Alcun Atirutan BBS

Falling down the coin rabbit hole again (the metal kind, not the cryptographic sort).

@requiem America having an 80p note is bananas and nobody can ever change my mind

@ifixcoinops @requiem what is that?

@az @requiem Americans have crap money, their biggest coin is 25c worth about 20p and they have one-dollar notes. Pain in the arse paying for anything because you have to keep your wallet out while they count your change. Absolutely strangles the coin-op/vending/arcade biz

@ifixcoinops it’s funny you mention this because coin-op is exactly what got me going down this path again!

I’ve been thinking about creating a small arcade and the machines I’ve built so far take coins. I could retrofit for cards but they are so much less cool so I was wondering about tokens instead.

This led me to wanting to make my own tokens and bam! Back to making coins 🤣
@az

@requiem @az I will tell you the same thing I tell any American setting up an arcade and which they don't listen to for the first five years I tell them: 1) Don't use tokens, people wander off with them and you constantly have to buy more and you end up with other arcades' worthless tokens in your machines 2) Pull out every mechanical coin acceptor and toss it violently into the trash where it belongs, buy electronic coin mechs that take multiple different coins, they're like $30 and they never jam 3) go to the bank and tell them you want dollar coins and when they ask "What dollar coins" you say the dollar coins they've had sitting in the safe for ten years, give these out as change and have your mechs accept them alongside quarters

I've got a thread about the unique dysfunction of American coins and banknotes that is still a text file on my computer because it KEEPS GETTING LONGER but the short story is there are at least six blindingly forehead-smackingly obviously wrong things that American money does, and if a SINGLE ONE of them *hadn't* been done Incredibly Wildly Wrong, then you wouldn't have Literally Run Out Of Coins back in 2021

@ifixcoinops @az so far I’ve done #2 correctly 😁

@ifixcoinops sounds like I should stick to the $30 coin acceptors I’ve been using, and get a change machine instead a token machine.
@az

@requiem @az oh hell yes, also change machines and token machines are the same thing but if you call it a change machine you can often find it in some bloke's barn

@ifixcoinops @az I really appreciate the voice of experience 😁

@requiem @az So what's the score, you doing Donor 2, 3, 4 and 5 too or...?

@ifixcoinops that’s the basic idea. I may have a chance to get access to a small commercial space for not a lot of money, and I think I could fit 4-6 cabinets and a change machine in there.

They could be general-purpose fundraising machines but I’m also toying with a weirder idea of running #pico8 games on them, sending the proceeds to the game devs and then rotating the titles for new ones on a regular basis (kind of a cross between an arcade and a farmers market 😁).
@az

@requiem @az Ah yeah, the indie arcade game thing, it makes me happy that that's viable now, my old project jammaforever.com was about twenty years too early :P

@ifixcoinops idk about viable, but it would be a fun experiment 😁

jammaforever sounds cool though!
@az

@requiem @az it was the same thing, indie games in a converted arcade cab, but

* using Flash
* when MAME cabs were _kind of_ a known thing but not really, arcade games certainly weren't general-purpose-PC-based like they are now
* before SBC's or cheap computers, the idea was that you'd use a secondhand one

Got some good traffic from Ryan North and Boing Boing when I did the Dinosaur Comics arcade game but it was just... not the right time, y'know

@ifixcoinops yeah, I know all about the “the worlds not ready for this yet“ problem 🤣

Very cool idea though; so was it custom hardware with a JAMMA connector?

@az