You know, sometimes I really do feel like selling off my cab collection and spending the loot on a shiny new MAME cab or something.

Let's examine the evidence...

Joust cocktail: Wonderful, wonderful, machine. But the 12v supply went on mine two years or so ago, taking with it the sound and the panel lighting, and despite changing over the power supply and checking the wiring about 400 times, it refuses to spark back into life. Oh, and the monitor needs to be on for about an hour to get rid of this horrible great black mask that covers half the screen. Apart from that, the game plays perfectly and, scarily enough, it's my most reliable machine.

Robotron upright: Christ, where to begin? The control panels (I have two) are shot to pieces, I can't find a Bezel for love nor money, the marquee was printed on an inkjet printer five years ago and the boards are nailed to a big plank of wood in the back. On top of all this, possibly because all of this, the machine flat out refuses to work every time I move it. I have two boardsets for the machine, neither of which work at the moment, and each of them needs a subtly different tweak of the power supply in order to behave when they are working. And the coin mech only works when the door is open.

Tempest cocktail: Since I've owned it this has worked for precisely 5 minutes. I think that the game boards are working okay, but since the monitor flat out refuses to spark into life it's anyones guess really. The worlds most expensive TV stand.

Space Invaders cocktail: Despite being held together with shoe boxes and elastic bands, this machine served me reliably for years - running pretty much every game I threw at it without any form of complaint. Unfortunately, an enforced three year stay in a cellar has put paid to that and it needs a complete overhaul now. Another project for those long weekends that keep refusing to be free.

These machines are old, the only chap I know who can repair them lives in Wales and they fall over if you so much as look at them funny. Why do I persist with the buggers? Why not just jack it all in, buy a decent PC and get on with life?

And then I remember Scramble...

I loved Scramble back "in the day", and it was one of the very first arcade boards that I owned, back when my Spacies cocktail could be relied upon. I could never finish it on the cocktail though as the player one joystick had this habit of pulling slightly down, which made the fourth stage virtually impossible. I fixed this by buying a dedicated Zaccaria Scramble cab a couple of years later. A beautiful machine that part of me regrets trading in for the shipping of my Joust cocktail from the states (long story).

I played that game to death. Two or three hour sessions were a regular occurance - Scramble, when done right, is a beautiful game. Even when you know it well there's something about the pacing of the levels, from easy first level, through to the showboating second and third waves into the slyly technical fourth and sleight of joystick fifth, that hasn't really been bettered since. I could, at that time and on that machine, easily marathon that game - I could literally play it until I got bored.

I never did.

And, since trading on the cab, I've never been able to recreate that experience.

I've got an X-Arcade, I've got a decent size monitor, I've got a PC which is more than cabable of 'perfectly' emulating the hardware, but it's not the same. I've tried loving the 360 version, but it's still not the same - especially when the VF5 arcade stick inexplicably swaps the controls around.

I don't really know what it is, and I while I love having easy access to everything ever there is something missing from the emulation experience. A something that is partly to do with the controls, partly having a hulking great cabinet, part feeling and partly the knowledge that it could all go wrong at a moments notice.

The arcade cabs might be unreliable, they might look like crap, they might even smell slightly of rusty wood but that missing 'something' makes them worth all the heartache and, until we can emulate that feeling I would rather have half a dozon 'broken' machines littering my house than have a thousand 'perfect' recreations sitting in my DVD drive.

March 2008

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PS: Since writing this article, the Joust has blown up too.