goatdan

An update that I just noticed today! "COMMENT: I find it interesting that while reading the forums that most commentators assume that I am wanting the listed retail value. Yes I would not mind selling at those prices, however I am open to all offers and expect to settle for a much lower price. I am doing other things and I am in no hurry to sell, but on the other hand I would like to move the inventory out of storage. Also with the Atari Brand being re-offered I would think that the "goatari.com" URL would be of some value. To answer another question most of the Inventory was purchased directly from Atari when they closed their doors." While it is great to know that he is apparently willing to deal, I have not heard back from my inquiry regarding whether he will work with a shipping agent or for a ballpark of value so I can know whether it is worth pursuing meetings with banks so on. I in absolutely no way am going to write a letter to find out this information.

Happy to entertain. Seriously though, we chose that particular name back in the day because there are so many 'Arcade Joysticks' that come out for consoles that are in no way 'Arcade Joysticks.' By using the JAMMA name, which refers to a specific arcade standard that was not generally used to describe home console stuff, we were trying to set it apart. Add to that, I think without exception, all of the Jaguar arcade ports were actually JAMMA standard boards -- Raiden, NBA Jam, Primal Rage, Total Carnage come to mind.

Believe it or not, yes, I do know that. Again, the reason I used the word JAMMA with the arcade sticks is to explain to people what they were getting. We did that line before X-Arcade was even around I'm pretty sure. I used the same thing here to refer specifically back to that line up. So I would like to revise my original statement to make everyone happy. [And this is supposed to be in fun since apparently I never knew what a huge issue the name of our Joysticks were from 10 years ago ] Please read this: "You can make a Jaguar hook up to JAMMA arcade buttons (I did it with the JAMMA Joystick line up way back when) without needing to worry about these pinouts at all." As this: "You may hook these adapters up to whatever types of arcade buttons you choose. Leaf switches or microswitches, Concave or Convex, HAPP or Sanwa, heck, you can pull an old leaf out of your Ms. Pac Man and put it in there too. You could also hook up a joystick or a coin device, or any other type of arcade specific component to it. Since essentially arcade components are not specific to the machines, you may choose to use any sorts of buttons you wish. You may hook up arcade style buttons that were not manufactured for use in arcades, you may hook up an old NES controller that you modify. Heck, you could modify an old NES controller to use arcade style buttons that were not manufactured in arcades, and then modify that and hook it up to this! Essentially, a button is a thing that allows an electrical signal to pass through it when it is closed or open, so you may use any device of this type to make a special controller for this. About 10 years ago, I made a joystick called the Jaguar JAMMA Joystick. You can use the same components that this used, because although the controller was specifically built and marketed as a controller that used the same standard parts as any standard arcade game, this could or could not be true, depending on what the arcade game was. Because I'm certain that thousands of people have been confused by the name of our joystick line up and what can and cannot hook up to the molex connector on the Jaguar Test Units, I will reveal at this point that the name "JAMMA Joystick" was a marketing ploy that was not intended to confuse people as it clearly did, and in fact, since the joysticks work with the Jaguar console, they are, in fact, not JAMMA joysticks in any sort of way. In fact, these 'JAMMA Joysticks' use the same electrical current pass through method that any other button uses, and are not special in any way, other than using components that were originally made to be placed into arcade machines, but since they were not this was really just a standard joystick, and one which was not use for arcade machines. Due to this, if you send back your GOAT Store Jaguar JAMMA Joystick, I will be happy to remove the buttons from it and place them into one of my JAMMA arcade cabinets so that the buttons may actually be JAMMA used buttons. This of course has nothing to do with the Carousel Test Fixtures, but I would be happy to get buttons and place them into one of my arcade cabinets so that you may also have arcade buttons in your cabinet, and not just a device that allows an electrical current pass-through." I'm sorry that I apparently opened some sort of strange debate by referring back to a product that I made 10 years ago in a post! I hope that people bookmark this post, and if they ever see a Jaguar JAMMA Joystick (or any of our other "JAMMA" Joysticks that we created) in their collecting days, they will now be much less confused about what is actually included with it.

Actually the 1st DS was just like this a floundered about a year. The rest is history with one of the greatest successes of all time.. I can't say 3DS will do this but with new must have titles arriving later this year it will do well. I agrre the price should be less but Nintendo have been very successful doing it their way. Yeah, it wasn't until Nintendogs hit that the DS started doing well. I still think that if Nintendo had built in some additional stuff with the DS when it was released, it would have dominated quicker and more thoroughly. Had they added limited PDA software to the DS with it's dual screens built in, and it would have been a ridiculously cost conscious PDA back when PDAs were selling pretty well. It would have sold to technophiles first who wanted to use it as a PDA, and then would have kicked in to everyone else. When Nintendogs came out, I bought 6 consoles from the local Toys R Us, sold five of them online and kept the sixth one for free. I remember seeing them used quite cheaply about this time earlier that same year.

