What's the ideal beginner arcade?

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I'd imagine it would be something like Ms Pac Man or another classic game that is easily available to repair/restore. Or is there another game out there that would be considered more beginner friendly for someone trying to get into the hobby?

What about games during the 90s? Would it be a version of the many SF2 games we saw?
 
I'd recommend a JAMMA game...
Many games including ms pacman, referred to as "Non JAMMA", require specialized harnesses specific to those games. While learning how to fix up any arcade is not too difficult with a little time and googling, I'd recommend a JAMMA game as a start for sure. A nice thing about JAMMA is you can just unhook a board and pop in a different JAMMA board without having to rewire controls in most cases.
 
I'd recommend a JAMMA game...
Many games including ms pacman, referred to as "Non JAMMA", require specialized harnesses specific to those games. While learning how to fix up any arcade is not too difficult with a little time and googling, I'd recommend a JAMMA game as a start for sure. A nice thing about JAMMA is you can just unhook a board and pop in a different JAMMA board without having to rewire controls in most cases.

Excellent choice. You can use any jamma game while you're learning and they use universal switching power supplies. Plus board and jamma cabs are plentiful and cheaper then getting some of the classics.
 
If you don't have specific games that you want, get something JAMMA and just buy whatever boards look interesting and are for the right price.

Double that if you're a kid of the 90s like me. 80-something% of 90s arcade games are at least part-JAMMA, so you and me, we're lucky, we can pick up a board and call it a day, as opposed to dedicating an entire cabinet to one game. There's no shame in only having one or two cabinets or just a supergun and collecting the boards :)
 
The Real Bob Roberts helped me understand the basics of wiring and is a good tool for learning the makup of arcade games. Start with a simple Jamma and in no time youll be able to jump into more extreme arcades like Tron and games that utilize computer power supplies and hard drives and switches. Good luck!

By the way, my first game I wired was a 1943 in a frogger cabinet. New Jamma harnesses are simple. Just make sure your careful around the monitors.
 
The Real Bob Roberts helped me understand the basics of wiring and is a good tool for learning the makup of arcade games. Start with a simple Jamma and in no time youll be able to jump into more extreme arcades like Tron and games that utilize computer power supplies and hard drives and switches. Good luck!

By the way, my first game I wired was a 1943 in a frogger cabinet. New Jamma harnesses are simple. Just make sure your careful around the monitors.

Actually, stuff new enough to break into 3D chips and hard drives tend to have problems that are either easy fixes, or on the other extreme, outright impossible to fix -- there's really no difficult-but-doable issues for those games, it's either a quick half hour fix or it's totaled. Go even newer and you run into outright PCs which you would think makes things easier... but you find a whole new kind of sticky. Good luck hunting down that one specific type of GeForce videocard the game needs!
 
I'd recommend a JAMMA game...
Many games including ms pacman, referred to as "Non JAMMA", require specialized harnesses specific to those games. While learning how to fix up any arcade is not too difficult with a little time and googling, I'd recommend a JAMMA game as a start for sure. A nice thing about JAMMA is you can just unhook a board and pop in a different JAMMA board without having to rewire controls in most cases.

Agreed. Roll with a JAMMA for your first game. Get a horizontal one.
 
The ideal beginner arcade? Oh, about 5 games and a DMD pin.

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First of all, go with what you want. Enjoyable games you really want > cheap games/easy projects of games you're "enh" about.

JAMMA is as easy as it gets. If you want even easier, CPS-2 or MvS systems are meant to be even more brain dead simple for swapping in a lot of games. Aside from CPS-2 needing a kick harness and MvS needing it's own special JAMMA harness, once you have them set up swapping games is...90% of the time...just swapping a cartridge.
 
Defender! ;)


Really, as a relative newbie to collecting, go with a nice jamma cabinet. They're simple to wrench on, and very satisfying to play "operator" with.
 
First of all, go with what you want. Enjoyable games you really want > cheap games/easy projects of games you're "enh" about.

I disagree. There's something to be said for populating your gameroom with cheap games/projects and then swapping/trading over time to get what you want once you have a collection going. It's amazing how many games look kinda crap on the outset, but grow on you once they're sitting in your house. Besides, a lot of people (myself included) are in this hobby far more for the machines than for the games themselves; otherwise, we'd be sitting on our couch playing MAME with an X-Arcade instead of collecting cabinets.
 
I disagree. There's something to be said for populating your gameroom with cheap games/projects and then swapping/trading over time to get what you want once you have a collection going. It's amazing how many games look kinda crap on the outset, but grow on you once they're sitting in your house. Besides, a lot of people (myself included) are in this hobby far more for the machines than for the games themselves; otherwise, we'd be sitting on our couch playing MAME with an X-Arcade instead of collecting cabinets.

We can agree to disagree I guess. Here's the thing:

I've gone through the whole "let's pick up stuff because it is easy/cheap and I can swap it later" phase. It doesn't tend to end with a garage full of stuff I want, but rather a garage full of stuff no one wants. It's like picking up any old project car that's easy to restore and claiming you don't care about driving it later. Really? Ok. Here's a 1993 4-door Sentra. If I wanted to drive, I'd go to Scandia and drive the go-carts.

If you're into this just to work on the machines alone, I think you're possibly in the minority (and that's totally fine and works for you). Working on these things is a huge chunk of the hobby, but a lot of us have to also care about the gameplay to pull through the rough spots of the project. The end goal is to play a game we want to play. Hence, I don't recommend going at this hobby based off of anything but, "what game do I really like/want to play?".

Only exception would be Pole Position.
 
I've gone through the whole "let's pick up stuff because it is easy/cheap and I can swap it later" phase. It doesn't tend to end with a garage full of stuff I want, but rather a garage full of stuff no one wants. It's like picking up any old project car that's easy to restore and claiming you don't care about driving it later. Really? Ok. Here's a 1993 4-door Sentra. If I wanted to drive, I'd go to Scandia and drive the go-carts.

Okay, yeah, it definitely needs to be qualified with "don't buy anything for more than you could sell it for as-is later, unless you actually really want it". I know all too well it's easy to buy yourself into a corner by overpaying.
 
to be honest, i would say go for JAMMA as well, just for the ease of use, i dont have the room for a cab right now let alone mulitple machines, but i also collect PCBs now so do what ever you have room for :SD
 
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