Anyone have a Home Arcade Machine?

Cafe Society
1

Prompted by the threads on Arcades on the Golden Age and the SDMB Arcade , Does anyone have any Arcade Machines in their home, or any of the Mame Cabinets - Home built or Store bought? What’s been your experience in ownership?

I have considered off and on building one, as I have at least the PC parts laying around, but it still seems pretty daunting. For the price, it seems you could get one decent original machine liek a Pac-man or such, but it seems like that woudn’t be as fun. I certainly like the idea of being able to play any of the old school games.

2

Back in the early-to-mid eighties I had Asteroids, Battlezone, and Gravitar machines. I bought them each for $150.

Currently I have a MAME cabinet: Williams Arcade Classics, or somesuch. Robotron, Joust, Sinistar, the two Defenders, Bubbles, Root Beer Tapper, Wizard of Wor, one or two others I can’t remember right now (that Devil-themed game, whatever it is).

3

I’d love to have a Golden Tee machine.

4

A friend of mine very nearly bought a Star Trek game that was autographed by most of the TOS cast and Mr. Roddenberry.

The shipping is what kept him from getting it.

5

Kind of. It’s not operated by computer, but instead is a special PCB board that contains 48 games. The whole thing is set in a cocktail table with controllers on opposite ends and the screen flips back and forth for the two players like the classic cocktail games.

This was a handmade job that I picked up in an auction, and looks very similar to this: http://www.nextgenerationarcades.com/product_info.php?products_id=54

I also have the 2007 model Megatouch that you might see sitting at the end of bars, as well as three pinball machines.

6

I have a Gottlieb Out of Sight electromechanical pinball. According to the documents that came with the machine, mine rolled off the assembly line in early 1975. Over thirty years old, and it still works!

7

My parents have had a centipede arcade game for about 10 years (maybe a bit more). They have had the trackball fixed/replaced at least twice, the motherboard has been in the shop, the power source was an issue for a while and the monitor replaced as well. But they seem to think it is worth it. And I love it when I visit. Family centipede tourneys!

8

I used to have 2 different Williams Stargate machines (hopped up Defender), different times.
I bought one and then a buddy also bought one, several of us could play pretty good.

We used to set them on maximum difficulty and play for hours, all the time. Then we’d drive all over the place, looking for Stargate machines to play. We’d play them, crush the high score, and post smack about the previous high score (you could enter a 20 character message and your user name IIRC).

I sold mine when I moved, then bought the one off my buddy later. It crapped out after that.

9

Aren’t the Megatouch machines really expensive?

10

We have the Arcade Legends 2 machine from the Chicago Gaming Company. I spend most of the time playing Joust, Golden Tee 2 and Championship bowling.

11

Gottlieb’s Card Whiz which is the two-player version of Royal Flush mentioned in the other thread. It’s not at my house, but at my brother’s – he’s got the kids and the room.

I bought it used in 1981 when the arcades were dumping the mechanical-reel pin games in favor of the plasma displays.

12

My friend had an old unit, that had two joysticks and six buttons, he fitted a PC into it with MAME games, a few thousand I think. It was great except that if it’s not a sit down unit it’s hard to get comfortable, especially when playing for great lengths of time. He’d bought the old arcade unit cheap and kitted out his old PC to play the games.