Do you remember your first time ?

[Belike]

Great story Ully and Chris!
My first cab was/is a Zacc Phoenix, I bought it almost fully working in 2008 with a boot pcb, there were just a few sounds missing.
I replaced the pcb with an original, it works fine by now and still waiting for restoration.It has an extra coin door and a badly damaged cpo, but the Space Station sidearts are in good condition.  

[ataritoobin]

My first was in 1997, a Sega Congo Bongo machine from an operator's warehouse.  The warehouse is long gone but I still have the machine.  It's currently stored away awaiting a proper restoration!

[Muerto]

The 02-24-2008 i bought my first arcade, though the story starts before that....
I had a friend who lived in Copenhagen at the same time i was living there, and he was so psyched because he had got a custom cab + alot of different PCB´s, i don´t know why, but i was like.... so??...... so - i moved back to Kerteminde, and bought a house.
I had had my house for a couple of years, and it had a shed in the back garden that was nothing but a mess, crap laying everywhere, and i did´nt really have any use for it, so i decided to ask the counsel if i could build an outhouse that would be around 50m2 - in the mean time my friend from Copenhagen told me that i have to see a doku called "King of Kong - A fist full of quarters" as he thought it was a "movie" i would like.
I have never played any arcades in grill bars or restaurants, but i do remember once on a school trip, we had to take the ferry to get to Sjælland and back, the trip was about an hour both ways, and they where spend in the ferrys arcade playing something called 1942!!!!
 
That said, in the late 80´s and all of the 90´s we have both had Amiga´s, and regularly held parties (meet Friday at 3pm and continued on coke and chips/sandwiches till Sunday around 4pm... ) where we saw demoes (Sanity, CNCD, TRSI, Fairlight etc) and of course played games!

Now back to the Shed, i got the go from the council, and one month later or so i saw KoK, and was immediately hooked, i wanted a Nintendo cab!!! - and i wanted to get the build done...:

The shed before:


From the garden, roughly the size of the new build:


I don´t know if you would like the whole building story, or simply show which arcades i got?? TBC.

-EDIT-
Ok, the story continues...
Borrowed a mini digger and dug out the foundation, i´m glad i did it this way, because it was clay!!




The foundation and support for the steel beams.


First 2 beams up..


All the beams up, and the roof beams.




Put in the isolation before the concrete was pored.


Mesh and tubes for the heating fittet.


pouring concrete - that was fun!


Job done..


Me laying the tiles.


All done, windows are in.


And the "famous" PCB storing devise.


That was a really nice day, when i finally got all my PCB´s moved from their temp storage into the shed


Sorry for going OT...
But this thread is dedicated for my first, so here it is: and it came with these games:


I remember the pickup as it was yesterday, i had to drive to Jylland to pick it up, and the guy lived on the 2nd floor, luckily he was very kind to lend me a hand transporting the cab down and into my van

NOTE TO SELF.
If i ever going to build another shed, i now know that windows is a no go (but in this case, a building of this size without windows is hard to sell if i ever decides to move...)

And short after i bought these, the 2 custom ones i bought to get the guts, and sell the empty shells.

[gyruss]

give us everything! 

[Andyman]

My first will never leave me.

1985, working for a gas (LPG) company, filling and delivering bottles and tanks across the UK.

Local delivery to a construction site at the back of some shops & a cafe, the cafe being one I used to frequent bitd. After unloading the bottles, I walked around to the front of the cafe, it was undergoing some renovation so I stuck my head in, all the machines that used to be there were gone apart from one I could see the back of.

I went further in and the back I spotted was a Defender, one of the many I used to play 

I asked one of the guys working there if it was for sale, he said 'yeah £70', I ran around to the lorry and borrowed £70 from the driver and it was on the tail lift and away before the builder had a chance to say anything. I had a Defender !!!, had to drop it off in my back garden and leave there for 4 hours as I was still at work, it was the longest wait ever. Finally got home and took it all the way through the house and up the stairs on my own, into my bedroom where it sat unworking for years, but I had a Defender !!! 

In between here I met my ex-partner and had 3 sons and 3 house moves, Defender came with me !!

Power supply and transformer were missing, I tried almost every operator in the uk, but they had all been thrown away when they were converted, no one had any Defender parts at all, so non working it stayed until I found Ebay in about 2006-7, several purchases later (mostly from the US) and I had all the parts to rebuild with the exception of a working monitor. ought a working chassis from Chad @ Arcadecup but my sons necked the tube with a basketball a few days before it arrived. I then found Jamma+ and almost had a WG monitor but fate put an end to that when the sellers roof collapsed, found and bought one on Ebay later on that month, fitted that and the other parts and for the first time in 25 years, I was playing Defender, better still it was mine.

Now I have 16 cabs and only require another 2 or 3 to *complete* my collection. They will come...

Andy.

[DarthNuno]

I remember a topic like that, but it was more the first time on Dragon's Lair... see here.

