I placed a little ad on craigslist saying I would buy arcade cabs. I received only one response (as expected) from a guy who said he has 40+ cabs in his garage. I went out to check them out and it turns out this guy works for Stern Pinball so not only does he have a garage packed with arcade cabs that he never got around to restoring, but he also has pinball playfields (many of them populated) up the wazoo. He has one stack of playfields that goes from floor to ceiling (they're no more than 1" thick each). Super nice guy wants to sell me all of the cabs.
Partial list of the cabs that I remember off the top of my head...
Missile Command (bought and brought it home for $100 not working but complete)
Nibbler
Rally X
Ms. Pac x 2
Punchout
Tutankam
Mario Bros
Gorf
Tron
Pleides x 2
Dig Dug
Stunt Cycle
9 Williams cocktails (don't know what games, couldn't get to them)
Timber
Can't remember all of the others - total of cabs and cocktails is around 45
So here's my first dilemma. I'm unsure what works and what doesn't. He is unsure as well so I have to assume that none of them work. They all appear to be complete and in decent shape, just dirty. He wants $100 each so a total of like $4,500. That's a lot of cash for unknown conditions. Also, storage costs a bit more than I had hoped, like $150 per month minimum. Plus renting a giant truck for the day is never cheap. So first dilemma is big $$$.
Second dilemma. If these cabs aren't working, what then? Do I spend the time and effort restoring each one and then selling dedicated cabs for $300-500 or do I MAME them and sell them for $900-$1,000 (I have sold 4 MAME cabs already at this price). I would never destroy a classic cab so don't worry about me painting over side art or anything. I would most likely replace the original control panel completely and keep it with the cab when it is sold for future restoration. Some cabs I wouldn't consider MAMEing (Timber and Tron come to mind).
What I was thinking of doing was offering $3,500 up front for everything. Grab one cab per week in my van (he lives 30 miles away). Pick up everything else on Dec. 1. This way I save 2 months of storage (really 3 because the first month of storage is free at Public Storage). He wants a MAME cab so I was going to offer to MAME one for him right away for his house.
Thoughts?