About a week ago I finally was able to move my 2 arcade machine from storage into my barn.
Because of this damn quarantine, all of my free time has been spent brining stuff from the old house to the new house, and working on improvement projects inside of the new house. I lamented last week that I miss going out and game hunting. Then an idea sparked in my head. If I couldn’t go out game hunting, what about hunting for games online that I normally couldn’t find at a used game store. What kind of games am I talking about? Arcade games!
I did a search on Facebook Market Place as well as Craigslist. Everything on there were full cabinets and out of my current price range. Then I hopped onto eBay and started looking at just boards themselves. That’s when I came across a Tekken 2 board that was listed about $25 below every other Tekken 2 board. And to make things even better, I was able to make an offer for the board rather than Buy It Now. So I offered $10 below what the seller was asking and it was approved. On Friday, I got a vintage 1995 Tekken 2 arcade board in the mail.
I went out into the barn that night and went to work on my Soul Edge cabinet. I remounted the Soul Edge board so I could mount the Tekken 2 board right below it, so all I had to do was swap out the JAMMA connectors between the boards and I could switch between the 2 games. After doing this, I hooked up the Tekken 2 board, held my breath, and turned on the machine.
Needless to say I was ecstatic. After the Soul Calibur series, Tekken is my second favorite video game series. That night I played they the game as my main character, Kazuya Mishima, and entered my initials as #1 in the time to beat category. Normally that would be no deal, but this board was pretty heavily used previously as these stats can attest to.
Even though I am able to play it right now inside of my Soul Edge machine, my long term goal (perhaps a winter project) is to build a dedicated Tekken 2 cabinet myself. The only caviet to that would be if I can’t find a CRT monitor, I’ll have to go LCD. While not the end of the world, I would certainly try and hunt for a reasonably priced CRT to make the cabinet more authentic. Slowly but surely, Trev’s Arcade is starting to grow in its new home.
