A few weeks ago I was spending my saturday afternoon shooting rats at the dumpster (like most of the people do in Belgium) when I heard a strange sound...
It sounded a bit like princess Daphne's voice but older and with an Italian accent.
Coming closer to the shed where people usually dump their washing machines, Indoor bicycles and other useless and heavy appliances I saw where the voice was coming from:
Of course I couldn't let the lady like that, come on, I know it's old and not a collector item and all but it's still an ARCADE, you got to respect that.
Well anyway I put the cab in the trunk of my spaceship and brought it home.
And then looked closer... "She" was showing all the signs of a rough life
Definitely, that saturday was my lucky day, after stumbling on an arcade for free, I then found 80 Belgian Francs (EIGHTY BELGIAN FRANCS!) inside the machine (a bit less than 2 Euros).
Wooohooo!
It was now time to check out all the parts and to give it a good deep cleaning... (notice the professional tools like the bags of apples for instance):
Meanwhile I got in touch with my friend Peter Smets from Rastermania, black belt of MAME-isation and looking for a cab for this unique performance:
A "LIVE MAME CONVERSION" that he will perform during the next BruCon (Brussels Hacking & Security conference,
http://www.brucon.be/) in the end of September 2010...
Well my friend, I have the perfect cab for your project, a cab with a soul, a cab used to smoke at least 3 packs a day and that has just been saved from the dumpster (some kind of W.A.L.L.Y. in a way).
Of course he agreed so he will use this bumped red cab "on stage".
And this probably explains the hint of Italian accent:
I also found this PCB inside the beast but have no way to test it (it's written model racing on it):
Oh and I almost forgot to show you how the ragazza looks like now, all clean, light and fresh (yes the sparkles are 100% natural):
For now it's time for the brave machine to rest a bit in my (very) country style game room until I bring it to THE HACKER tomorrow...
More soon
