I also assembled a virtual pin several years ago, and came away feeling very “meh” in the end. The worst part for me was the letdown I felt after spending so much time pulling my hair out getting PinMAME configured; it was the most tedious, mind-numbing thing I’ve ever done on a computer other than editing metadata and downloading album art when I ripped my CD and LP collection years ago, and the end product was still glitchy and tweaky, and not nearly as enjoyable as the real thing. I would have MUCH rather spent those seemingly endless hours I wasted at the command prompt with some good old-fashioned hand tools, a soldering iron, and a VOM giving new life to some cool old machine!

On the other hand, if someone makes a truly turnkey, fully-baked virtual pin based upon some of those great Zen or other video games (that are either impossible or prohibitively costly to render as physical machines), I’d certainly think about giving the virtual pin idea a second look.

I really tried hard to force myself to be OK with skipping it, but my OCD traits ultimately got the upper hand! I had about 4000 CDs and 250 LPs at the time, so it was a fairly monumental task.

Also, I did the bulk of my ripping in the early 2000s when the capability of displaying art was still a novel idea and I sort of felt as if I would be missing out by skipping it.