My dad bought our family an Odyssey 2 system for Christmas when I was around 10 years old, and I've been a video game junkie ever since. Probably what influenced me to become a computer programmer.
The Odyssey 2 was soon joined by an Atari 2600, a Colecovision and eventually a Commodore 64. Loved that C64 - in high school and college my friends and I spent hours playing the various Zorks and Ultimas and games like Space Taxi, Spelunker, Leaderboard golf, Dino Eggs, 7 Cities of Gold, Summer Games...and a bunch of others that I can't recall right now.
After college I got an NES and have pretty much been hooked on the Nintendo family since then. N64, Gamecube, Wii, various Gameboys. Love the Zelda series, the Metroid series, most of the Mario games, etc.
I had a first-gen Xbox, but only because I won it in a raffle at a Microsoft conference. I played the driving game that came with it a bit and bought a few other games for it, but it just never clicked with me. Never bought any later Xboxes or any of the Playstations.
I've always been a big fan of arcade games - spent an unhealthy chunk of my youth (and way too many quarters) in the glorious arcade that once filled the basement of the Park City shopping center in Lancaster, PA. I'd love to see some photos of that old arcade, but so far web searches have turned up nothing. I remember it being across the hall from a 2-screen theater that showed kids movies in the one half and porn films in the other. Ah, the good old days.
A few years ago I got obsessed with the MAME arcade emulator software and gradually built a full emulator arcade cabinet. Started with a cheap tower with just enough processing speed to run MAME, then bought a professional arcade-type control panel with two joysticks, a trackball and a ton of buttons. Finally I bought a kit to build a cabinet and a dedicated monitor and speakers and put it all together into this:
ArcadeEmulator.jpg
In addition to MAME with 1000 arcade games, it also has emulators for the Odyssey 2, Atari 2600, Colecovision and Commodore 64 (I still own working versions of all the Nintendo consoles, so no need to emulate those). I can basically play all the games of my youth on that one machine. It's glorious.
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