Grandmother Buys Old Building In Japan And Finds 55 Classic Arcade Cabinets 133
An anonymous reader writes A grandmother agreed to purchase an old building in Chiba, which is just outside of Tokyo. When her family arrived to check out the contents of the building it was discovered that the first two floors used to be a game center in the 1980s. Whoever ran it left all the cabinets behind when it closed, and it is full of classic and now highly desirable games. In total there are 55 arcade cabinets, most of which are the upright Aero Cities cabinets, but it's the game boards that they contain that's the most exciting discovery.
Boards include Donkey Kong, Street Fighter Alpha 2 (working despite the CPS2 lockout chip's tendency to kill old boards), and Metal Slug X.
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How can they expect to be believed when they say crazy stuff all the time. The IRS thing is a joke. Just because the head of the IRS took the 5th and their hard drives failed 10 days after receiving a letter asking what the heck was going on means nothing. The whole cancel our contract thing with the back up company was nothing other than a coincidence. this stuff happens all the time. I am a Systems Manager. Everyday we lose emails off local hard drives
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Ohh. If you do not like something Obama does you are crazy and love all Republicans.
Bush reacted to 911 with the Dept of Homeland Security, The Patriot Act and the TSA. All things I fault him for. I am not sure of an Embassy attack under Bush that took place where we had very little security even as the British and the Red Cross were pulling out due to the dangers "We never saw coming".
Petty people put all of their politics in small boxes labled "D" or "R". Mostly. I beli
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Why would she burn nostalgic entertainment from her youth?
Cool time capsule (Score:2)
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I saw this recently (Score:1)
did it say "Flynn's" on the outside?
Re: I saw this recently (Score:1)
Secretly she's a 9th level Kendo master who will step in and kick ass all over the place, and then make you some tea. Good tea too. Cause, you know, 9th level.
Re: I saw this recently (Score:5, Funny)
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In related news, they have discovered the manager had his office hidden behind one of the arcade games.
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It was Polybius, right?
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I was just gonna say, she better not touch the big weird desk-computer in the basement!
"What is this place, a rave? What am I supposed to do with this frisbee?"
neat, but was probably in use to 2000's (Score:4, Interesting)
due to metal slug x being in there..
so a neat find, but it's not an '80s arcade been in the dust for 25 years.
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the whole story is over romanticized and not even technically true, there are posts about it on some of the arcade collector forums with more information
www.jammaplus.co.uk/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=63536
I find it more fascinating when pieces of rare Japanese culture appear outside of Japan
mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2014/06/07/whac-a-bison-vega/
there was a bubble bobble 2 prototype arcade machine from nearby there dusted off only a blip of time ago too
Had to be said: (Score:2)
W00t!
But the Tokyo area is so crowded (Score:2)
Why would a building sit unused for 30 years? (And not get a leaky roof or clogged gutters that ruin the insides...)
Re: But the Tokyo area is so crowded (Score:1)
Because it's not. Look at occupancy rates. Also Japanese are super tidy and maintain things despite them not being used. See their behavior at a recent world cup match
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Also Japanese are super tidy and maintain things despite them not being used.
Actually, this is incorrect. They may be a generally clean and tidy people, but they typically *don't* maintain buildings - they re-build many (if not all) of their temples every few years rather than perform maintenance. Couples almost never buy used homes - that's why there's so much odd arcitecture in that country; you don't have to worry about resale value because everyone's just going to demolish the building anyways.
There was a neat bit about it on an NPR economics podcast a few months ago, if you're
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Wow. A world cup insult targeting Japan for some reason. I never thought I'd see the day. How random.
Re:But the Tokyo area is so crowded (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't; although there are '80s cabinets in there, the hardware in a lot of the pictures is late '90s or early 2000s vintage, and one of the articles suggests it has been closed for about ten years. Given that there's been a recession on that entire time, it might be that the value of the space didn't justify the cost of clearing out all those machines.
