corrupted, but hasn't actually suffered a hardware failure, you can recover it.
If you have the USB drive, you can use it interchangeably between games that already were booting with the USB drive without any issues. The only real issue I've come across is that something has changed in the USB drive hardware in the past few years that the old Linux OS doesn't like and renders the game unbootable (kernel panic). I've tried updating the bootloader on the USB drive, but it didn't make a difference.
As for the IO card, most people have the RED version, but there is now a BLUE version that was released in the last 3 years. From what I've seen, they function and lock to hardware identically. Interestingly enough, I've see several game chassis where the IO card had flaked out on a few of the USB versions of the game and lock all input, but still run the attract mode albeit very choppily. The only fix for this was to get a replacement IO card from Betson / Namco at $250 a pop.
I do have the USB image if anybody needs it (it came directly from the game dev). I also have an image of a backed up hard drive, but I never got the opportunity to test it on a corrupted hard drive.
Question, if you have the old harddrive version which is tied to the IO card......can you order newer IO card and then pair it to a motherboard and then run with a USB drive (basically upgrading?)
Quoted from cpr9999:Question, if you have the old harddrive version which is tied to the IO card......can you order newer IO card and then pair it to a motherboard and then run with a USB drive (basically upgrading?)
It would depend on the motherboard you currently have in your game. If it is the P4M800PRO-M478 version, yes. See picture below:
pasted_image (resized).png 2 weeks later
2 weeks later
My bowl o Rama arrived today, the game was bought new for the home , dollar bill acceptor and it’s absolutely Mint !
Now we need Big Lebowski conversion!!!
Quoted from whitey:My bowl o Rama arrived today, the game was bought new for the home , dollar bill acceptor and it’s absolutely Mint !
Now we need Big Lebowski conversion!!!
Yes!! And I have TBL Pinball on the way!
Quoted from whitey:My bowl o Rama arrived today, the game was bought new for the home , dollar bill acceptor and it’s absolutely Mint !
Now we need Big Lebowski conversion!!!
How did you find it? It’s is new or like new?
The guy I bought it from bought a large number of games from a guy who had a arcade in his house . From what I understand he purchased everything new
It looks like it was just unboxed. First time I’ve played one , gotta say it’s pretty dam cool
I have a brand new in the box complete conversion kit for this that converts your Golden Tee cab (big white one) for sale.
Trollhättan
Quoted from whitey:My bowl o Rama arrived today, the game was bought new for the home , dollar bill acceptor and it’s absolutely Mint !
Now we need Big Lebowski conversion!!!
That is awesome! I've been trying to track one down for a while with no luck. Found a non-commercial one and several of the arcade cabinet style ones, but I really want the commercial pedestal style.
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