Arcade Talk 24/7/365

Folks, an idea I long thought about was doing some sort of an arcade show/ event for a weekend here. I know it was mentioned on here before by a few different people in a few different shapes and forms over the years. I think a sort of format that would make sense to me is:

Hosting it at Level Up, using the new function room for lots of additional games. Bringing in rare games and big rare DLX games like Afterburner DLX, Outrun DLX, Tron, Tempest, Donkey Kong, 3 or 4 newer Jap games to have as many as possible for the event. Rare pinballs? Maybe having aiming to bring in 30+ games just for this on top of the other 50 or so already there. What would you like to see game wise?

Having all games on free play in the whole venue. Set entry fee in.

Having tournaments/ competitions throughout the weekend. I.e. Street Fighter, Tekken 7, etc. Pinball competition? (League would be finished for the year by the time it would probably happen). Prizes for the winners.

High score challenges on certain games, i.e. prizes for the winners.

Have a retro console area setup for the likes of SNES, NES, 2600, Etc.

Maybe bringing in some special guests for it that could perform something interesting? I.e. speedrunners, etc.

Would people be willing to travel to this/interested in attending this sort of thing? I would reckon it would cost a lot of money to run this, so to break even probably well over 100 tickets would have to be sold (if they were lets say somewhere around 20 quid each). Although a lower budget version might be possible to achieve if it was scaled back. It wouldn't be a big money spinner but it wouldn't really be about that, any additional money would probably be used to rent some more interesting cabinets for the event.

It's something I always thought would be neat, I know a few people previously talked about doing something similar but they've never happened. I suppose this is just gauging interest for something like this rather than "this is definitely going to happen" sort of thing. It might be a non-runner as it wouldn't be just up to me too and would need a lot of thought. But would you be interested? Any ideas? Good Idea/ bad idea?

+1 for another attendee here alright, would really love if something like this was on in Ireland and I'd be dragging quite a few people with me too!

Thanks folks, I know a lot of time/effort/money/planning would need to go into this so, I'm just scoping it out for the minute and gauging interest. I've seen similar events run in other countries (much larger countries however) but always thought it might be something that would be nice if one happened here, and I think I could organize some really cool games to be there.

Abominations of arcade cabs in my work office as part of 'Return to Office' events for those who weren't on site over the pox.

Took one look, saw LCDs, Pandora Boxes...well, I couldn't see anyone renting out cabs having CRTs. Too expensive to maintain.

So this fix didn't last long and I had 'the fear' of the DinoKing screen getting some image burn-in if the kids left the cab on without selecting a game as it would stay on the old 161-in-1 menu. Well no more! A kind soul showed how to easily use an Adafruit Trinket board to do the same job of holding the start button during power on. Some work later, direct into the PICKnMIX feature of the UniBios v4 with a 161-in-1 cart :)

Was in Token last night and the machines are in even worse condition than I remember.

Or maybe I notice more since getting my own cabinet.

For started, All the controls are unresponsive but also, loads of machines have had their CRTs replaced with LCDs and those with CRTs aren’t ever calibrated properly.

Point Blank - Brightness too high.

Mario Kart - One cab has screen off center.

Street Fighter - Colours all wrong

Loads of others are off center, or need some adjustment.

They also no longer sell lots of interesting beers, just whatever is owned by Heineken.

I guess it’s more about restaurant now, but we ended up giving away the last of our tokens and I won’t be back.

The moment you remove a CRT from a machine it ceases to be an arcade machine IMO. I wouldn't bother playing anything like that either.

A good tech with a practical approach to pins and cabs could do wonders for the place. Last time I was there the pins were in a sorry state or affairs

To be honest I can understand why places put LCDs into machines in a commercial environment. It's not ideal but saves time, money and esb so I can understand it.

But LCDS with original boards causes a good bit of lag right? If they are going to go that route it's probably worthwhile to take out all the original boards and replace the innards with mame and run the CRT emulators for the LCDs. Go all in.

4 player HOT ROD !!! ...i need it .although sys24 is a bugger and its massive ,food to see one surviving !

very nice

I reckon you could make that from a coat hanger and a roll of tinfoil.

Hahaha! I'm going to have to give that a go for a laugh now at some point. 😁

Years ago I bought a headphone jack adapter from a guy who was making them on Arcade Otaku. Has a cable that runs off the jamma edge, up into a blank button hole and you can connect up a 3.5mm pair of headphones.

That's the later one he made that auto detects the headphones (my other cab has his earlier version and you've to hit a manual switch to go between both)

The other connector is more interesting. The Last Bandit made that one up, it's so you can connect a Sega Saturn stick for player three.

On the other side there's a harness that connects up to the player 3 pins on arcade PCBs. Used to have it running with my FixEight and Mercs boards if I remember correctly!

Not for a very long time but it was used alright back when I had that three arcade setup in Bray. It was left connected up to my FixEight board.

Have me interested in trying it out again now, I'd completely forgotten it was there. Wonder is there some way of getting it hooked up to a DE10?