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One of the pictures seemed to show a poster with odds for some kind of gambling game. Maybe some kind of issue with licensing or maybe even some kind of organized crime problem?
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Nah, that's fairly normal for Japan. They were probably running Pachislo machines alongside some Pachinko machines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachislo [wikipedia.org]
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Gambling is illegal in Japan but also extremely popular and a mainstream pass-time for many people. They get around the law in various ways. For example many machines let you win non-monetary prizes (which are legal) that a little shop around the corner from the pachinko parlour conveniently pawns for a fixed amount and sells back to the pachinko operators again.
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Re:But the Tokyo area is so crowded (Score:5, Interesting)
Secondly, even in Tokyo proper if you travel to any point in the city that is more than a 10-15 minute walk from a station(and there are plenty of them) you will find plenty of run-down and abandoned buildings. Property in Tokyo seems to follow an inverse square law, the value is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the closest station.
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Secondly, even in Tokyo proper if you travel to any point in the city that is more than a 10-15 minute walk from a station(and there are plenty of them) you will find plenty of run-down and abandoned buildings. Property in Tokyo seems to follow an inverse square law, the value is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the closest station.
Which begs the question- would it be worth someone's time to buy some of these unwanted out-of-the-way buildings and then fund (possibly fully) the construction of a line and station covering that area?
That quite obviously wouldn't be cheap- to put it mildly- but given the ludicrous value of some buildings and land in Tokyo, the returns could be huge.
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Better to buy your buddy in the urban planning department a few Rolex's and lavish vacations to know where the next station will be just a few days before the other property developers.
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I have no idea if this is true for commercial buildings too, but there was a freakonomics podcast episode (2/26/2014 "Why are Japanese homes disposable?") that described that homes aren't built to be long lasting in Japan. Would definitely be worth researching before trying to do this.
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No, it is not about the home VALUES, but literally the building quality and how long they should last.
I mean, I know a poorer constructed building have a lower value, but that's a consequence, not the subject.
Again, I have no idea if this shoddy workmanship applies to commercial buildings.
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Raises the question, not begs it.
Fair point, but I'll put that stupidity down to the fact I was on a five-minute break at work :-)
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It didn't. One of those games says '97 on it. So it was AT LEAST open until then. Ok, that's still potentially a long time. But it's not 30 years.
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here in the USA I can point you at several buildings that have been "for rent" for well over 30 years and have never EVER been occupied. They were built and then sat there.
All over the USA there is crap like that.
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Usually, having the second one implies also having the first one.
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Next they will discover Flynn himself!
Boards or ROM's (Score:3)
Is it the boards that are really so interesting, or the ROM chips thereon?
Many years ago I remember playing some of my favourite childhood arcade games on my PC with MAME, and the hardest bit was getting hold of the ROM chip images.
Even way back then most the games mentioned in the article seemed to be available, so I wonder if this anything more than sentimental value.
Re:Boards or ROM's (Score:4, Insightful)
Even with ROM images, some of the older, weirder arcade hardware is very hard to accurately emulate, so having whole boards is very precious.
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Show me why I should even care about such trivial nonsense. I don't need perfection, and I can't see why anyone would.
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I hope you never need neurosurgery.
Re:Boards or ROM's (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you. I hope that you never need neurosurgery either.
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Most neurosurgeon bots are run on old PacMan arcade motherboards. I though that was common knowledge!
...and Software Written in Python (Score:3)
Nobody expects their neurosurgery to be done by an old video arcade machine.
Its four weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope... and the original version of Space Invaders. Its *five* weapons are...
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It's performed by a human. Why would you think you're going to get perfection?
Re:Boards or ROM's (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of old programs relied on some very specific behaviour of chips to perform accurately. They'd exploit bugs in the microcode or timing imperfections to make their games small and efficient. Older games did a lot of very weird crap to get around limitations of the time. I remember reading quite fondly how the makers of Monkey Island 2 hacked their way around the scene where you dive to the bottom of the ocean to make the blue fade to black scene work despite not having a colour palate setup to do so.