I voted "Yes I am" although I have no intentions of getting this during it's lifespan from what I've seen so far. Nintendo has really, really soured me on their stupid controls with the Wii -- I adore the Donkey Kong Country series for instance, and have so far not gotten Donkey Kong Country Returns because I'm not paying more than $20 for a game I have to wave the controller around when playing. The fact that Nintendo has said that you can hook up one tablet controller and a bunch of Wiimotes to this thing make it for me the worst of both worlds -- you won't get the same 'cool idea' of having your own little screen for games like Madden or whatever, and you'll still have those damn controllers that you have to wave around like a moron because Nintendo couldn't figure out anything else to do with them after the success of Wii Sports. How I see the whole Wii market is that they came out with Wii Sports, and it worked really well. Really, really, really well. But, Nintendo didn't have any other great control scheme ideas for the controllers, so they tacked on waggle stuff everywhere to continually remind you that you were playing a console with motion control. I love 2D Mario games, and New Super Mario Bros is why I bought the system, but every time I wave around the system to fly, I feel like it is both way more inaccurate and way stupid. Let me push a button to do that. Let me use the classic controller. Like someone else said, I have no real nostalgia love for Nintendo games any more. I haven't liked a 3D Mario or Zelda game yet, and while I enjoy the Metroid titles, I don't love them. I also don't like Super Smash Bros, and Mario Kart with it's horrible rubber banding I stopped buying after the GameCube crap. The Sonic's All Star Racing game is *way* better and *way* cheaper too -- oh, and NO waggle because I can play it on a different system. I do like the fact that the Wii has light gun games, and that is pretty much the reason that I still have it. But good god Nintendo, it has become so apparent that you had no idea what to do with the Wii after Wii Sports was over, and I sense this as another cash grab. Their best reason for using the controller? You can play hide and seek (or shoot at a spaceship) with one person on the tablet thing and the others with the WiiMotes. If I want to do that, guess what -- I can do that by going and playing without the use of a console. I'm so completely and utterly unimpressed by Nintendo lately -- a company that I used to absolutely adore, and the GameCube remains my favorite prior generation console -- that to me, the Wii U is like the Saturn after the 32X.

Well, yeah -- I know that, but regardless it seems like it would make the most sense to port that, especially since it was a stunningly popular arcade title. Not to be pedantic (but I am ), buttons is buttons. There's no 'JAMMA button'. I know you know, and it's just a typo. Just so others don't get confused... Well, sort of -- we called them JAMMA Joysticks because we used buttons that were produced specifically for use in arcade cabinets. So, while on one hand, you're right, saying 'buttons is buttons' is a little akin to saying that the buttons used in an arcade machine and the buttons used on my cell phone are the same, and I can drop one of the arcade buttons into my cell phone easily to fix it. Buttons are buttons, but JAMMA cabinets do use very specific button types. We used that specifically as a way to note that we were not using those cheap buttons that come on the cheap arcade sticks like you can pick up for the 360 or whatever with Tekken 6.

- Ghostbusters Action Figures (have collected since I was about 6, both 'Real' and Filmations, and Movie too) - Disneyana, specifically Indiana Jones Adventure and ride vehicle memorbilia. I have some awesome (at least to me) Indiana Jones stuff. - Books on Disney theme parks - Disney theme park music CDs (sense a trend there?) That's about it

Does anyone have a CD-i controller? I bought a CDi console about six months ago now that came with a controller, but the controller has a pin broken and does not work. I'd really like to give it a shot, as there are a few games on this console that I've always really wanted to try, but I have not found a controller anywhere since I got the system. Honestly, I'd mostly be interested in loaning a controller from someone for like a month. I can return it with some CDi games that I have doubles of, or figure out something else. Or, if you don't want much for it, I would be willing to buy it from you. I really doubt that I'm going to keep the CDi for more than a month after I get a controller, as there are only one or two games I really, really want to try (which reminds me, I'd also like to loan / buy the Thunder in Paradise game and Merlin's Apprentice). Anyone willing / able to help me out?

