I recently made the road trip from Chicago to McLean IL, to meet up with my good friend Jeff at the Arcade Museum. What is the Arcade Museum? Just a little piece of arcade nirvana located right off I55 on your way south to St. Louis. If you don’t find what you’re looking for at the next St. Louis Super Auction, you can at least pop on over to the Arcade Museum and get your fill of classic gaming at its best.

John Yates, the avid collector responsible for the museum, has created a cozy little place to play a bunch of true classics. When we arrived there were a handful of customers playing games and a few volunteers working hard moving new games into place and keeping the ones on the floor working 100%. (more…)

Wow, now that’s a long name for something I don’t ever recall seeing at an arcade. I didn’t even know this thing existed until I found a copy of the flyer mixed in with my “big box of arcade paper” score. The idea is interesting. A monitor above the game would keep the player from being crowded by curious onlookers or know-it-all friends. It would give the person some space to play and would be a great way to advertise the game and attract more customers. Of course, it could be potentially disastrous for the player. What if you suck at the game? Now all your friends know and got to watch every lame move! A horrid thought when you were 12 and trying to be cool.

I’m not sure how well this was accepted by operators or arcade owners, but I imagine it was a tough sell. An extra monitor would have added a few hundred bucks to the cost and that’s a lot of quarters. Maybe that’s why I never saw one, they just didn’t sell. It appears to be just a simple monitor in a plastic housing, otherwise known as a television, with some type of mounting bracket to secure it to the top of the cabinet. I imagine it had a Y connector to branch the video from the printed circuit board (PCB), to both the cabinet and top mounted monitor. It would be interesting to see how it set up. If anyone has any more information about these units, or even better, some pictures of them in the wild, please drop me a line! Game on.