I attended the U.S. Amusements coin-op auction in Indianapolis. Here are some general observations I made.
* Nearly every machine there used leaf switch buttons. - They had a completely different feel then the micro switch type. They were springy and had a lot of travel. Most used leaf sticks also.
*People will pay a lot for Porn & Poker machines. - People were paying $,$$$ for these multi-game touch screen machines that were about the size of a microwave. I saw people paying over $600 for these that didn't even power up. I thought I might be able to snag one of these just for the touch screen for about $40 but that wasn't going to happen.
* My Act Labs light gun looks way cooler than the guns on most arcade machines. - I quit going to arcades about 1983
so I never really saw any of the gun games. My gun may look like a futuristic ray gun ,But I like it better than the over sized pink and blue squirt guns that were on 95% of the arcade machines there.The only gun I saw there that was half way decent was a metal Colt style gun on a game called Lethal Enforcer.
* There are places you can go where the Mullet is still the dominant hair style.
* Classic 80's games cost big bucks. - Games like centipede ,defender and galaxian were drawing $800 and up, even with major screen burn. The first Defender I saw go didn't power up at first and the bids went to $400 after they fiddled with it and got it to come on the bids soared to around $1300.
* Some arcade machines had huge screens. - Tekken and NFL Blitz had huge monitors that looked awesome.I had never seen these games before and I was blown away by the screen size.
* If your thinking of cutting up a classic cab for mame don't - If you have managed to get a hold of a classic cab for cheap some where, my advice is take it to one of these auctions and sell it for $800+ to some one who really wants it. This should give you enough cash to buy your wood, P.C. , controls, circular saw , router ,drill ,jig saw and just about any thing else you would need. Plus when your done you will have all the tools for other projects.
They spent the first 3 hours of this auction selling single game boards , marquees, power supplys and other small stuff. So by the time they were selling the full sized cabs
I could only stay for about another hour. Prices may have came down on the later machines when people were running out of money. I wanted to get a bar style dart board or maybe a pinball, but it was going to be a few hours before they got to those and the prices would be out of my range.
Slug54