Well, you are thinking, "Can I actually afford this?", and the answer is YES! Arcade games aren't necessarily expensive, they can actually be very affordable. For instance, I bought a Shinobi (from a classified ad in the paper) that the owner claimed occasionally locked up or wouldn't come on, for $25. I took it home and checked the voltage. The +12 side was reading +16 volts. A simple turn of the manual adjustment screw fixed that. Here's another example.. A friend of mine bought a Ms. Pacman in good condition and a Final Fight in fair condition for $50 from a lady that sells used clothing and had these games just sitting there. The Ms. Pacman had a bad monitor and the Final Fight had a disconnected AC wire on the power supply! So Final Fight was working great after that. Here are a few games that I saw listed in my paper.
So, you see that you can actually get by pretty cheap. Now for this nice price of under 200$ you will usually get a game with a 19" monitor, some scratches and dings, and might even have been converted before. My friend's Final Fight has a marquee that is spray painted black and under the black, it says "Super Dodge Ball". Inside there is a manual to a helecopter game. His Ms. Pacman, however was in pretty good condidtion. My Shinobi has Williams stickers all inside it and I noticed the sides were black painted over a design. After removing the top 2 layers of black, I found out that mine used to be a Joust.
For my purposes, I got a great deal, however if the funds were available at the time, I would have gotten the Street Fighter II. Mainly because it would already have the extra buttons I wanted and it was Jamma. And also unlikely to be a conversion already, because fighting games usually have a larger control panel than a regular game.
