Buying old arcade games

A friend of mine from college told his sister that I restored/repaired old arcade games. She was interested in getting a Tempest or a Donkey Kong game. So the question is "What is the best advice for these people?".

I told my friend that first you need to be a commited hobbyist to have one of these games, they break down often. A game manufactured in 1982 is just not meant to last 30 years, so they are always breaking down. Another thing is cost. Tempest is one of the "hot" games, and a working Tempest can cost $1500 or more, a broken one can cost $700. And a broken Tempest can present a host of problems in getting parts, particularly for the color XY monitor.

Donkey Kong isn't much better. I've been looking for a non-working cocktail version for about a year now. My price threshold is "$250", and that assumes it's "parts complete" and in reasonably good shape. I haven't seen anything for less than $350, and even as high as $600. So much for the recession keeping prices low.

While Donkey Kong isn't as hard to keep running as Tempest, it's no picnic. If you want to keep it authentic then you'll always have something coming loose or needing re-seating. When I restored a PacMan for my daughter, I upgraded the power connectors and switches. So now I have a NEMA IEC connector (like the back of a computer), which definitely isn't authentic. I also added a fan to help things run cool and replaced the internal power wiring (once again for safety).

I recommended to my friend that they consider going with a pre-built MAME cabinet. The downside is cost and authenticity. The upside is it's modern, fixable by the average computer geek and runs hundreds if not thousands of games. You can find used versions of MAME systems for the $1500 range (maybe less if you look around for a distressed seller), and new ones in the $2300 range and up. But they will work and play all the popular games.

Owning old arcade games, especially systems from the 70's and 80's, is a hobby and takes real dedication in both time and money to keep them working. Totally restoring a game is expensive, the restoration of the PacMan game cost about $700, and that is just parts. Getting into this hobby is not for the faint of heart.

I'm back!

Okay I'm back. It's been a while. Another hobby took precedence, Home Brew beer. I recommend it to anyone who wants to have really good tasting beer that is a lot of fun to make. And when I say "really good tasting" I mean better than virtually anything you can buy, and cheaper to boot!

Asteroids - cocktail
My next project won't be Battlezone or Missile Command, but rather to get the Asteroids cocktail that I purchased a while ago up and working. I have two 15" B&W Vector monitors that don't work, one from the Asteroids game and one I purchased quite a while ago. I just picked up a 15" CRT so I can replace the burned out tube in one of the monitors. My goal is to get the monitor working with my Zektor ZVG and then proceed to fix the game.

The cabinet is in pretty good shape (I'll post pictures later). There's a power supply and all the other hardware but the motherboard is missing. Fortunately I have a spare, and working, motherboard, so I'm off to a good start. I should be able to get the system playing blind rather easily, but I'm sure the monitor will be a real bear.

I have stopped purchasing new games, I've fallen behind in fixing the games I have and keeping them working. So until they are all working and setup no new games!