Pinball machines suck!

(I keep telling myself that because I want one, can't afford one, and know I won't do the maintenance required on one.)

I've never got any of those Pinball MAME things to work right. I tried a few different ones with ROMs and front ends and blah blah blah and could never find the right combination. At least at that time, the usability factor was several generations behind MAME, that's for sure.

I've seen crane machines go for $50 at auctions before. I've considered buying one but I'm sure they look a lot bigger in one's home than they do at an auction ...

[quote="AArdvark"]It's not like you or anyone you know is gonna really bang the cabinets around, and you could look as cool as Fonzie when you thump the side of the machine and get a credit.[/quote]

When I was considering making ole Polybius there a MAME cabinet with a Frankenpanel, I wanted to have two buttons on the side of it to simulate pinball flipper buttons.

(I'd love a pinball machine, I just have no room and the costs are usually quite a bit more than arcade games.)

A while back I helped a guy move his games downstairs, up near Fort Collins, and he got one of those crane machines. The novelty factor on those are pretty sweet.

So the quarter factor comes into play for those 'continue in 30 seconds' games. Leave them factory. Modify the slap switches for free play! It's not like you or anyone you know is gonna really bang the cabinets around, and you could look as cool as Fonzie when you thump the side of the machine and get a credit.



THE
AAAAAAAYYYYYYY
AARDVARK

I need to go download the manuals for all of my games and get them all on free play.

I don't mind freeplay vs. tokens/quarters. I get the whole authenticity angle but I just think the pain-in-the-ass factor outweighs having them sitting in free play mode. The one thing that I think it kind of ruins though are the "coin eaters" like Gauntlet, X-Men, and so on. On something like Q*Bert where you don't continue, free play is just a convenience. But on something like Gauntlet II, now that it's on free play you've changed the game from "see how far you can get" to "I can play this forever until I get tired." I guess you could pretend to have discipline and limit yourself to a certain amount of credits, but if I had any discipline I wouldn't have 30 arcade cabinets ...

Wiring up the coin door isn't a bad idea. I don't have a lot of old school classics per se so I'm betting the vast majority of mine can be put on free play. I think Karate Champ's about the oldest one I have out there that I haven't looked into. Well, and Make Trax, but that thing's going to Make Dust real quick and begone.

[quote="Flack"]So do you have all your games set to run on coins? Or are they all on free play? Or do you unlock every time you need to edit credits? Is that too many question marks in one paragraph?[/quote]

There are never too many questions!

I have the ones that can be set to free play set to free play. I love the experience of dropping quarters into games, but that involves:

1) Keeping a bowl of quarters around
PROS: The full arcade experience
NEGS: The cats would be spraying each other with piss to be the first to knock the quarter bowl off whatever surface it was on. More, as I discovered with the box of sugar I have*, any thing that even remotely resembles a litter box will make Frobozz scratch it around.

2) Putting in token mechs
PROS: I love tokens
NEGS: I'd have to put new mechs into all the games, which would get to be expensive and time-consuming

There's a few games that don't have free play. For two of them, I wired a push button that sits in the coin-return slot (Gyruss and Arkanoid). For two others (Spy Hunter and Crystal Castles) I have five or six quarters kicking around. Now that I think about it, I've mucked about with the wiring for Spy Hunter so much, that I could drop in a push button for that one. When people come over, I find that if I tell them, "press the push button in the right-side coin drop thingie" and it's consistent for other games, they'll check there for different games.

A guy did create a ROM set that you can drop in to make Spy Hunter have free play, but the idea of messing with it when my SH is 95% working is daunting.



*Over the summer, ANTS got into the bag of sugar I had in the cupboard. So after irradiating the kitchen as best I can, what I now have to do is throw a small amount of sugar in a box and keep that in the cupboard, while the rest of the 10 pound bag of sugar is carefully kept in the fridge. So if ants get back into the house, they'll go into the box, which can be thrown away. It's like a sugar airlock.



