Arcade cabinets & pinball machines

I grew up in a small city in western Austria. As a little child, me and my family used to go to italy for summer vacation every year. That's where i got infected with the arcade virus at a very young age. I remember saving up all my pocket money for those three weeks when i finally could play all the games, i longed for during the year. The arcades in italy were a lot bigger than at home (just the occasional machine in a shopping mall) and so these 'sala di giochi' as they were called, were a very special and magical place for little 6 year old Ben.

As i grew up, these trips to italy discontinued but i stayed true to playing videogames and a few years back i rediscovered MAME and all the games i loved so much as a child. This led to long hours of reading all about building my own cabinet on the BYOAC forums. Since i moved in a big appartement 2 years ago, space was no longer an obstacle and so i was very busy building 2 fully functional arcade cabinets.

The first one is a classic horizontal, 6 button layout cabinet, the other one a vertical shooter cab with 3 buttons for each player and LED lit buttons. Its not quite finished yet (artwork is still missing) mainly because my love for pinball conquered nearly all my spare time.

I've been the occasional pin player all my live. At the before mentioned summer vacations in italy i sometimes invested a little money in pins, but it never really got me hooked as the arcade games did. Maybe because those few games i played were very short and in my memory pinball was extremely difficult and more of an adult thing.

In the last years I re-discovered pinball and played more often in local amusement halls, sadly a lot of the machines there are in really bad shape!

Having 2 arcade machines at home I decided a pinball is a must have to complete my collection (little did I know about the urge to own them all :) I did some research and soon found a reasonable priced machine in acceptable distance (still had to travel nearly 400 kilometers back and fourth) - a Williams Space Shuttle.

Bought it, brought it home and did even more research about restoring a pinball. The past few months I've been really busy, cleaning, clearcoating, airbrushing, LEDing, soldering coils, putting new decals on, sanding inserts flat,..... Since 2 weeks my space shuttle is soaring through the skies again and looking better than it ever did :)

This week i bought my second machine, a beautiful Star Trek Next Generation in beautiful condition, perfectly working with no playfield wear, just some little cracks in 2 of the plastics. Im currently reading a lot about different Mods to this machine, I'm definitely planning to put some LEDs in, maybe some lasers for the cannons.

I enjoy playing my machines so much, this is just an awesome hobby! Tinkering with the machines, keep everything running, play the hell out of them with my buddies - i guarantee, this is not my last machine and i look forward to many more years of pinball fun.

EDIT 10/2017: Nearly four years have passed since i wrote my introduction and i caught the pinball bug really hard :) Going to tournaments regularly in a 300 kilometer radius, 9 more pins have cycled through my gameroom and i found my sweetspot to be four machines at the same time. Could be more but that number helps to keep my gameroom not so crowded and makes it possible to host fun pinball evenings for the local player crowd :) Also added another childhood classic arcade machine, an Outrun cabaret which i restored and enjoy a lot at the moment.

My latest aqquisition is an Total Nuclear Annihilation, i'm in the third batch so i hope for a delivery in january. My first NIB purchase and I'm totally stoked to get this machine :)