Given how people stuff their carts, seems like you could easily bury something expensive at the bottom. If the store is super busy the receipt checkers probably won't disassemble your whole cart.
The more likely reason is that it was a test machine, as shown by the paperwork in the cabinet and the low play count. It was put on location for a few weeks to gather earnings data and then probably pulled back to the factory. A lot of those test/proto machines were then scrapped or sold at a very low price to someone on the design/production team if they had the means to take it home.
Back in this era it was very rare for an arcade cabinet to be sold directly to the home. Aside from being very expensive, you had to buy from a distributor much like a car dealer. Most local distributors hated dealing with home owners (too many questions, couldn't fix it themselves, delivery was a bitch, etc).
Given this was found in a Chicago suburb I'm going to take a wild guess and say it was a Bally/Midway employee that kept it in their garage or basement for a few decades and then decided it just took up too much room. Or it was handed off to a friend or neighbor over the years but either way it really hasn't left the city and never saw hard use in an arcade. Galloping Ghost has taken great advantage of this situation and obtained many pieces that are more rare then Discs of Tron.
The reason I know this is because I have a few engineering sample games in my basement as well.
Yep. I have a century-old pool table (coincidentally also made in Chicago) that was left in the house I lived in as a little kid. It is extremely rare. Thinking of taking it to Antiques Roadshow.
That's right. Bally/Midway left the city for the suburbs during the boom years, with offices in Rosemont and factories in Franklin Park and Bensenville.
The Franklin Park factory is actually still in use. It now makes equipment for Life Fitness, which has a historical tie back to Bally.
One embedded platform I worked on was developed in the late 80s, launched in 1990, and code I wrote in 1994 is still running. It's a 6809 processor with a little bit of RAM and 512KB of EEPROM attached. The entire code base is pure assembly language. That doesn't mean it doesn't have bugs, it just means no stdlibs to lean on.
The key isn't the longevity of the CPU, it's whatever is attached to it. Input and output stages fail, power supplies spike, things burn out, things wear out. So the processor can keep going strong...but what are you controlling?
But TDLR the answer is use the oldest sustainable tech you can find. Think like Gunpei Yokoi and build a Gameboy, not a Steam Deck.
Yokoi said "The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply." He articulated his philosophy of "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology" (枯れた技術の水平思考, "Kareta Gijutsu no Suihei Shikō") (also translated as "Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology"), in the book Yokoi Gunpei Game House. "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology. Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting-edge technology; novel and fun gameplay are more important. In the interview, he suggested that expensive cutting-edge technology can get in the way of developing a new product.
Chicago Gaming just announced a non-remake, Pulp Fiction. The designer and programmer are veterans from the Williams days (Mark Ritchie and George Petro)
That's the Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield. They now have the largest collection of arcade videogames under one roof, and they're growing their pinball collection.
Stern tried this a long time ago to compete with Golden Tee Golf tournaments, since those games were paying people cash and killing pinball in street locations like bars.
The problem was stopping nefarious players from taking the glass off and rigging the score. It's an impossible thing to prevent.
Why do all the tech? The goal is to have the ultimate model of just-in-time manufacturing: to never run out of supplies and, without sounding creepy, to know precisely what the customer plans to order and have it in a bag in and in their hands the moment they arrive at the store.
There are upstream benefits for marketing to see the feedback of their campaigns in real-time, but this is mostly about keeping inventories low and service times lower. That equates directly to profit.
CFA isn't the only chain working on this, but they're the most open about how they're implementing the infrastructure.
I have a hunch if the developers eventually got this to run on original Midway hardware and installed it at Galloping Ghost Arcade outside Chicago that Ed would show up to check it out and say hi.
IIRC, this can run on real hardware. Maybe at least the UMK3+ hack (I think the security chip on that board has been hacked). I remember because I toyed with the idea of making a similar hack for WWF WrestleMania (which I have & runs on the same hardware). I really wanted to give each character a Fatality like the Undertaker, or do something fun with the Adam Bomb assets already in the game, but then I remembered I have no idea what I'm doing with regards to debugging or writing ASM code!
One of the devs streams his work on YT and it might be informative, but it's impossible to use as a reference...
