Has this ever happened to you...
I was walking through this mall that is about 1 hour away from where I live. I was having a good time, and then I saw te arcades.........it looked pretty old, and beat up. There didn't seem to be anything good, but then I saw......the old X-Men Arcade machine!!! I haven't seen one of those things in years. It brought back soooo many memories. I played it for a while. (maybe almost an hour lol) It was so fun, and it was like I was a little kid again. Has this ever happened to you? You see something that you haven't seen in soooo long that you start using/playing/etc with it, and it made you feel like a little kid?
I only wish there was an arcade that had old games around where I live! My dream is to find
Dragon's Lair or Cloak and Dagger in arcade machine form..... ahhh... they'd have to pry me off the damn machine!
Maybe someday when I'm independently wealthy (I can dream, can't I?) I will buy the damn things. I found a site that sells the
Dragon's Lair machine (with DL 2 and some other game) for only $3275 (probably a small fortune for shipping as well).
I know a couple guys that have built their own cabinets and ran an dedicated emulator computer inside. It wouldn't even have to be a fast computer, something like 1000 mhz would probably be overkill. Arcade-X makes some pretty nice sticks too that fit these projects nicely.
If I had "computer smarts", I would try that, but I don't .
If you are able to post in the message board, you are smart enough to make an emulator cabinet. That is, if you have tools, cash, and time.
I have tools. I don't have cash, and I have time up until school starts so I doubt I can make on, but do you know where I can download the Arcade
NES ROM?
Take a look at Roth's Game Links thread. I use
NES ROM-world.com.
i went into my arcade and saw SEga Rally and i was happy to see a Rally game.
I seen Raiden 2 in the back of some arcade. I really wanted to play it, but I used my money on Soulcalibur 2 & Tekken 5.
The only arcades around my parts are full of fruit machines and tat like that (and it's not as if I live in the middle of nowhere)
The only arcade machines I have found are "Dance Dance Revolution" and "Tekken 5" But I don't think that old skool arcades ever really exsisted in the U.K as much as in the U.S. At least not round my "hood"
Yes they did! Seaside towns had loads of arcades full of quality cabs. There are still a few arcades near me which are mainly filled with racing and shooting games.
My Favorite Arcade Game in my Arcade.
Raiden Fighters would have to be my all time favourite arcade game. I used to play it at the local bowling alley all the time, and I still do cause I can't bowl worth shit.
Daynum, please bear in mind that my local seaside towns consist of Whitby, Skegness, Scarborough and, ahem, Blackpool
Cool I remember going to Blackpool in about 1991 and they had huuuge arcades there full of 10p a go classics.
Oh, yeah, back then they were full of classics!
I remember way back in 1996 I went to I think it was Sega World in London. It was amazing! I played on sooo many sweet games, Sonic, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop etc but then it closed down. Gutted.
Game Exchange here in Rapid City, SD, has a TRon Arcade Machine. a
Dig Dug 2, and
Gauntlet.
The only arcades around my parts are full of fruit machines and tat like that (and it's not as if I live in the middle of nowhere)
The only arcade machines I have found are "Dance Dance Revolution" and "Tekken 5" But I don't think that old skool arcades ever really exsisted in the U.K as much as in the U.S. At least not round my "hood"
Those arcades full of fruit machines probably used to be full of actual arcade machines at one point but arcades went into terminal decline at the appearance of the PS1. They were already going that way, but
Street Fighter 2010 2 gave them one last "hurrah" before most of the classic Jamma cabs went out the window, and in came the heavy, dedicated cabs like Propcycle and Ridge Racer.
in my opinion the decline began before that, when it started costing $1 or more per play... Nobody can grasp the concept that if something is cheaper, you sell more, and more sales = more profit
$1 arcade cab is played 10 times a day
$0.25 arcade cab is played 50 times a day, because people can afford to go in and actually play a couple of games.
Where do you make more money?
in my opinion the decline began before that, when it started costing $1 or more per play... Nobody can grasp the concept that if something is cheaper, you sell more, and more sales = more profit
$1 arcade cab is played 10 times a day
$0.25 arcade cab is played 50 times a day, because people can afford to go in and actually play a couple of games.
Where do you make more money?
Yeah, it was already going that way, but it was with the arcade appearance of games like Ridge Racer, in their dedicated cabs that things really started to hit the buffers.
Traditionally, this was the pull of the arcade: You COULDN'T play games like the arcade games at home; just a cut down approximation for your platform of choice. As home gaming hardware got closer to the full arcade experience though, numbers playing in arcades dropped, and arcade-machine manufacturers felt they HAD to go the dedicated cabinet route in order to offer a gaming experience that punters couldn't get at home. Still, the experience "at home" started to prove "good enough".
The problem is one of economics: The reason that a lot of those older games could be played cheaply is that all an arcade operator had to do to "refresh" was slap a few new decals on his cabinet, switch over the circuit board and viola, whole new machine. It wasn't really possible though with dedicated monstrosities like Ridge Racer, and those machines cost a LOT more to buy in than a Jamma cabinet, and often took up the space of two or three other machines.
Yes, I've experienced that once. When I was 5 years old I got my first NES, I played it a lot, but then one day it broke down. Maybe there would have been a chance of fixing it, but I was just 5 and my parents didn't know that much about those things and still don't. Lol.) So they got rid of it. When I got 11 or 12 I began to miss the NES, so I begged my parents to get me one. They tried really hard we phoned everybody we knew who owned it, but none of them wanted to sell it. We printed an artical in the paper. We got plenty of offers, but none of them was about the NES...
When we started to give up, one of the guys we knew said that he could sell us his NES anyway. So I got the NES pluss two controllers, 6 games and one zapper for 25 dollars. That was one of the happies days of my life till now.
in my opinion the decline began before that, when it started costing $1 or more per play... Nobody can grasp the concept that if something is cheaper, you sell more, and more sales = more profit
$1 arcade cab is played 10 times a day
$0.25 arcade cab is played 50 times a day, because people can afford to go in and actually play a couple of games.
Where do you make more money?
If the arcade is in any sort of decent location I'm afraid the $1 cabs stand to make a lot more money. I worked in an arcade a few summers ago in a busy seaside resort and during the evenings and on rainy days it was packed. Played 10 times a day? More like 10 times every 10 minutes and these were even more expensive at £1 a go. I didn't have anthing to do with the finances but I would hazard a guess that a popular cab like Time Crisis 2 was probably pulling in about £500 a day. If it had been set at 25p a go there wouldn't have been enough hours in the day to make that much.
Of course I'm talking here about a busy arcade, but even for the less busy ones I don't think cutting prices is going to encourage enough kids to put down their PS2 pads and head outside. Remember it's (usually) successful owners/manages who are running these arcades and they have the experience to know what's going to make them the most money. My boss was driving around a Jag after all!