For the most part, like my cock, all my coin doors are just flopped out there, wagging in the breeze. When you have 30 games and only three sets of keys it seems kind of pointless to lock only those machines. I know the [url=http://www.1984arcade.com]1984 Arcade[/url] and several others using that model (pay once, play all you want) have added buttons to the front of their cabinets to coin them up. I've considered that but I hate the idea of drilling holes in all my cabinets. Just feels wrong.

I'd say 2/3 of my machines I've been able to set on free play, so there really aren't that many I'd have to modify. Maybe I'll do that this year and then add locks to them all. Maybe.[/quote]

So do you have all your games set to run on coins? Or are they all on free play? Or do you unlock every time you need to edit credits? Is that too many question marks in one paragraph?

For the most part, like my cock, all my coin doors are just flopped out there, wagging in the breeze. When you have 30 games and only three sets of keys it seems kind of pointless to lock only those machines. I know the [url=http://www.1984arcade.com]1984 Arcade[/url] and several others using that model (pay once, play all you want) have added buttons to the front of their cabinets to coin them up. I've considered that but I hate the idea of drilling holes in all my cabinets. Just feels wrong.

I'd say 2/3 of my machines I've been able to set on free play, so there really aren't that many I'd have to modify. Maybe I'll do that this year and then add locks to them all. Maybe.

[quote="AArdvark"]Not to mention the Chluthu-the-friendly-space-spider game that we never saw anything more than a screenshot.[/quote]

That's still in development. Everyone else seems to have left coding for the Vectrex, so if I ever do finish it, it'd be a gold mine.

[quote]And there was something about developing a hernia during transport of said cabinet.[/quote]

[b]JC FUN FAX[/b]: You know, I never had to move Xenophobe by myself. When I bought it, I was recovering from knee surgery, so I paid two guys to bring it up to our apartment. When we moved into the house, the same movers brought it down the stairs and into the den. When I sold it, the dude brought another guy and the three of us were able to move it about. My appliance dolly's tires were out of air, so luckily they brought one. But yes, it could very well give people a hernia if you looked at it the wrong way.

(Don't tell anyone, but I miss it!)

[quote="Flack"]Where I really missed the mark were those 48-in-1 boards. I had a really good looking Sunset Riders game that I got at an auction for $50 and just didn't love it. 4 player, giant 25" monitor, great everything ... and just didn't care for it. I sold it for I think $200. A week later the guy I sold it to had stripped the cabinet, stuck a 48-in-1 board in there, and sold it for $1,500. Go me.[/quote]

Oh, totally - those things are going for crazy dough. I don't know if the guys are getting what they ask for on craigslist, but they are asking for anywhere between $1299 and, yeah, like you saw, $1500. I assume there is wiggle room there for a motivated buyer, but still.

(Actually, games on Colorado craigslist seem to be drying up a bit the last few months. Granted, I am checking less than I used to, since I am out of space, but I still have an rss feed. There's 48-in-1s, and seemingly little else. Though I think two people are trying to sell Gauntlet IIs.) (I would, I should say, LOVE a Gauntlet II, or even the first one, but I'd have to get rid of two games to have space for it. I know you have one, and like you say in your book, I totally see it being a hit at parties.)


[quote]Drilling out locks was one of those things that I was really intimidated by and once I finally tried it I said, "huh, that was really easy." It seems like something you wouldn't have to do that often but believe it or not I'd say somewhere around 20% of the games I buy are locked up and don't come with keys. And on at least one occasion I've opened a locked game only to find the keys inside, which kind of makes you wonder how that happened ...[/quote]

Hahaha, that's fantastic. Only with arcade games can someone managed to warp space/time and get those kinds of keys stuck inside, creating some M.C. Esher-style feedback loop with them. I can totally see that happening too (and I bet that's where the old Xeno's keys would have been).

I picked up keys for all my games from the Real Bob Roberts, as I was sick of the cats getting in. I did my own wiring for Arkanoid, and since it was the first time I tried it, it's a deathtrap and a fire hazard. So I had to lock that one up, but they were all jumping inside the various games. If I caught them unaware, it was a friggign jailbreak when I'd turn one on to coin it up.

