This is my baby. A professionally made, custom arcade machine, pre-loaded with 46,000 games from Tiny Arcade Machines.
When I was a young boy, I basically lived in the local arcades. It wasn't just a social hang out, I was obsessed with the magic of video games. Synthesized worlds that I could control. For a mere quarter, I could become a kung fu master, a daredevil racer, or a medieval warrior.
You know how you smell something oddly familiar and it triggers long lost memories? I have that same nostalgia with games. Hearing SINISTAR's taunting voice floods my brain with serotonin.
Chun-Li's shrill knock-out scream still sends tingles down my spine. I've always been especially excited by early voice synthesis from titles like Sega's 1981 color vector games Space Fury and 1982 Zektor.
Space Fury
Zektor
I love that sound so much, that it inspired me to effect all of the voices in my VR title TECHNOLUST with a great plugin called Bitspeek that would give everyone that raw synth sound. But this is a topic for another post.
The arcade machine! As I mentioned, it has 46,000 games. I think 114 diferent systems, including classics like NES, SNES, Atari 2600 and any other home console or arcade system you can imagine. This was something that I had to have. After receiving some funding for my game, I thought that it was time I bought something nice for myself. I never really do that. I get really bad buyers remorse whenever I purchase anything expensive (probably from being poor for so long), so this was a big deal.
I think in total after shipping from the UK to Toronto and the custom marquee that I designed It was about $3,000 Canadian. The marquee says Quinn's Arcade. My daughters name (Quinn) in Aurebesh (the Star Wars language) add a bit of nerdy flair to the already nerdy reference to Flynn's Arcade from the TRON films.
I also added my company logo to help justify the purchase with the company credit card. WHAT?! It's research!
Here's Quinn at 2 years old playing a little Jungle King.
The machine comes fully set up with HyperSpin. A great front end menu that loads all of the emulators and has great graphics, animations and sound for each game and system. This was key to my decision to purchase it. All of this setup is what takes all the work. Combined with the excellent craftsmanship of the machines build, there was no way I could build something this professional on my own.
It has USB ports, HDMI and all the stuff you need just under the front lip if you want to play with external controllers (which you need to do to play newer games with analog stick controls, and I would recommend for SNES games as well for authentic feel).
When it first arrived, my friend Timur plugged in a keyboard and showed me how to beat the original Leisure Suit Larry in 5 minutes by sleeping with a prostitute. haha. Was almost worth the price just for that.
Anyway.. like I said, it's my baby. I would recommend it to any arcade or retro games enthusiast like myself who has a little extra coin to throw at their dreams.
Follow me @anticleric to keep up with all things retro-future-cyberpunk-vr-buzzword. :P