from Hacker News

Rescuing vintage arcade video games from an abandoned ship (2016)

by videotopia on 2/3/20, 5:28 PM with 49 comments

• by sheepdog on 2/3/20, 9:01 PM

  Perhaps this is just my inner poverty showing, but how does something like this even happen, from a monetary perspective?

  I'm assuming the owners had investors or loans or some other financial reasons that would prevent them from spending a lot of money and then simply parking it forever.

  And wouldn't property taxes or city nuisance abatement fines nibble away at the property over the years? It can't be completely free of carrying costs, right?

  Even if there is no ongoing cost for the ship, wouldn't the owners rather have sold the furnishings rather than leave them to rot?

  I did some research and found that there was a huge court case that didn't go in the owner's favor. So perhaps the owner is too emotionally invested to cut their losses?

  Or perhaps they are tremendously wealthy and using the loss to write off other business gains? Or maybe it changed hands through inheritance, so the owner doesn't care about recouping the initial investment? Or maybe I'm overestimating the remaining value, and the thing is already a total loss?

  This is all speculation. But it would be very interesting to learn how such a large venture was left to rot...

• by andygcook on 2/3/20, 6:32 PM

  This article is nearly 5 years old. I'd be curious to know where all the arcade games ended up and what the total value of them were all worth after resale.

  As for the ship, apparently in 2019 there were plans to host a zombie-themed event on it, but the plans are now delayed indefinitely: https://www.dailypost.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/zombie-ev...

• by jackhack on 2/3/20, 6:27 PM

  I can't help but wonder what sort of maintenance might these machines require before starting up again? I imagine, at the very least, cleaning corrosion from the contacts of all mechanical switches and changing out the filter capacitors in the power supply and CRT. What else? Would every capacitor be suspect? Are the boards salvageable or would the cabinets just be gutted and a modern (MAME?) machine be substituted (or is this just sacrilege?)

• by lostgame on 2/3/20, 9:11 PM

  What on earth is with this website?

  Literally half the page is covered by a massive photo.

  I expected scrolling further down the article would rid me of it, but it doesn't - furthermore, it's aligned to the right instead of the left, which breaks my brain while I'm trying to read it.

  I can't imagine any benefit to this layout. Shrinking the screen causes the article to display properly, I learned, and I couldn't find a Reader mode...

  Great article - extremely poor formatting in Desktop mode.

• by geuis on 2/3/20, 6:35 PM

  I somewhat recently came across this youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9mrDyAw2EvsnFozzrxLrmQ. "Joe's Classic Video Games". They frequently produce fairly lengthy and in-depth videos about doing maintenance and restoration on older arcade games.

• by agentbellnorm on 2/3/20, 8:51 PM

  I loved this story. In 2016 I glanced out of a window of a train between holyhead and liverpool and saw the ship sitting there. I had no idea.

• by at-fates-hands on 2/3/20, 8:57 PM

  The one thing about these old cabs I still love is the artwork that adorns them. I know there's always been a huge market for skateboard deck artwork, but I still wonder if there's a market for this type of art - some of it was just magnificent in its heyday.

• by pmarreck on 2/4/20, 2:33 AM

  Watch a teen rescue an old IBM z890 mainframe from the dead in his parents' basement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk

• by 867-5309 on 2/3/20, 7:16 PM

  who would believe it - northwest Wales. if you're not familiar with the area, be sure not to ask George Bush https://youtu.be/S0ZG5-WB_ho

• by rbanffy on 2/3/20, 8:23 PM

  I know that somewhere there is an old IBM mainframe connected to a bunch of 3278's, 3279's and 3290's waiting to be saved.