Interesting topic anyway   ...OK, try to beat this then  

Here's my very first arcade cabinet I got, back in ...1990! I was ...17 years old  

What? Picture or it didn't happen? Ok, here's the picture of the beast ... inside my bedroom    



...in addition to be my first arcade cabinet, you can also see my first electric guitar : A Gibson Flying V 'bootleg' by Marathon  
You can also spot all the mess in my bedroom : Marshall JCM900 amp (100W tubes!), and all the Amiga stuff that most of us probably had in that era (some poor guys had 'only' the Atari 520ST... shame on them  ) Oh, and the giant poster on the left is the original ALIEN one I got directly from a theater  

More details on the cabinet? OK... this 'Apple Time' is a generic cab... I bought it from a guy who was in my school. His father was... an arcade operator, yes! I'm not sure about the price I paid for it...  It's was 20000BEF (500€) or 25000BEF (625€). I remember I went with my school mate to his house, where his father had a big warehouse, full of cabinets, pools table, babyfoot and pinballs. I said to him : I want GALAGA!!!!
His father showed me few cabinets and proposed me two prices... one for a one player panel, the other one for a two players panel   I only wanted to play Galaga, so I say... gimme the less expensive one please... and so I choose that one!
He said ok, come back in few days and I'll prepare the cabinet for Galaga. And this is how I got my first cabinet at home!
Because I still was in touch with his son, my school mate... he changed me the games for other ones   So I also had for a short period of time : Commando, Gyruss. I even had a jamma adapter (done by my school mate/his son) that allowed me to play a more recent game   It was a shot em up, but I can't recall the game   I had that 'incredible jamma game' during a couple of days : When his father discovered he had lent me that 'recent' game, he came immediately to get it back : that game was supposed to be 'operate' in a pub or somewhere else

Here's an other picture when you can see the cabinet... I think it's one year later (the back of the picture says 'OCT 91')... in an other room of our family house... I'm also on the picture   Can you guess where am I ?  



LOL! As you can see, at that time I was more concerned by other 'things'   ...anyway, great memories  

[level42]

Great stories....funny thread I hadn't actually meant it like this but it is great how it turns out

My guess is your the one flipping the finger Bruno 

I was one of the "poor guys" with an Atari 1040 STfm and was happy to have the hi res BW monitor at a comfortable 71Hz. which made this machine also do other stuff than just games like some competitor machine....
i worked for the machine and the other part was financed by selling off my 8 bit stuff ( yeah I know, BIG mistake but unavoidable. At least my parents didnt spoil me....they always contributed but taught me this way I had to work to get nice stuff.....so I was damn proud to be able to buy it...
It was over 1000 Guilders (about 500 Euro) and that was a very cheap price at that moment (I think they did grey import). At that moment the Amigas were around the 3000 guilders so the ST was definitly the more wise and reachable choice, plus, I was an Atari fan and Commo was EVIL

Anyway........keep th stories coming..!!!

Ill add a little to mine:
In 1998 or 1999 I was first introduced to MAME by a colleague. I was working in IT then (stationed at Shell headquarters. We downloaded every ROM set we could get our hands on. The company internet connectionnwas pretty handy for that stuff because I'm sure I was still at dial-up at home...
Played a lot of the classics like mad (only at home of course) but at one moment playing it behind a keyboard just didnt _work_ any more....I got "lost" in playing LAN parties, UNreal Tournemant of course....
FFW to I think 2005. I have ADSL at home so while surfing the net  I rediscover MAME. Shortly after that I find the BYOAC controls site and forum and before I knew it I was looking for a generic cab to convert to MAME.

I found one on Marktplaats, the seller lived close to me. He was a really nice guy and showed me around his house and garage FULL of machines, he was mostly into pinball but also in videogames. Bought the Playscene for just 100 Euro, I still think its a great cab for a MAME machine. MUCH later the same guy became a member here (Arcadegek) and we met again at Eurocade

Of course I saw some BYOAC members who bought original dedicated cab, and the more I saw them, the more I fell in love. The artwork, the original controls, the shapes of the machines, th history associated to them.... THIS was what I wanted...Then I saw. ad for the Double Axle. I had just switched jobs and temporarily drove a Honda Accord Aerodeck which is freaking brilliant car and also HUGE in theback so I could fit the DA "just" in there. It was at a youth center in North Holland. i paid 75 Euros for it. The Honda had a great 2.4 Diesel engine and so I doubled the price of the cab when I was cought by a speed camera...the damn thing just accelerated like it was nothing So, add that to the top of the story and its complete

[Superully]

wonderful stories guys - and interesting to read how we all vividly remember our "first time"!

[muddymusic]

I saw a cab for sale on ebay one day and thought it probably wasn't such a stupid idea to actually have one at home. Didn't have the room for it at the time but a few years later saw another one near to me and my girlfriend said go for it, we'll pick it up together (now my wife, that made the decision easy  ).

So bought this :


Thought I must be mad having a real arcade machine at home but once I started looking on the net for some advice fixing it found out there were several forums full of people who collect these things 

Bit of help and restored it to this :


2 years on and I'm on my 13th cab!

[Muerto]

- updated.

[Etienne MacGyver]

Looks very much like a zacc mini shapewise !

[Luigi]

Folks, please add the year to your "first time" stories

I bought the first cab in 2004, a few weeks after I had realized that there was a community and even parts to make PCs run inside the cab and hook it to the controls.
I bought the well known Zaccaria Crazy Kong. It was empty, only the damaged controlpanel was left. No bezel, no marquee, at least not the originals. So I mamed it. After we (Dirk and I) had started our collection and it grew constantly I decided to bring it back to its former meaning. Meanwhile it's Crazy Kong again and since a few days I've got a brand new repro plexi on my controlpanel (thanks, Etienne!!)

Here's a picture of the very first evening I had it in the garage:

[Etienne MacGyver]

Meanwhile it's Crazy Kong again and since a few days I've got a brand new repro plexi on my controlpanel (thanks, Etienne!!)

Lets see some pics of that please ! 

[Luigi]

Meanwhile it's Crazy Kong again and since a few days I've got a brand new repro plexi on my controlpanel (thanks, Etienne!!)

Lets see some pics of that please ! 

will come...I should have taken your plastic tool for bringing the water out....my father in law had something similiar but it was very lame....high risk of scratching the cpo 

[Muerto]

Youre right about the shape of the arcades Etienne.
I recall a conversation with Rune from the Danish Arcade Museum, he said that the danish CG (Compu Game) arcade machines where modeled after the Zacc... to a certain extend....