Yes, the Armor Attack at SuperAuctions Compton was working fine, but missing the overlay making it a tad more challenging to play, but somewhat intriguing. My two year old son liked it too...pointing and saying "helicopter...". He preferred the driving game though which worked fine... what was it... a Daytona or? I forgot already. He loved the redemption games better. Nothing there I really had to have, though if I would have stuck around I might have bought the Quick & Crash (Japanese) for parts.
I left before the auction even started to go to the OTHER Superauctions event, located at one of the film studios in Hollywood. They were liquidating a bunch of items from something called the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. It was a sad story. The non-profit museum was already having a very tough time, and then this economy rolled them over. Everything there went cheap, and I figure there I got the deal of the day...
For $500 (plus tax and premium) I got a repro coin-operated Edison Kinetoscope machine, one of a dozen or so made by a famous Edison historian a while back, worth about $12,000 to $18,000. It only seems to need some minor adjustments and a new set of antique locks. The original ones are worth over $100,000. Neither come up very often at all. It shows a short movie for a penny. What you see in the second attached photo are a bunch of film looping back and forth... the whole very short movie is on an endless loop. Welcome to movies before they got projected on a wall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetoscope
(An early Kinetoscope arcade in San Francisco, late 1890s)
I actually got an original serial number plate off a Kinetoscope for about $750 on eBay about a year ago, and someone offered me twice that an hour after the auction. The serial number plate was as close as I've gotten to a machine in a decade of looking. Note: Kinetoscope is also the name of a number of other Edison machines (ie: Home Kinetoscope), but these other machines don't have the history (or value) behind them.
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Edit: I pay healthy finders fees for old rare machines...
I left before the auction even started to go to the OTHER Superauctions event, located at one of the film studios in Hollywood. They were liquidating a bunch of items from something called the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. It was a sad story. The non-profit museum was already having a very tough time, and then this economy rolled them over. Everything there went cheap, and I figure there I got the deal of the day...
For $500 (plus tax and premium) I got a repro coin-operated Edison Kinetoscope machine, one of a dozen or so made by a famous Edison historian a while back, worth about $12,000 to $18,000. It only seems to need some minor adjustments and a new set of antique locks. The original ones are worth over $100,000. Neither come up very often at all. It shows a short movie for a penny. What you see in the second attached photo are a bunch of film looping back and forth... the whole very short movie is on an endless loop. Welcome to movies before they got projected on a wall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetoscope
I actually got an original serial number plate off a Kinetoscope for about $750 on eBay about a year ago, and someone offered me twice that an hour after the auction. The serial number plate was as close as I've gotten to a machine in a decade of looking. Note: Kinetoscope is also the name of a number of other Edison machines (ie: Home Kinetoscope), but these other machines don't have the history (or value) behind them.
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Edit: I pay healthy finders fees for old rare machines...
