I purchased this one from a fellow collector along with a handful of other Willis overlays. I’ve seen it in pictures on other sites but have never had a chance to examine it closely. It is supposedly for crystal castles by Atari and I have no reason to doubt that. One thing is certain though, it isn’t a Willis product.

Besides lacking all of the usual clues that identify a Willis overlay (can you name them all yet?), it is one flimsy piece of art. Cheaply made and probably one of the thinnest overlays I have in the archive. (more…)

I’ll be polite and call this one interesting. Someone decided to bootleg a moon patrol control panel overlay, using the reverse screen process, 3M adhesive and die cuts for the buttons and joystick. Unfortunately they neglected the most important part, the artwork.

I’m not sure why so much effort was put into this bootleg, perhaps it was for one of the foreign made knock-off pcb kits that were so popular with some operators. Maybe it was just for a local group of operators that had a half dozen or more Williams Moon Patrols needing fresh overlays. (more…)

Another collector tipped me off about a Willis Elevator Action overlay for sale at the Eldorado Games website. I bought it because I had never seen the Willis version before, only the bootleg Spy Agent version. Well, I still haven’t seen one because this overlay is a bootleg.

How do I know? There are lots of reasons, the first one is that Willis never copied existing work. (more…)

Not the most exciting piece, but even boring control panel overlays have a place in arcade history. If you hung out at the arcade back in the late 80’s or early 90’s, you probably saw more than your fair share of generic control panel overlays.

This one is a standard space theme overlay, meant to be used with any number of space conversion kits or simply as a cheaper alternative to the pricey OEM* replacement parts. (more…)

I’m on the lookout for a Willis Vanguard cpo, at least I believe it to be a Willis piece. I saw this control panel on eBay, but didn’t bid since the overlay was already applied. As much as I like Willis artwork, trying to collect examples attached to games or game parts would become space consuming real quick. I need my space for actual games!

If you happen to have or come across an NOS Vanguard overlay, or any NOS Willis artwork, drop me a line.

This is the second NOS overlay I picked up from Troy Smith (vidgameseller), the first was a Popeye cpo. Troy got a whole bunch of NOS parts in a bulk buy when IPB sold off most of its parts inventory in an attempt to downsize operations. (more…)

I was watching this frogger control panel overlay on eBay, an odd variation that I hadn’t seen before. The seller had it listed as Willis, but it didn’t see the usual markings to identify it as such. (more…)