I'm now selling that arcade 'thing' at JC Penney

[98PaceCar]

Umm, this ISN'T a noac. It's running on a board designed by Claw Cowgill, a highly respected board designer in the arcade world. Anybody who's spent any time working on classic games should know his work.

Here's a thread where he spills a little bit of info about the board.

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.g...ff2719d9bf0b10

I won't sit here and say this is a good product for the type of person that spends their time on DP, but it does have a place and I know of a lot of people that would be very happy to shell out the money for one and be completely satisfied with what they got for their money.

[tonyvortex]

did anyone else notice that sad marvel pinball game jcpenny is selling also when you click on that link?

[Iron Draggon]

forget the silly arcade thing, I need one of those frozen margarita machines! they're a bit overpriced too though, so if you could get me a good employee discount on one, let me know... or just give me a heads up when they mark them down to a more reasonable price... like under $100

[sickdrummer420]

yea i played one of these last saturday. shitty controls, and very bad emulation. the colors did not look right at all. i was excited until i hit the player 1 button to start a game of timber, lets hope i forget this memory real soon.........

[Pantechnicon]

I won't sit here and say this is a good product for the type of person that spends their time on DP, but it does have a place and I know of a lot of people that would be very happy to shell out the money for one and be completely satisfied with what they got for their money.

I agree. If I was less than five feet tall, not a member of Digital Press, and of the belief that the PSX was "old school" then I'd say this thing was the bee's knees.

Having nothing better to do on Sunday (wife and kids were out of town), I drove 15 miles to JC Penneys to see if I could find one of these things in action, which I did.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. The control panel was unusual, but didn't feel as cheap as I thought it might. The sticks were passable, but JAMMA-style buttons would have been preferable to the ones in the cab.

The sound was atrocious. The less said about that the better. And I was quite horrified by the size of the monitor - couldn't have been bigger than 13", but it did the job. The colors were strange, though, very "runny". I don't know if that was the monitor or the software.

The game ports themselves were actually pretty good. I didn't think any gameplay elements were sacrificed on this cab. Except for the color issues described above the games themselves were top-notch ports.

The size of the thing was a drawback. at 6'1", I had to straddle down really low to see what was going on. Maybe the intention is to put a chair in front of it, but there's something to be said for the authentic game experience of standing in front of the cab. This machine, however, had a footprint that didn't lend itself well to taller types.

There is a humongous amount of dead space underneath this thing. Underneath the monitor well a door opens up revealing a huge dead space with a shelf. There's a little composite video box down there (presumably an AC outlet too, but I didn't see it) that lets you hook up a modern game console for use on the monitor. I thought this was a nice touch, and provides a justification for all the unused space because honestly, this whole hardware setup could have been packed into a tabletop package instead of a half-sized cab facsimile.

I would have spent more time poking around the machine, but there were a couple of 10 year old boys climbing the walls behind me waiting to play it.

So, to wrap up this impromptu review; I would say this cab is better than I thought it would be, and a price of $350 to $400 is a perfectly fair one. I can see a device like this leading people into our hobby, but I can't imagine that anybody who's been into this hobby for some amount of time would ever want or need one.