I'm not surprised at seeing this. Most of my electronics "purchases" in the 80s to 00s were perfectly good discarded things just thrown out on the street because they were inconvenient or someone bought something shinier. I even got a 2 year old Intel Mac Mini once and used it as a desktop for nearly 3 years!
An arcade machine, regardless of how rare it was, would be something I walked straight past though! Too big and heavy. I suspect that's why this turned up on the street.
> An arcade machine, regardless of how rare it was, would be something I walked straight past though! Too big and heavy.
Yeah but there's nothing like standing up in front of an actual arcade cab, one joystick in each hand, and playing Robotron 2084! (one joystick to move in one of eight directions and the other joystick to fire in one of eight directions).
About ten years ago a friend of mine was moving to a smaller house and had no room for his vintage arcade cab... So he offered it to me. I immediately took it (my fancy car wasn't big enough to carry it so I went and borrowed my parents' car).
This cab has already been moved to three (EU) countries (!).
It's fully working, I've got a few PCBs (both originals and bootleg PCBs) and I've got a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter, driving the CRT screen...
It's a joy to see my little daughter play on the games I used to play as a kid (like Elevator Action, Buster Bros/Pang!, Bomb Jack, etc.).
It's an amazing relic from really glorious times.
P.S: it used to be in my office room first, then in the living room (which was epic) and now in its new house it's in the laundry room next to the washing machine : )
We had a similar situation...broken Defender cabinet...free
A power supply and 3 RAM chips and my kids got to experience unlimited Defender...having 24x7 access to that cabinet like that, you picked up really interesting insights into the code...and the realization that, no matter how much I played, I was never really going to get good at it.
My friends and I were into computers before this, but four of us got into systems administration and network architecture primarily from dumpster diving around the SF bay area in high school. Sun Microsystems and SGI workstations, Cisco networking equipment, IBM and DEC servers... we got good getting enterprise and/or obscure technology working and talking to each other which gave us a more generalist or fundamental knowledge of systems and troubleshooting.
I dumpster dived the IBM offices in North Jersey in the 90s. They would trash brand new in the box model Ms, plus huge piles of more esoteric keyboards, equipments, manuals, etc.
An arcade machine, regardless of how rare it was, would be something I walked straight past though! Too big and heavy. I suspect that's why this turned up on the street.