John!  I have to say your coverage of the reveal and the detail you showed over the course of 3 days/3 video "parts" was absolutely spectacular.  It's great that this was documented in such detail for those of us that couldn't attend and see the reveal in person.  The passion and knowledge of Alex and Whitney is amazing and it's great to see this conclusion after the year or so that I've been following they Sky Skipper project.  Really wanted to go to SFGE and the reveal but couldn't make it happen.

Awesome.  I only worked on this for about 30 minutes before work one morning.  I didn't refine it much at all.  When I get time to work on it some more, I'll post my findings.

YouTube user Metal Jesus Rocks did a great video on it.  Had a guy on there who was a sort of expert, a lot of info in this vid.

https://youtu.be/klzCi5jT7fY

The best way I know of to do this is setup manually, so I'll try and explain it that way.

Go to http://www.ebay.com/sch/ebayadvsearch.

In "Enter Keywords or item number" I have the following so far.  This is everything you want it to hit.  Set it for "Any words, any order"

Code:

( (coin op,, coinop,, takes quarters,, pin ball,, pinball,, pinnball,, pinabil,, pinabill,, arkade,, aracade,, acade,, acrade,, arcade) )

"Exclude words from your search" is pretty self-explanatory.   This is what I have so far.  I have "2600" and "vcs" to filter out some of those pinball games without flagging "atari" as a bad word, for example.

Code:

xbox wash dry gameboy nes snes boy advance playstation psx ps2 ps3 2600 vcs painting paintings art topps cd lp dvd vhs

Search is "All Categories".  This is a general suggestion for all eBay searching.  I find limiting the category limits results, people list things in all kinds of odd categories and if you search in a specific category you will filter those results out.

For even higher hit rates, select "search in title and description".  You'd be amazed at the stuff you can find with this check box, but it takes a lot more filtering out of words and you have to be careful to not filter out arcade games by the words you use.

Scroll down to location.  Set it within a reasonable distance of your zip code.  Basically, a little over the maximum distance you're willing to drive to pick these machines up.  Keep in mind, you might be willing to drive 200+ miles for a super machine...rare on eBay, but you never know.

Sort by "distance nearest first", so you are getting results by how close they are to you.  I like to see more hits, so mine is set to 200 results per page but you can set that how you like.

NOTE:  this is still very much a work in progress, let me know that search terms and filtered out words you use and what kind of success you have with eBay advanced searching.  I don't think there's a limit to how many words you can search for or filter out, so this can get very refined. 

Oh cool, I didn't know that existed.  I'll have to try some of those in MAME.  I'm guessing since I haven't heard of them as of yet, they're not really great games?

Flicky is a FANTASTIC game.

Oh right, that one I have seen.  Would be cool to have a dedicated one.  I'll have to contact the laundromat owner and see if they'd part with this machine for cheap, heh.  Perhaps I can get a look at the serial tag and see what it originally was.

Oh cool, I didn't know that existed.  I'll have to try some of those in MAME.  I'm guessing since I haven't heard of them as of yet, they're not really great games?

Fixed, sorry for the crappy cell phone photos.  I think Domino Man is the most likely, but it could be some other Bally/Midway title.  I'm not totally sure what all came in that same cabinet.

A local laundromat has a cabinet I've been eyeing for a while.  No longer working, slight Vigilante burn on the monitor.  It has been converted to a Vigilante, but it is for sure a Bally/Midway cabinet.  Domino man is probably closest to possible I found in my quick research, since it has the 2 buttons to the left-right and joystick center.  But that red joystick and two red buttons stick out, so it could have been a Journey.  It has a generic Bally/Midway CPO and glass monitor bezel setup for horizontal (though converting from vertical could have been done).  Thoughts?

I didn't personally get any photos, but you can see photos on the website and Facebook page. http://www.recbarlouisville.com/ https://www.facebook.com/recbar502/

On to the post.  My wife's cousin had a birthday last Sunday (Oct. 2) and wanted to do something.  We had thought about some places to go that were more friendly to his family (very religious/conservative, don't even want to be near bars) but it turned out they couldn't go and it would just be him, the wife and I.  I mentioned Recbar, this place I wanted to go to myself and hadn't been to yet, and I know this guy loves arcades.  He agreed.  After about an hour or better drive from here, including an adventure involving closed interstate onramps and taking backroads past a huge music festival...we arrive.