To be completely fair, it's the reason I keep my Wii around. HOTD 2&3, HOTD Overkill, Ghost Squad, New York Guns, Mad Dog McCree, Target Terror... It's not quite like holding the old school guns, but it works pretty well. I have a Maximum Force / Area 51 combo in the garage. It's too bad no one ever got that running on a stock Jaguar unit, considering the arcade unit *is* a Jaguar. Now, having said ALL of that, the molex connectors were designed specifically to work with the Carousel arcade units. This is *not* a JAMMA connector, the Japanese Arcade Manufacturers something something that is the standard hookup -- that is something that is an option for arcade manufacturers to use to make it easier to swap out boards, like for instance swapping in a Super Street Fighter II into a Street Fighter II cabinet takes about ten seconds to swap the boards, and gives (gave?) the arcades a better way to earn money, as they didn't have to buy a whole new cabinet each time. With specific titles however, for instance titles like the Carousel games, or most of the racing games (Sega in particular almost never uses JAMMA in their specialized cabs like racing games), the connector is just a connector to go to the next part in the series. So, an example here is that you would take your connector, plug it into the control panel and it would work. For all practical purposes, I did already reverse engineer the molex connector, and I can send anyone who wants it the little GIF image I made with the key to it all, but that has no real bearing on doing anything else. You can make a Jaguar hook up to JAMMA arcade buttons (I did it with the JAMMA Joystick line up way back when) without needing to worry about these pinouts at all. The bonus of having them, of course, is that it is both a really rare piece of history (there are 10 adapters total in the world that we know of) and it's pretty unique. I'm planning on, hopefully lately today, dividing up a console and selling it as the console itself with the adapter separately if you just want that. I'm planning on keeping one of the adapters for myself (I love arcade stuff, as the 30+ish arcade machines around me can attest) just because it's a fascinating piece of history. Again, if you're interested in one of these systems, contact me through private message and we can see about working something out -- I'd really rather not keep listing them on eBay.

No problem! If anyone else is interested in one, I have a few left that I've been lazy listing because I've been totally sick lately. I would be happy to make a deal where I don't have to list them on eBay

I guess you haven't dealt with him before then. I think he really believes that there are people out there waiting to gobble this stuff up. I wrote him and asked for if he has a ballpark of what he wants for everything, as I have no want of wasting my time putting together financing and / or a shipping agent (as he states he will in no way help with shipping) if he wants some stupid amount for everything. I haven't heard back yet, but I doubt there are more than a half dozen people who would be seriously interested in this package (especially with the worthless Game.Com crap included), and I honestly don't envision anyone that is in the group of people that would buy it coming to a price that will make him happy. I've made offers to buy wholesale stuff from him before, including stuff that I now see he has literally thousands of, and was turned down. I think it would be great to get this stuff, but in all honesty, a lot of this stuff is going to end up in the garbage, and I don't know if anyone will convince him of that. I think that it will probably sit and rot for a number of years until he decides to do a single auction for it, and when and if that happens will be the only time someone will get it for a decent price. Otherwise, don't expect that stuff to float into availability anytime soon.

Hunh -- is there really enough value in 2600 carts to sell them for scrap? I mean, I guess there was, because he did, but that surprises me!

Wow, that's what happened to O'Shea? When he was selling the games for $0.80 apiece, I made an offer to buy an absolute TON of them for like $0.50. He told me that I was crazy, and that he would make way more money selling them himself. Shortly thereafter, he raised his prices to like $2 / apiece. About a year later, I got an email offering to sell me a ton of the games for the "low price" of $1.50. I told him that I probably wasn't even interested at $0.50 cents anymore, as I didn't have the money nor space available. When people decide their inventory is what it's worth, no matter what, sad things happen.

First off, thanks Ax for pointing out to me that I should announce this here... Long story short, the GOAT Store and Beta Phase Games have acquired the rights to the Carousel International games, and as part of that purchase we got a number of test fixtures that Carousel used to develop the kiddy rides at their factory. Essentially, it's a stock Jaguar core console attached to a board of wood with a bolted on adapter that runs from the controller ports to a molex adapter so they could hook them up to arcade components. They are a pretty interesting part of history I think, and we don't have many of them. Anyway, we're selling them on eBay -- we received a total of 10 of them, and have already sold one. I have one up on eBay as an auction here: eBay Auction -- Item Number: 310320273529 Which ends within a day. I also have three listed for $50.00 apiece or Best Offer here: eBay Auction -- Item Number: 310320274578 If you win one, I'll be happy to give you the pinouts so you can make your own Carousel Kiddy Ride out of them, or you can leave the adapter off it and play stock Jaguar games with them. If you want to get a piece of really rare, interesting Jaguar history, this is a pretty cool thing! We're working out more of what to do with the rest of the rights and stuff for the games in the future, so keep your eyes open for that too. Any questions, please feel free to ask!