[quote="Flack"]I just saw a Top Skater go for $200 at an auction. Everything worked except the monitor. From what I understand you can swap in pretty much any projection television that'll fit. I don't know anything about swapping it with a flat screen television but that seems like a better long term solution.[/quote]
That's good to know, I never noticed it was rear pro while playing it, but maybe ours was set up different. By the time I can house Topskater flatscreens will be even more dirt cheap than they are now, so no issue.

[quote]Did you ever play Street Skater (I mean, Sk8er) for the original PlayStation? I always thought that was the closest console version of Top Skater. It didn't have the depth that the Tony Hawk series had but god damn was it fun.[/quote]
Naw, I was all over THPS, if you're still jonsing for some Skating fun, Skate for the 360 is probably the best thing to come along in awhile.

Results of owning a Xenophobe game

[quote]it has cost me respect in my community, my self-respect, and the respect of my one-day future great-great-grandchildren[/quote]


Not to mention the Chluthu-the-friendly-space-spider game that we never saw anything more than a screenshot.

And there was something about developing a hernia during transport of said cabinet.


THE
BAD NEWS ALL AROUND
AARDVRK

I just saw a Top Skater go for $200 at an auction. Everything worked except the monitor. From what I understand you can swap in pretty much any projection television that'll fit. I don't know anything about swapping it with a flat screen television but that seems like a better long term solution.

Did you ever play Street Skater (I mean, Sk8er) for the original PlayStation? I always thought that was the closest console version of Top Skater. It didn't have the depth that the Tony Hawk series had but god damn was it fun.

Dumb trivia fact, Street Sk8er was the first PSX game I ever downloaded. Via dialup. Oh, the pain.

Sunset Riders was a fucking sweet game! The only upright I ever really wanted was Top Skater, because I'm fantastic at it, and the hardware doesn't really lend itself to being emulated.

Owning my own top skater is primarily my only current motivation to ever buy myself a house.

Hah! I've never taken quite that bad of a beating on a machine, but it's not by design. My personal trick is to find broken games worth $100 but pay $200 for them because, when fixed, they'll be worth $500. Then I never fix them and I end up selling for $100. Either that, or I'll pay $200 for a (barely) working game and when it breaks I'll lose interest and sell it for $100.

Where I really missed the mark were those 48-in-1 boards. I had a really good looking Sunset Riders game that I got at an auction for $50 and just didn't love it. 4 player, giant 25" monitor, great everything ... and just didn't care for it. I sold it for I think $200. A week later the guy I sold it to had stripped the cabinet, stuck a 48-in-1 board in there, and sold it for $1,500. Go me.

Drilling out locks was one of those things that I was really intimidated by and once I finally tried it I said, "huh, that was really easy." It seems like something you wouldn't have to do that often but believe it or not I'd say somewhere around 20% of the games I buy are locked up and don't come with keys. And on at least one occasion I've opened a locked game only to find the keys inside, which kind of makes you wonder how that happened ...

I had a lock that I didn't have the key for, with my Xenophobe. I never drilled it. I never drilled it out, I mean.

I always regretted it. I could have checked to see if it had a real attract mode. They... I just wanted a proper attract mode for Xenophobe.

Did I ever tell you about my Xenophobe, Flack? It was the one I paid a $1000 for and managed to sell, years later, for $230. It is the worst thing I have ever done with money in my life, and it has cost me respect in my community, my self-respect, and the respect of my one-day future great-great-grandchildren ([i]they[/i] will lose respect for me because we will befriend aliens in the future, and an ancestor owning a game where you kill them will be like us finding out that one of our ancestors lived in New Hampshire and yet owned slaves during the Civil War.).

I think your voice is like liquid velvet.

Mostly 'cuz I like hearing myself talk.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wFdc6NhR-4[/youtube]

(That was sarcasm; I hate hearing myself talk.)