Recbar is a pretty cool location.  Decent parking, great food and drinks, nice layout, large machine selection and cheap token per credit settings.  Downsides, machines though working aren't always in the best of shape. I found very little that detracted from gameplay, aside from a somewhat jacked button on the Ms. Pac 60-in-1 machine that didn't work every time and the MK II had a rom error and had reset it's self to factory settings (backup battery perhaps?).  It's just mostly that the machines are in more of a true arcade op "made to work and make money" condition rather than enthusiast "restored" condition.  I found little bad on the pins of note, they were all fairly level, in OK condition and played well.  The glow in Viper Night Drivin' were in pretty bad shape and liked to get stuck sometimes, but I bet those are very hard to find .   Had a lot of fun playing Big Guns and Ghostbusters.  As an example of how cheap the credits are: Ghostbusters, a brand new Stern, was 2 tokens per credit.  Equal to 50 cents!  You usually see this machine set to dollar credits.  Most others were single token credit.  The Tee'd Off machine was actually set to give you TWO credits per ONE token and they had their World Challenge Soccer on free play.  They rotate out a few machines on free play as a little bonus, which I think is super cool for an arcade to do.  A few of the games have been LCD converted, notably TMNT which had a 16:9 LCD and black Happ comp joysticks...worked fine and played well, though.  Many of the original CRT games do have CRTs though, I imagine a few games they acquired with LCDs, I know they got their "Racin' Force" that way, I recognized it as a machine I saw on Louisville Craigslist.    So that one I know was listed as working and the picture showed an LCD.  They just took the coin mech out of the coin door and put in one of their 0.950 token mechs(yes, I measured the token.  I always keep a token from token based arcades).

In closing.  Recbar has a great classic arcade feel, good food and drink and will be fairly easy to access once all this is done in Louisville.  It isn't bad even still, just take alternate routes and let your GPS units guide you.

Ebay link for the lazy, wasn't hard to find though.    http://www.ebay.com/itm/ARCADE-PCB-ASSORTMENT-/302092113113

Too bad the Galaga is sold, I really wanted that one...heh.  Looks like it was a Gaplus/Galaga 3 based on the screenshot.

Well, the wife says to me a week or so ago:  "I know what I want for my birthday.  There's a not-so-subtle hint on you computer."  It was this webpage: http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/chicago (it's now dead and shows 2017 since the convention is over)  She's a huge Walking Dead fan and mostly a general fan of Norman Reedus.  He was one of the celebrity gusts.  We planned as quickly as we could on short notice and made the trip on Saturday along with the wife's cousin.  Getting there plenty early, she got a decent place in line and kept it for hours to meet him and get an autograph.  I stayed with her cousin and looped around the exhibitors and such.  Left the convention later in the evening, hit the hotel, got some Jimmy John's and crashed.

Next day, a bit of breakfast and then some rest before heading out to get some Giordano's deep dish.  Awesome pizza.  Then, interstate and heading home.  Planning on doing it next year, but getting Logan Hardware Arcade in there somewhere and perhaps seeing more of Chicago.  I did get to play some VP cabs while I was at the convention wandering around, heh.  They had several of them set up, including some of the new "vertigo" machines that take up less floor space.  Still not a real pin, though.

http://johnjacobson.com/index.php/john-jacobson-helping-to-shape-america/

Helping to shape America.  Great work, John. 

Well, Louisville Arcade Expo was much more packed this year than last, but that was expected since we didn't have unusually heavy snow. Weather was actually great this year.  Tons of vids and pins were there, as well as the classic consoles.  I didn't get to meet Steve Ritchie, but I did get to meet Billy Mitchell.  Pretty cool guy.

You have some fairly thorough videos on Xbox soft-modding.  I haven't did mine as of yet, but It's something I would like to mess with sometime.  Welcome.

Another thing you'll see is just using the switcher to provide 12, 5 and sometimes -5 volts DC while the original power supply is giving some more obscure voltages or even AC.  This is something a collector or pro restorer would do, though, and what you're describing sounds like a quick fix as described above.