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I have just been sorting through our old photo albums and I have just found this!!!! it was taken by me at Mablethorpe over 25 years ago it shows that very gunslinger arcade machine and if you look in the back corner of the room you can see a lighthouse grip machine as well the two kids in the photo are my little boys...now over 30 years old .....I was old when I got up this morning but now I feel a lot older, how the time passes

In this thread, the AIR GUNNER machine at Mablethorpe is mentioned. Tonight, an ex-worker at the arcade found a small 35mm strip of actual film from that machine. Don't know if it's of any interest, but I will post a picture.

How strange, this piece of film isn't in stereo??? The machine can't have worked properly with only a mono image as you wouldn't have seen the depth of the stereo film. I'll scan a piece later to show the difference.

This is from the manual and shows the stereo imagery that was used in the machine. The film from Mablethrope appears to have been scanned upside down as the vertical index position (black notch) is shown on the left of the image, when it should be on the far right side of the right hand image. And since there is no left hand image at all there is no way for the machine to find the horizontal position of the target. And no 3 dimensional effect because of that. Or any sound attached to the Mablethorpe film. This must have been a copy of the original film but why only one image??

My friend, who has the original film, and worked in the Mablethorpe amusement arcade for 25 years, has read gameswat's latest and here is HIS reply:

Well if it was scanned upside down, the bomber involved would have the tail at the top of the picture, or did everyone fly upside down to confuse the enemy? Perhaps he meant the image should have been rotated. As for the soundtrack, well either thousands of punters must have heard the attendants of that time inside the machine going brr, brr, brr, and rat-a-tat-tat through a cocoa tin!! As the machine did in fact work ('cos you could hear it). So irrespective of what the manual or the technical diagrams indicate, I won't go along with the point that they didn't work, as me and thousands of others know they did. If the manual was for the American version, perhaps it's a bit like today, defence cuts and all that, couldn't afford stereo or gun noises (had to use somebody inside with a cocoa tin).

Anyway, I've turned the picture 'round.

Yes, I meant upside-down, though I thought it made sense by what else I said about the image.

The sound of the machine guns wasn't supplied by the film, obviously that only sounded when pressing the fire button - the film supplied the sound of the airplanes in dog fight.

My guess is, the Mablethorpe machine this film strip came from was made in the UK by Shefras expressly for coin-op operation and as such was a simplified version that was much easier for them to manufacture than trying to copy the US Navy 3 Dimensional original. There can't have been many of the surplus Navy machines available for them to revamp for coin-op after the war, so they decided to make their own.

Oh, and I didn't say the Mablethorpe film machine didn't work, I said it couldn't have worked as it was supposed to. Without the stereo view of depth it's impossible to know how far ahead you should shoot to meet the attacking plane, which is obviously why these Navy training machines were invented in the first place.

Hi gameswat, my friend has just informed me via email that you had replied to his earlier post. Things seem a lot clearer now, and he wishes to thank you for all your input on this machine. Believe it or not, I even played that same machine in Mablethorpe in the 1960s. We had a bank of 4 in one local amusement arcade. Happy days!!!