This really shouldn’t feel like an eviction, but for some reason it does. Last Monday I spent from dawn ’til dusk clearing out the last items remaining of our old home: the arcade. For those of you who haven’t seen it before, in better days it looked like this: The “arcade” is really a shed that was already on the property when we purchased it. The actual number of machines inside fluctuated over time, but for most of 2011 it was home to 25 machines. I had another 3 in the garage that never made it out to the arcade… (read more)

I’ve had a lot of miserable experiences when it comes to moving arcade games. I’ve dropped machines, I’ve hit drive-thru signs with them … I even almost lost one off the back of my trailer once. Nothing, however, compares to moving a 720 arcade cabinet by yourself. 720 arcade cabinets are essentially a lesson in what not to do when designing an arcade cabinet. It’s tall, and top heavy. It has a 25″ horizontally-mounted monitor in it, precariously balanced on top of a thin pedestal. The pedestal goes into a base that, I think, may contain concrete. None of the… (read more)

Over the weekend Mason and I zipped down to Dallas to visit my friend Justin. One thing Justin wanted to do was take Mason to Gameworks, located in the Grapevine Mills Mall. Gameworks is definitely a new school arcade. None of the machine there take quarters or tokens; instead, everything works off of a “game card” that you swipe at each machine. I’ve never been a fan of game card systems as they cause you to overspend and it make it hard to keep track of how much money you have left (which is probably the point). Justin and Mason… (read more)

For those of you who don’t know, I have a part-time second job. I’m the maintenance guy for a local arcade … that just happens to be located in my backyard. I know lots of people who think it would be fun to own an arcade game, but most of those people don’t know what kind of work goes in to keeping one up and running. Sure, these beasts were pretty reliable back when they were new, but all of my games are somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five years old, and many of them are getting cantankerous in their old… (read more)

Greg Kennedy asks: “I have a question about your MAME cabinet: how much do you play it vs. the other real-deal machines you own? I wonder sometimes if the diversity offered by MAME is a match for dedicated hardware or not […] I asked because I just got my MAME cab working and was wondering how others’ experience pans out over time.” Greg, I’m so glad you asked! The debate between MAME Cabinets and Arcade Cabinets (aka: “dedicated arcade machines” or “real machines”) has raged, I’m guessing, since the day the first MAME cabinet was built and will continue to… (read more)

Behind every collection there is a collector, and behind every collector there is a holy grail that drives him — that one, seemingly unobtainable item that always seems to be just out of reach for one reason or another. For those unfamiliar with the concept, “holy grail” comes from the 1975 comedy “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, and it was also featured in the third Indiana Jones film, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” There are multiple reasons why grails become grails. The first quantifier is typically the law of supply and demand — in other words, there are… (read more)

Man, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Three days in a row, three resolutions achieved. I’m like a resolution machine (watch me get down, watch me get down …) It’s been too cold to do any real gaming out in the arcade this week so instead I’ve been working on a couple of my “garage” projects, one of which is my Ms. Pac-Man cabinet. I paid $80 for this cabinet at an estate sale and let me tell you, other than my fully-working Q*Bert that I got for $100 at a garage sale (thanks again for the tip, Tim-Dog),… (read more)