I wrote a big article on this for GameRoom Magazine in the past. As a guy who worked at four different places that all either were based around games or had a bunch of them there that all existed until just recently, when one was closed due to a retirement, here's the nutshell of it: Disney spent a LOT of money trying to make DisneyQuest into a worldwide thing, and it failed miserably. They had plans to build tons of these, and the couldn't even keep the first one open. If a motivated Disney can't do it with all their money and resources, there is no single solution to making arcades successful today. You can do it on a limited basis though -- it requires putting in games that people cannot play at home. A lot of arcade owners thought that Street Fighter II was a hit because it was a fighting game, and they just focused on those -- but DDR could have been nearly as big of a hit when it came out, but every op that I know hated them because they were 'too noisy' and 'other people might not like them.' Did you know that before it sold billions of dollars worth of games, Guitar Hero was in the arcades, called Guitar Freaks? In fact, the reason it came to the home console is the place that made the guitars was disappointed they weren't selling better in arcades. So, they brought it home -- imagine what could have happened if arcade ops didn't turn away Guitar Freaks and instead embraced it? Light gun games like Area 51 and Maximum Force still earn well because they are unique compared to what you can get now, even though they are 15 or so years old. Make your arcade based around unique ideas, have something else there to also make money off and keep people around (food), and it's possible -- in fact, the past few years have seen more arcades pop up than I remember in the last 10. Here's hoping that trend continues!

Do you realize that it takes nearly 100 people per day to run the show in it's current form? We are not a corporate show - it would mean hiring additional help. And, with a $198 'profit' in our most profitable year (I still don't know this year's count, won't until May-ish), I can't really afford it. I'll consider it once we're breaking the 15,000 / year barrier, but unless you know of a secret stash of thousands of volunteers willing to drop everything and hang out at a video game convention on a Friday, the answer is that is most definitely impossible in the current form.

Whoops, sorry -- that was actually supposed to be closed and locked again. Must have missed it

Thanks for the kind words! One interesting note: In 2006 we had the speakers in their own room. Although the event was very busy, almost no one ventured into the room to see them, and once the doors were closed that was it. In 2007 we moved them into the hallway between the two rooms, and they received a significant improvement in traffic, although there was many complaints about the hallway being too noisy/busy for them. Regardless, we really didn't have anywhere else to go with them so they stayed there until 2009 when we moved. Last year, we had two speaking halls. Neither did exceptionally well, but we picked the restaurant because it offered the best of all worlds: 1) Traffic passing by so people could stop and watch, and overflow could be handled if (when) necessary. 2) It was the restaurant, so they served food there throughout the presentations -- you could drop by eat and see something interesting. 3) It was partitioned off enough to make it where you didn't feel you were "in the hall" like before. Also, what else could we do in the restaurant? I'm actually extremely pleased with how it turned out this year. In my opinion, we couldn't ask for much more. It's not "normal", but then again this is the Midwest Gaming Classic we're talking about -- all that was pulled off with no major corporate involvement.

Oh yeah, and about the people and being busy, the choice is basically this: 1) Raise the price of admission even higher. Hope the vendors don't mind there are less people. 2) Find another location. Like I said, this is one of the biggest, and here's the other problem -- last year, we had 3600+ attendees. The show "profited" $198. To put that into perspective, if 10 people less showed up on Saturday last year, we would have *lost* money. Oh, and I don't yet have numbers on this year, but $198 was the best profit we ever made to date. 3) Make the show longer. Hope that vendors don't mind having to take off another day from work. Hope that volunteers are willing to take a day off of work. Not really a good option when you put all that together at this point. I mean, while it was most definitely busy, when I walked around this year (which I actually got to do, whoo-hoo!) and visited areas, while there was sometimes a short wait to play something, there was never a point where I felt like it was too busy to actually do anything. As a for instance, I walked into the NES Devver area, and while one of them was busy doing high scores for Yars' Revenge, another one happily talked with me and showed me his N64 dev cart with the amazing demo he made. I was able to walk through the vendor hall on Saturday afternoon and quickly ask a few vendors to put things away for me. Overall, I thought it was really nicely spread out this year.