What typically happens is if you faithfully emulate what an old console is supposed to do then at best a game plays with minor bugs, at worst it becomes completely unplayable. Correctly emulating an old console on the other hand is a processing nightmare which can bring multicore 3GHz machines to their knees. What really happens is that the people who write emulators figure out how the original game exploited the hardware configuration and then code the emulator to look at which game is currently being played and apply an appropriate hack to make it work. I.e the emulator works differently depending on the game.
Trivial nonsense would actually prevent you from playing the game at all in some cases.
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Re:Boards or ROM's (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm speaking as someone who has an arcade cabinet running MAME, and who regularly uses emulators on a Mac as well. I'm not perfectionist for a lot of the standard stuff, but I do appreciate that in some cases there are material differences to the real thing.
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In my limited experience, you need a LOT of pixels for a vector emulation to look good on an LCD display. One of my all-time favorites is Gravitar, and the lines are just a bit too faint with a 1080 display, unless you crank things up. (specifically on my 17" MacBookPro, but I haven't tried it with recent emulators)
I think vector games might look pretty good on a 4K monitor, especially one with retina resolution. And then you won't have to worry about the vector driver hardware flaking out and spewing line
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It's not just pixels. The concept of resolution on a vector monitor is funny, but yeah, higher resolution will look better. The other issue is brightness. On the original console with the vector monitor, the bullets were *bright*. Much brighter than anything else on the screen. I'm thinking that to show something that looks like that on a raster display, you'd need something like the Brightside HDR (High Dynamic Range) technology. That's now being licensed as Dolby Vision.
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who regularly uses emulators on a Mac as well
You must be a glutton for punishment. I was very active in the Mac emulator scene many years ago (provided hosting for MacMAME.org, etc.) and recently looked into it again, only to be very depressed by what I found. I had assumed that with the growing mainstream popularity of Macs over the past decade that emulator availability would increase but I found just the opposite. In fact, it seems like it's a PITA just to get a current version of MAME up and running, let alone MESS. The old sites and message board
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When I was about 15, there was a Laundromat down the street with an old Asteroids game where the vector monitor worked fine except that the beam never turned off, so you could see how it sat dead center in the screen most of the time, then drew a line from one asteroid to the next, to the next, etc. as it rendered a frame.
Let me guess... eventually it burned a hole all the way through the centre of the screen until one day it got through and (a) blasted the woman whose job it was to collect the change from the machines' head off or (b) lasered her, segment-by-segment- via an early-80s pseudo-computer-effect- into the Asteroids machine itself where she was forced to play life and death computer games and interact with anthropomorphic, sentient realisations of abstract computer concepts, while finding some way to prove that sh
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Fighting games. The move durations, defensive reaction times, and openings are all measured in frames. Timing is absolutely critical. In high-level play, you may only have an opening of a handful of frames in which to land an attack...and that's at 60 frames per second.
If your game isn't running 100% frame-accurate (Try as they might, emulators really don't), you might as well be button-mashing.
That's why those of us who care about that sort of thing take extreme [giantpachi...ofdoom.com] measures [giantpachi...ofdoom.com] to ensure an authentic experienc
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It also gives emulator programmer a reference point for correct behaviour, and information on how that behaviour was originally achieved which might be useful. Aren't we reaching the stage where low-level simulation of original hardware is possible for the simpler cabinets?
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We are, but since emulation is such a niche subject (we can't even emulation the NES 1:1 despite its massive popularity and widespread availability), its extremely difficult to find people (with the skills/talent/knowledge) willing to put in the time to dive in that deeply.
Not to mention the legal difficulties (yes, I know emulation is technically not illegal, but that doesn't stop companies from sending cease-and-desist orders which immediately scares most people away).
