ICJ requested I post this here. It's a rather long story to retell over and over in IRC anyway. Here we go..
This story could also be called "My First Arcade game" or "My First Arcade Auction", but both of those sound kinda lame.
- CRAIG'S LIST -
I've wanted arcade cabinet of some sort for as long as I can remember, though I passed up on a Bosconian machine I could have got. Then, around January I happened to look at Craigslist for random arcade games, and found a 4-slot Neo-Geo MVS machine very close to my location. It was pretty beat up and the controls were messed up on one side. He wanted 400-450$ for it. The only problem with this was that the listing was posted a day before.. and "a gentleman was coming to look at the machine this evening". It was gone. I really hate I missed this one at the time.
- LOCAL AMUSEMENT MACHINE DEALER -
Still bummed out about the missed CL deal, one day my father and I drove out to a part of a nearby city I rarely frequent and we passed a closed down ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) store with "#1 Amusements" in big letters on the side. I decide to look them up on the Internet and contact them to ask if they have any Neo-Geo machines. They do. I visit the store about 2 days later.
The owner wasn't there, but a technician was. He was a cool and friendly dude that showed me all around the store. It really was a nice place but probably in some part due to that.. they had rather high (for me) prices. He shows me the Neo-Geo machine. It's turned off, but is in very good cosmetic condition. Unlike most items in the shop, there was no price tag on it. The owner had to call me back the next day to give me that information.
He calls back. $1000. I was expecting maybe $800 at the most (still rather high for me) so I told him I'd have to think about it. That night I relay this story to Flack, who agrees that it's a high price and he asks if I have any auctions in my area. I told him I'm pretty sure we don't have anything like that around here. I was wrong. He found a website for some guys out of TN that auction arcade games, parts, gambling machines, etc and an auction was coming up in a couple of months just a 30-minute drive from me. I figured it was worth a shot, and made plans to go.
- THE AUCTION -
9:15am
The night before the auction, I'm pretty excited. And I probably drank a bit too much beer in this excitement. The morning of, I wake up a bit late, feel a bit sick to my stomach, and too nervous to eat breakfast. I pull into the fairgrounds where the auction was being held. Instead of seeing anything arcade related, I'm surrounded by farmers market and cattle fair stuff. And it's raining. Drive through the mud a bit.. and see a truck trailer with "amusements" on it. Whew, okay. There's the warehouse where everything is going down. I go in. What I see when I arrive is about 6 rows of machines like this:
This picture doesn't really do the scene justice as far as how insanely crowded it was, but the crowd always followed the auctioneers and I didn't want to camera flash a bunch of random people. Especially considering that a majority of these people were male, older than me, and 90% looked like they hated life. I witnessed random arguments here and there, insults, and other generally unacceptable or just plain annoying behavior. This was a strange crowd.
There are some cool machines here though. I figured the pinball machines were way out of my league price-wise and just kind of cruised by them as fast as all the mounted-gun shooting games. There was a Funhouse machine, but I think it had issues. It displayed "Ball 1" while the flippers just flipped at random and no ball was actually dispensed. I saw a game with a steering wheel called "All Points Bulletin" I had never seen before that I should check out on MAME sometime. Also there were things like a Pole Position with a graphics problem, a perfect looking Punch Out, Ms Pacman, and others, but nothing I really felt like I'd really want. I also wasn't seeing a Neo-Geo machine until I got near the end of the machines. There it was! A 2-slot MVS! It wasn't on at the time as there were a limitation of outlets and people were just kind of rotating through them. I noted the auction # on it and wandered around a while until I cruised back over to it and 2 people were playing it. Obviously nothing wrong with it. Then, I overhear someone say "This is a really nice machine." Uh-oh.
10:00am
People are sitting down for the auction to begin. Getting hungry. The auctioneer dude says if you haven't registered you need to do so. Of course, I knew nothing of this.. so I followed the rest of the clueless into an office to exchange my drivers license for a bidding card. Back to the chairs. Auction begins. Nervous as hell. Feeling sick to my stomach. Occasional renching coughs. Hope I don't puke on someone. Yet, for the next 2 hours we are subjected to some of the most boring and random items known to man. A few of these items were: a box of Hello Kitty jump roads, cases of wood wax, womens slippers, 5 gallon buckets of soap, a hover-round, and a box of random and worthless looking CDs (some idiot paid 100$ for it!). Some relevant items were sold in this round though, like boxes of random arcade boards and a box of arcade manuals. Nearly all of the latter were bought by this younger middle eastern looking shithead that threw all his trash on the floor rather than use one of the plentiful trashcans. I hope you are reading this, you parasite. Then, the auctioneer dude announces there will be a short break before they continue to the actual machines. I decide to get a 3$ Pepsi to try to settle my stomach.
12:00 PM
When they come back, they are auctioning the gambling machines. Great, this is gonna take a while I think. I venture off to sip on my Pepsi and take a couple of pictures. After a few minutes, I hear what sounds like a 2nd auctioneer. I realize they have started auctioning the arcade cabs WHILE another dude only twelve feet away was auctioning the gambling machines. Chaos. Also, at this point I realize that they are starting on what I thought was the END. They are already 1 machine away from auctioning the Neo-Geo. I panic and run over there.
Before I came here I had no idea if a NG MVS would even be here. But, I did have an idea that if there was one and it was in good shape, I'd just keep bidding until it got to 500$ maximum, then give up. Anything above that would be more than I really was really willing to pay, and that wasn't even counting the fairly hefty buyers fee of about 13% plus state tax.
Auction begins for the machine. I'm literally shaking and feeling faint at this point. "Bidding starts at 200!" I wave my hand like madman and do a slight hop. One of those guys that were admiring the machine earlier raises the bid. "225!" I raise again. "250!" it goes back and forth to the point I'm not even paying attention to the #, so long as it doesn't start with "five" or god forbid higher. I just keep waving my hand like crazy every time the guy looks at me. We get to 375$. then he says "four hundred, four hundred, four hundred" and I wave again. He grins and says "Nope, you bought it. It's yours."
At this point, I looked exactly like this while the horde of people stared in my direction:
I.. I won? I WON! I went outside to smoke a celebration cigarette (okay more like to stop my worsening shaking). Stomach feeling much better! I pay for my purchase, get my ID back, and a couple of dudes load the machine into my truck and help me secure it and put the tarp on it. As I was loading, this cool local dude came up to me and said he had a lot of MVS related stuff like extra marquee cards, stickers, and carts he'd give me a better price than ebay on. He gave me his fone # and later emailed me pictures of it all, and we will talk soon. Then, I drove all the way home 10 MPH under the speed limit with my hazard lights on. That was a bit nerve-wrecking.
- SETUP / CONCLUSION -
I back the truck up to my front door carefully so I don't have to get it up any stairs. My girlfriend helps me tilt the machine up onto the ledge and we almost get the machine through the door, but it's too heavy to lift over the threshold without having someone else to spot the heavy top-end without risking dropping it. It's still raining, so I throw the tarp back on and call a buddy. He comes over to help me move it. Still a bit of a struggle with 3 people, we get it in the door. It's at this point I realize I didn't have furniture mover slider things. I will buy those soon! We just kind of "walked" it into my computer room (temp spot until I finish cleaning out 2nd bedroom) and were able to do so with minimal scuffing to the hardwood floors. Whew. With all the moisture I was scared to turn it on, so I spent an hour checking it with my friend and cleaning it up a bit. The original manual and credit stickers were found in the coinbox, as well as another set of keys for use with the marquee. Nice.
Ready to play the machine, I realize there's no power cable. Instead there's a hole that looks just like one for a PC PSU. Cool. I throw a spare PC cord in it and plug her up. Immediately, I hear the chime of the Neo-Geo BIOS! YES! I didn't even know if the sound worked at this point because it was so loud in the auction hall. But where's the display? Oh yeah, wait for it.. it's a CRT. There it is!
The machine stayed on for 5 hours with zero problems while we played off and on. The joystick and buttons felt perfect when I checked at the auction, and they were responding without flaw during matches of Samurai Shodown 2 and World Heroes 2 Jet. The only oddities are a weird graphic glitching on 2 sprites on the "top scores" screen of SamSho2 (i'm thinking prob with the cart or slot, not the main system) and in general the contrast seems just a bit off. As might be able to tell from the picture, it's hard to see different shades of dark. It's not critical though, and I'm going to try to see if some adjusting will bring out the variant black colors a bit.. once I learn how to adjust it. The marquee bulb was burnt out, but is easy to replace and looks like a small but common type of florescent.
So besides that bit of maintence, I'm all set. Now all I need is a 161-1 multicart and a few of my favorite games from the 90s that aren't on the multicart such as Magician Lord, Nam '75, and Top Players Golf.
Time to get into setting the 2 current games in the cab to "free mode" and turn "demo sounds" off!
