I'd like to invite everyone here to be among the first to see a new sister site to the KLOV that is under development but open to visitors.
The International Arcade Museum includes not only the KLOV but also all other types of coin-operated devices, though in particular arcade, gambling, and vending devices from the 1890's through the present.
It's currently at
http://coin.klov.com/ through the address may very well change in the future.
The KLOV may be positioned as one subset of the International Arcade Museum. The KLOV will, however, continue to have it's own unique identity. I'd like to integrate the two sites as much as possible while at the same time allowing people interested in just one area (ie: KLOV/videogames) to be able to avoid having to dig through the other areas.
The back-end code base for each site differs. The International Arcade Museum site actually has a great deal of functionality that the KLOV doesn't (though a lot of this functionality won't be obvious if you look at the site today). Over time, the code base for both sites will tend to merge. The new code allows multiple people to help maintain the sites (ie: process submissions), which is critical for our growth. (Wouldn't it be nice when people submitted images that they actually made it online in their lifetimes?)
coin.klov.com is running on a live data set so please don't submit any bogus 'test' data using the "add description" or "add image" funcations, etc. Note that although we have over 6000 machines on the new site already (99% with page references to books they appear in), most of them do not have photos or descriptions yet. The listings that do include photos appear at the top of the indexes.
There will be separate sections of the 'Message Boards' for the areas of the International Arcade Museum. The nature or 'flavor' of each section on the message boards will tend to vary. Collectors of old penny arcade machines, myself EXCLUDED, tend to be in their 40's, 50's or 60's. As such, the penny arcade section of the message boards will have different types of conversation than the younger-oriented KLOV boards.
In addition to my personal collection of coin-operated video games, I also have about 100 old penny arcade machines, mostly from the 1890's through the 1940's. I started collecting video games first then kept expanding my collection back and back and back as I discovered some really cool old pieces (especially some old mechanical two-player games). One thing leads to another and...
Comments welcome...
Enjoy...
Greg McLemore