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Well, higan (formerly bsnes) comes extremely close, with very few known bugs in it's SNES core (other cores not as good though). :)
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"Show me an emulator that is perfect"
bsnes
Re:Boards or ROM's (Score:5, Informative)
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Pinball, 1973 (Score:1)
No story here (Score:2)
There isn't really a story here. There may be a few classics here, but this is no golden age arcade, especially considering the stock of late era look-alike candy cabs. If this arcade had been mothballed and locked-up in, say, 1983 or 84, that would be cool. Otherwise, there isn't anything very special here.
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There are a bunch of DVD-based adult mahjong games there. Dumps of these are quite rare.
Just an arcade (Score:2)
Ah, Man (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think the demise of the American mall is in some way linked with the demise of the American video game arcade.
Common root cause, advances in computing.
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Robotron? Classic?
When *I* was in high school (and college), 95% of any arcade was pins. Bally, Williams, Gottlieb, Chicago Coin; some wedgeheads thrown in. That was the good old days.
Now get offa my lawn.
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I think it's more that consoles caught up with the arcades. The last arcade I went to was maybe five years ago, while on vacation in Virginia. Most of the games there were console ports - they had a Soul Calibur 2 machine at a time when Soul Calibur 3 was already out on consoles, the ever-present DDR machines (also ported to PSX/PS2), a couple of Street Fighter machines (available at the time on XBLA and PSN in HD remake form) and that was about it.
Meanwhile, most of the old arcade games (CPS/NeoGeo) were p
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I think the only games I'd actually want that aren't ported are Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and MvC 3, both of which are highly unlikely to be ported again since Disney bought Marvel.
MvC2 is on xbox live arcade and playstation store, I have it on dreamcast (as well as a proper port of Xmen vs Street fighter the reason I bought dreamcast), MvC3 has two different Editions on PS3 and XBox360
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Ported to PC, I meant.
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There were three arcades in the mall near where I lived in the '80s, a proper arcade, a bunch of cabs next door at the movie theater, and a few more cabs next to the Montgomery Ward's entrance. Now that mall is the headquarters of an internet hosting company. [rackspace.com]
I was in college in the early '80s, and could play Gravitar for like half an hour on a quarter, and two-fisted Gauntlet, pumping dozens of quarters into one character to get a high score on another character that had a single quarter. (high scores were
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Over a decade ago, I went to my childhood's local mall. It used to be Time Out with arcades. There is a larger arcade area, but with newer games and expensive. :(
Declining wages killed malls (Score:2)
I've seen a lot of harebrained theories about what cause the 80's game crash, but fact is it was just
Holy crap (Score:2)
There's a Raiden 2 board in the lot. It's not Raiden DX, but still, it's not Raiden 1 either.
Haiku (Score:1)
Cabinets I see.
Holy cow this stuff is rare!
Get in good with Grams.
'Knock-offs' (Score:3)
I've got a few... (Score:2)
Anybody want some real classic machines that have been in-service since the 80s? I've got about two dozen, and it may be a good time to start unloading them soon.
Pac-man, Ms Pac-Man, Centipede, Choplifter, Galaxian, Street Figher 2, etc.
Anybody got tips on unloading them? With something like eBay, it seems you either limit yourself to a tiny fraction of the audience for local-pickup only, or freight charges can dominate the sale price.
For anyone thinking about it, they're simpler than computers, and not t
Honey Girl? (Score:2)
What are those arcade games with the girl pictures on them? Dating simulator games where you try to say the right thing to a static image of a real person?
Just curious on cultural arcade differences, did kids play games with sex and nudity in them or was it more like Leisure Suit Larry?
Dates (Score:3)
Everyone seems to be pushing up the date this place closed. Sensationalizing the time capsule perhaps? TFS says 80s. TFA says early 90s. One of the games in the photos is "Cherry Master '97". Hmm... I wonder how much research it would take to determine when that game came out? "Early" 90s indeed. So the place was open at least until 1997.
Nerd City (Score:2)
The machines have an AERO CITY logo on them, but with the weird font they used, I first read it as NERD CITY.
Not much of a find at all (Score:2)
thanks (Score:1)
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