holy shit

I got my first arcade cabinet last night. I was walking to work and saw that someone had left it out by the curb for garbage! I freaked out and tried to find a way to pick it up or at least tell some friends about it who could pick it up for themselves. Unfortunately I had no luck and had to just keep walking my ass to work. 5 hours later when I'm coming back home, assuming I'd missed an awesome opportunity, I saw it from a couple blocks away. I sprinted toward it, made some calls, bought some casters, and slowly moved that thing down the block to my house.
So now I have an old arcade cabinet in my garage...and it looks awesome. The cabinet and wood are both in fairly good shape. It looks like it didn't take too much of a beating during it's time in an arcade in the 80's or 90's before it was taken home. When I plugged it in, some lights near the buttons lit up, but I got no sound or video. None of that matters though because I don't give a fuck about Asteroids.

I am going to mod the hell out of this thing! I don't know the first thing about anything electrical, so I'm not even going to try to restore it. Instead, I'd rather replace the tv screen and upgrade the control panel big time. I wanna completely repaint the cabinet as well. It's always been a dream of mine to get an arcade cab and find a way to make it play Street Fighter. I'm thinking I should just completely gut everything and start fresh. Ideally I would like to be able to have games run off of a console in the cabinet that I could switch out whenever I wanted. I think the most difficult and expensive part is going to be the control panel...it looks like a lot of work to replace it.

Basically I just wrote this to express how pumped I am to get this thing and how excited I am at the possibilities. When I actually start working on it, I'll post updates on the progress. In the mean time, if someone knows how to mod arcade cabinets or can point me in the direction of some helpful websites, that would be very much appreciated!

-Brian