Noob question: Using foreign coins as tokens

[iscariot]

I was giving this some thought recently as a friend of mine has decided to build a game room in his basement and his wife has given him the go-ahead to spend about $1k to get the actual arcade games.

The plan is to have three-five standup video games there.  We've found plans online and are going to go with the multi-williams, a multi-vertical, a multi-horizontal and some sort of other cabinet, maybe a sit-down driving or flying game.  Thus far we've cobbled together power supplies, monitors, and coin doors from various places and are still very much under budget. 

Now for the question....he wants to configure them all to use tokens.  His brother-in-law somehow managed to get him a bill changer and a pool table that takes quarters to put down there.  I tested the bill changer and it seems to work well enough.  What I'd like to know is, well two things...first, how hard would it be to configure the machines to take a foreign coin?  We don't really care what...something that was just cheap would work.  Then the next question...where would we get it?  Something that was no longer used would be good, like the old peso from Mexico or something like that where the exchange was very high.  Could someone suggest something?  THe reason for this is that he looked online and to get new tokens seems pretty pricey.  I thought about just trying to come up with a way to get the coin acceptors to take pennies but he wants something that would be larger. 

Can someone help me out here?

[u_rebelscum]

For details, you'd have to find someone who has done this before, but I'll get the basics, AFAIK.

Most drop coin doors "read" the coin's size and weight.  The size and weight can be set, but different models change settings differently.  Most of modern doors are set either by preset coin plug-ins already set to specific coins, or by putting a real coin in the mechanism as a model to compare against.  Others had to be set "by hand".  IIRC, someone here set their doors to take anything coin-like of any size and weight. 

The last one is what I'd like to do, personally, if I every got a coin door hooked up.

Hopefully someone can give more details than I.  Good luck.

[iscariot]

I just realized I don't know where to get old unused coins. Anyone have any ideas?  I was thinking Russian ussr kopek or something not in circulation.

[severdhed]

that just sounds like it could be difficult or expensive to find a large quantity of.    if you look on ebay, you can often find lots of 500 or so random tokens for reasonable prices if that is what you are looking for.

i just went to Lowe's and bought a few packs of steel washers.  i don't remember the size of them off the top of my head, but they are sized between an nickel and a quarter, so they work perfectly in my coin slots...plus they were pretty reasonably priced

here are the washers i am using...