Arcade Machine Specs & Manuals Database
This is a new account but I'm not new to the retrogaming scene. I'm Tim (used to be @woodpunk on the old Twitter before it turned into what it is now) and a few years ago I wrote a book about classic arcade game art called Artcade. I'm a Patreon subscriber and some of you know me IRL. Anyway, I've built a searchable archive of over 7,800 arcade machine specs and 2,400 manuals and schematics. Still a work in progress, but it's getting there and now I've realised I don't have the reach any more to let people know about it!
I've had a Google drive of the manuals shared for a long time, but it wasn't the ideal way for people to find what they need. They were also uploaded to the Internet Archive but again, not always easy to find.
I wanted to find a way to make them searchable so if you're fixing a Track & Field PCB and need to harvest a spare VLM5030 speech synth chip from somewhere, you can find out that 21 other games used it, including the crappy Wizz-Quiz PCB your mate has in his stash!
Type "Z80" and find every arcade game that runs one, with clock speeds.
Type "YM2151" and find every board using that audio chip.
Type "Altered Beast" and get the full hardware spec, DIP switch table with factory defaults, and direct access to the original service manual PDF.
It's called arcadeRTFM.com
It's fully searchable. Free. No login. No email address harvesting. No user tracking.
Nobody needs to know what a nerd you are! ;-)
Posted Apr 8, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC