I stumbled across this forum when ckong posted a link to his gameroom-build-project on the dutch Commodore Users Group forum. I've been reading a lot of topics on here over the last few days, and I thought a brief "hello" should be in place.
So, here we go: I'm Eric, 33 years young and living in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Although I haven't got much of a playing history with arcade machines or other coin-op machinery, I've been a fan of (retro) gaming for a lot of years. It all started when I was 6 or so - my best friend next door had a Colecovision and we spent hours and hours playing Mouse Trap, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. Maybe some more games too, but those I remember best. I also played a few times at my cousin's house who had a Philips Videopac.
A few years later (around 1989) I discovered the Amiga 500 at a friend's home and I HAD to get myself one of those too. I spent a good 10 years playing lots of games on it (and more productivity stuff as well, I even ran a BBS for a short time), but I got rid of everything in 2002 and continued on a regular Windows PC.
Since about 2006 I'm back into the Amiga scene, and since then I've also owned quite some consoles (Sega Master System, Megadrive, SNES, Gameboy, Atari Lynx to name a few) for a year or 2, but I sold those again since they weren't really my thing and they were collecting mostly dust.
But I've always had a soft spot for arcade games and pinball machines and since I learned about MAME about a year ago I started dreaming about having a full-size arcade machine to run it on. Until now, I don't have the space for it (and my girlfriend will kill me if I bring a big cab like that into the house
), but in about a year we'll be moving to a much bigger house, of which I already claimed the attic to be my hobbyroom
. It shouldn't be much of a problem to put a nice arcade machine in there.
Now, reading a few scratch build topics on this forum I've decided that - if I'm going to bring an arcade machine into the house - that will be the way for me. At work I work with nothing but computers and numbers, so in my free time I love to use some real tools. I play and build guitars for a hobby (very amateuristic though), so building an arcade machine should be no trouble at all - I already have most of the tools that I need for the job (drillpress, router etc). I'm going to try to build most things from complete scratch, including things like a metal coin door and the design of the marquee, CPO and side art. Of course, things like buttons and joysticks I will just buy ready-made. I'm not aiming at a 100% replica from any existing cab, just a nice machine which looks like it's a real thing.
Wow, this story ended up a little longer than just a brief "hello", but at least you know a bit about me now