Kind of like what Marty said, I thought I had addressed this mostly last year but I'll do so now... If you take the vendor hall at the Sheraton with the hallway outside, it is the same size if not slightly bigger than the Olympia. But, we can fit in more vendors thanks to our layout. After that, everything gets way bigger... Just as examples from 2009 to 2011 (and it was very similar last year), VGEvo was two tables at the Olympia, I think they used about 40 this year (and there were 12 arcade machines there too). Ben Heck was one at the Olympia, he used about five this year. No NES Developers or Pokemon Podcast at the Olympia, no where we could have put them. No Mario room. We didn't have enough power at the Olympia to power the about 180 games that showed up, the most we ever had there was about 100. The Sheraton let us do a power upgrade that lets us power up to about 225. The Family Game Room was four tables, is now 10. The Underdog Chamber was about four tables, is now 10. Jagfest was one table, is now three. Turbofest didn't exist. Zimm's area didn't exist. The Versus room didn't exist. The two other museum areas both gained minimal space in the move (something like two or three tables), but there was still some gain there. The speaking area at the Olympia could sit 40. The speaking area now sits over 120. The tournament area hasn't actually grown, but is in a much better position for actually having people see stuff. The tabletop gaming area didn't exist. Our option with the Olympia would have been to rent one other room, which would have meant sending people all the way through the hotel to get to it and would have added a space about the same size as the Mario room. I think that people don't remember just how small and packed the Olympia space was because we both did a good job of figuring out a layout there, and we also just limited people and what they could do. We really wanted to be able to expand everything, and thus the move -- the thing is that people expanded everything so well that we actually ran out of space and had to pack it all in the first year at the Sheraton, which makes it appear that the space is smaller. It's not -- when you include the hallways where we had additional stuff this year, we're actually probably now pushing 40,000 feet of used space at the Sheraton, about double what we would have used at the Olympia. The other thing, the Olympia had a lot of things we couldn't change. We paid for power in a totally different way, whereas the Sheraton allowed us to build Doc Ock and run our own stuff. While the cost was cheaper for the Olympia in the short term (Doc Ock was a $10k investment last year), the power situation is better now than it ever has been. Pinball machines in particular are very finicky and if they don't get good, regulated power they tend to get issues. We've now had two years where a lot of the pinball folk have been amazed by how well everything holds up, I'm guessing in huge part due to that. Also, the layout now allows us to 'give the keys' to the rooms to a lot of people and let them do whatever. For instance, the Retroids / VGEvo room does an afterparty. At the Olympia, with their couple tables in the museum, there was no way to do this unless all the museum folks hung around to ensure their stuff was safe. Now, they can do it in their area at the show without anyone worrying. There are SO many positives of using the Sheraton for how the show is set up, like these last two that aren't even about size that even if we do bust the walls of the location with people, it's going to be very hard to figure out a better place to move to. There are not many larger venues in the Milwaukee area that are also hotels, and moving to a convention center would be a ridiculous cost. Here's a perfect number to highlight the differences between the two places -- at the Olympia, the most number of tables that we ever used was 108. Total. Between everything. This year with the Sheraton, we used *nearly* 400. Hope that explains it pretty well From an organizational standpoint, there is no question with any of us about which one is better.

If the show ever starts making enough money that I'm not having to freak out about it all the way up until it's over (and usually, two months after), it would be much more possible to at least consider But seriously, I did think of that as I was posting -- Sunday is $10 to get in, so if you just want to see that stuff come that day. I think most people would agree there was a lot of good stuff still left Sunday -- I know I found a TON of awesome stuff myself Sunday. I got the Galaxian design docs for the upright machine, Jr Pac-Man control panel handdrawn engineering blueprints (the ONLY of that stuff in the world, total cost was like a "whopping" $60), T-Mek for the 32X for $5 (been looking for that FOREVER) and a bunch of other stuff too. Bunch of pinball parts too. And a machine. Heck, if you're looking for machines, there are usually nice price drops the second day

From one of the two show organizers who last year outlaid $50k+ to put on the show which turned a whopping $198 "profit" (and we have no idea how the show did this year for probably another two months), I have noted the suggestion but doubt we'd be able to act on it, even if there was a simple way to do so. Oh wait -- there is a way -- go Sunday. It's $10.

I love that you think this (it means you love the show!) -- but it just isn't possible right now and probably won't be unless we switch the show dates to the summer, which is pretty unlikely. It's a combination of a ton of things, including volunteers and vendors both needing to take off an extra day of work. We floated the idea of opening the vendor hall on Friday night a year or two ago, and we were asked by a lot of the vendors not to just because of the time. But, that's why we added the arcade tour, Clock Chaos and MGKaraoke to Friday nights -- we probably won't run the arcade tour again (it was a huge success, but the plan was always that it was just a special 10th anniversary thing), but the other things are quite popular, so there still is a reason to come out!

Damn dude, $1 apiece? I have NO space for something like that, and it makes me want to buy some!

We actually provide those officers, although as was noted, most of them are off duty police looking to earn a little side cash. Great group, they'll be back this year.