The Radarscope Pages

you are here index home

These pages are dedicated to Radar Scope by Nintendo, 1980. No cookies or ads here.

I want to help Radar Scope owners to repair and maintain their machines and to conserve some interesting hardware for arcade history.
I hope that you can profit from them in this way. If you want to contribute information on Radar Scope, by describing your hardware, sending pictures or other interesting facts, please contact me. We could make your contributions available to other fans of Radar Scope.

If you want to play this video game but have no dedicated hardware, please have a look at the Mame Project, which does a good job in emulating it (although the emulation is not 100% accurate). I will focus on hardware and repair issues of the arcade version of Radar Scope here.

The picture above (cutout of a US flyer) shows three variants of the cabinet.
The game seems to have been a success in Japan, but not in the US, where allegedly about 3000 units have been imported but did not sell well. (numbers for Europe anybody?). Later a lot of these games must have been lost or converted to Donkey Kong games.
Now, DK owners, is the time to convert them back. The story of Radar Scope can be found in a wikipedia article along with a discussion on whether the game is named Radarscope or Radar Scope (it seems to be the latter).

I remember when around 1982 this game was on a cocktail table in the "Play No. 1" arcade in Basel, Switzerland, being played by my friend Rolf. He was so good at it that just watching him play was fun.
In Europe this game is rare, but in 1999 i managed to get a boardset in the UK. It took me some time to create a do-it-yourself Radarscope by repairing the boardset and building a cabinet for operating it.

	This was my ugly "Do-It-Yourself" cabinet. It is now used as a test device, since in 2005 i was lucky to locate an original cocktail table in Dortmund (Germany) and Michael K. was willing to sell me his defective unit, provided i would not scrap it for parts. This cocktail table is shown below.
For this Original Radar Scope Cocktail Table (german version) you can download a jpg image of the instruction sheet artwork (300dpi, 1.7 MB) or download a jpg image of the registration sheet artwork (300dpi, 750K)

Note: Although I live in Switzerland i use the English language for the Radar Scope Pages because probably most units of the game are left in the United States and maybe in the Japanese region. Sorry if my English is faulty.

Disclaimer: Radar Scope is a trade mark of the Nintendo corporation. This site is a non-profit, ad-free fan site about Radar Scope arcade game hardware. All shown materials are property of their respective owners.