Found my first arcade game, almost a decade after I sold it

jimmyfloyd

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Found my first arcade game, almost a decade after I sold it

So, the first Arcade game I ever owned I got from a roommate, who got it from a neighbor when we were in college. It sat in our apartment, and we got it working and played it a bit. When we both graduated, he was moving quite far away and didn't have room for it, so he gave it to me.

When I got my first job, I moved it with me back to my hometown, and it made it as far as my parent's shed. My mom did not want it in the house and there was no room in the garage. While I was looking for a place of my own and getting settled in, I would run an extension cord out to the shed for it.

Well, I finally decided to move into a 1br with my then-girlfriend, and there simply was no space for it. After a couple of months of playing it when I'd stop at my parents, it just sat as I didn't get over there much. My Dad was now starting to state he needed the space again. So I decided to sell it reluctantly. I put it up on CL. However, by this time the monitor had collapsed to just the thin line in the center, and I didn't have time or knowledge on how to fix it, so I sold it cheap and watched to go.


Then, come today, I am browsing THIS THREAD and I happened upon THIS POST. I thought, "Man, that looks a lot like my old Arkanoid RoD. Even has the cracked, taped together Marquee." So, being curious, but not optimistic, I saw that Spyridon had a build thread for his Pacman in his signiture and followed it.

Right away, after seeing the pictures on the first page, I was quite sure that this was my cab. The description of his purchase of it sounded similar to what I recalled, and the time of the post puts it squarely in the right timeframe for the sale. And the better pictures of the Marquee certainly looked exactly like my old busted one (came that way, I taped it to hold it together.)

Unfortunately, It's been so long, I can't remember which hard drive has the pictures of it, even though I know I saw them less than a month ago. Because of this, I could not saw for sure it was mine, and was about 75% certain. Feeling like I wanted to know for sure, I picked a random hard drive, popped it into an external case and took a quick look to see what I could find. While I did not find any of the pictures of the outside of the machine, I got lucky and found several I took of the inside. The downside, most were blurry...

So, I then took the pictures, and started trying to compare details, and as I read the thread, and looked at my pictures, I was finally able to determine that it was indeed my old cabinet because of the following:

Monitor: The monitor issue in his first post is very similar to mine, along with the severe burn in. Also, Post #14 of his build thread shows the monitor numbers that are seen in my 3rd photo. While Blurry, they appear to be the same.

Bally plate: I know most cabs have this, but in Post #120, the same 2 screws of his plate are rusty, and the same knick in the paint showing yellow under the plate match mine (photo #5)

Board ID: This is not as easy to see, but the SN of the Arkanoid board in Post #45 appears to be the same as mine in picture #2.

Switching Power Supply: Also in Post #45 is a picture of the Power Supply board with switching power supply. As you can see in Picture #1, mine had this same setup, which initially confused me when my roommate and I got it, as it did not match the manual. It appears to be exactly the same, with the exception of more shed grime (My pictures are from before the move I believe)

And the last thing that told me this was mine is visible in the same picture and post as the power supply: The staining along the floor of the cab visible in the upper left on my picture. It is an exact match for the picture in Post #45 of the bottom of the cab.

So I know this is a long post, but I am very excited that I found it and finally got to see it was restored. The guy who bought it from me said he was going to turn it back into a Pacman. While I was sad to see it go, and I kick myself for selling RoD (one of my favorite games) I sold it for the (mostly) right reasons of not letting it deteriorate further in the shed because I knew I wouldn't have time or space to get to it for a long time.

Hope everyone enjoyed my story! I'll post my pictures if I find them.
 

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that's one of the reason i dont want to sell any of my games.

[sellers remorse]

congrats on finding one of yours back.
 
Interesting bittersweet story! RoD is one of my favorites as well. They did get restored gloriously, so at least its not converted into a 60-in-1... ;)
 
For the record, I did not bring this back home, just found it here in another member's collection. It did finally answer whether it was restored as the buyer said he was going to, or parted and/or Mame'd as I thought it may have been.

I would probably consider purchasing it back just for nostalgia's sake, but I would rather have an Arkanoid RoD over a Pacman. I spent hours playing some variant of breakout and Arkanoid over the years.
 
For the record, I did not bring this back home, just found it here in another member's collection. It did finally answer whether it was restored as the buyer said he was going to, or parted and/or Mame'd as I thought it may have been.

I would probably consider purchasing it back just for nostalgia's sake, but I would rather have an Arkanoid RoD over a Pacman. I spent hours playing some variant of breakout and Arkanoid over the years.

Buy it back and covert it back Arkanoid RoD?
 
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