Trade #11

one mean shredder

Meet Ed.

Ed's the kinda guy that plays a mean guitar.
Here he is looking pretty mean with his new Ibanez. Yeah, you can tell by that smile that he's up to something.  I'm on to you, Ed.  I'm on to you...

Actualy, Ed is one heck of a nice guy. Not only did he do a great job of keeping our emails up to date (something the average craigslist-er is lacking, I must say), but he also treated my brother and I to a little show of his talent.

Ed has several guitars and he's been playing since he was like five years old.  (He even still has the guitar he started on.  It's a cute little mock-electric job, and it's red... like Kyle MacDonald's paperclip.  I thought that was entirely irrelevant, but fun to share anyway).

http://www.oneredpaperclip.com/

Ed isn't in a band and has never really thought about joining one.  No, Ed's the kind of guy who just likes to jam.  And while up to now he's made do with his acoustic and his older, smaller Ibanez, he was definitely thrilled to get a good look at what is now the coolest shred-maker he's ever owned.  As he fingered the strings and layed out some riffs, I could tell Ed is also the kind of guy who really appreciated cool stuff.  Awesome.  Exactly the kind of person I was hoping to trade my guitar to.  And since my guitar has been sitting idle (ok... almost idle... I took it to 2 guitar stores & 1 pawn shop, but all those people did was tune it a little, strum it a little, and offer me a third what I'd paid for it... bleh) for over two months, and had been idle since December before that, I am proud to say I helped a cool guitar find a happy home.  Ed, I think I can hear you right now wailing away even as I write this.  Rock on, dude.  Everyone else, here's something Ed taught me: yet another thing I didn't know about guitars... they don't all have the same # of frets & therefore the same # of available notes.  Weird I never noticed that.  Ed's new guitar has 24 frets, that's 2 full octives and 6 frets more than his older Ibanez and about 10 more than the acoustic.  No wonder Eddie Van Halen hit all those crazy notes... he probably had more to choose from! 


Ok.  Lame. 
Back to important blogstuff...

silly scientists... tricks are not trades

I mentioned earlier that my brother was on hand today.  And it's a good thing too, because what Ed traded me was too heavy to handle on my own and too big to haul away in my Honda Civic (new & improved with its working A/C & buffed-out deer dent... but that's another story).  So before I get into the new item, thanks have to go to my bro.  Where would I be without you?  Probably forking over way too much dough to rent a trailer.  And here's a little trading side note: because he took his orange Avalanche (rife with its own stories) on no less than 5 hours of driving to help me out, I felt obliged to cover his gas expenses.  And guess what? I happened to have $40 laying around for just such an occasion thanks to my most recent trade (the last of the 4 items from Trade #9).  I remember when I got the $40 that I'd just tack it onto the deal for my next trade if need be... but a $450 guitar and $40 cash is kind of an odd thing to offer someone, so I decided to keep it for a rainy trading day.  Today was that day (yes, it did rain a little on the way there).  I like it when things work out. This cartoon is what happens when they don't.

emulating is fun!

So here it is, my new trade item. It's an Arcade Game Emulator.  What that means is that it's not any real arcade game like from the '70s & '80s... it's an emulation of lots of them.  Loads of them.  Bucketsfull of them.  Ok, to be more precise, this arcade has over 3,200 games on it.  What kind of games?  Well, Donkey Kong, for one.  Pac Man, for another.  I also came across Punch Out, Q-Bert, Pole Position, Dig-Dug, Tetris, Space Invaders, Spy Hunter, Street Fighter, Pitfall, Arkanoid, Breakout, Burger Time, & Centipede, to name (quite literally) just a few.  What is an emulation of an arcade game?  I'm glad you asked.  Simply put, it's some geek's home-made version of the game played on his home computer.  But when you consider that geeks from the '70s & 80's made all of those games from computers that were ridiculously inferior by today's standards, you can understand these things can be quite good.  While not all the 3,000+ games on this arcade actually work, and while there are like 7 versions of Pac Man, and while some of the ones that DO work have weird glitches in them (all very typical "downsides" of using massive emulators), there's no doubt that many play exactly like the real thing.  Graphics, board levels, music, speed, sound effects, rules-of-game, high scores... you name it, these emulators have it.  And the ones that have the best chance of being authentic are the ones people most liked to play back in the day... like those listed above.  And yes, emulators are totaly legal, though I can't hook this baby up to a working quarter slot... that would be very very illegal. 

I've already told you that Ed is a guitar guy and also a nice guy.  But what I've been keeping secret is that Ed is also an emulator guy.  No, he didn't write the emulator programs, but he did download the M.A.M.E.emulators (the most trusted & honored name in game emulators... it stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) into his Dell computer, mount it in this old arcade cabinet he picked up from Craigslist for fifty bucks, purchase then install then hooked up all the buttons & joysticks, and finally customize the whole getup to look about as real as the old machines as one could do from the comfort of one's own home.  Oh, did I mention Ed isn't yet a Junior in college?  Yeah, I think he'll be going on to bigger and cooler emulators in the future... but not until he plays his fingertips raw on his new Ibanez, of course. 

Ed took several months to build his arcade emulator, and I was happy to trade him for all that hard work.  I'm sure that many of you are now wondering what this thing is worth.  Truth is, I don't know.  They range a lot.  For example, on eBay right now you could pay up to $3,000 for a customized cabinet WITHOUT the emulated computer inside.  Value, I am learning, comes in all shapes and sizes.  It the case of an arcade emulator, it's time and effort that makes the grade, the biggest of which is hooking up and installing all the buttons in such a way as to communicate with the computer.  But there is $ as well.  The cabinet costs money, the buttons & joysticks cost money.  The lights, the wires, the improved sound card, the glass hovering over the screen... you get the idea.  Combined they are worth... well, whatever somebody is willing to trade in avoidance of doing all that work themselves.  One friend of mine, for example, stated that had he not already sold it, he would have traded his Ford F-150 for it (working, 150k miles, 1998).  Other people, however, pointed out that they could download the emulators for free & be perfectly happy playing sans-joystick right there on their desktop.  Hey, to each his own.  I get that.  I also get that while I don't really know how much $ my new Arcade Emulator is worth, I do know that I've drastically increased my audience.  After all, only musicians can play a guitar (and from what I've seen on Craigslist, most of them want acoustics), while ANYone can play a video game. I know that I'm already loving it. And both my brother and my sister-in-law have already stepped up to the panel & taken a few whacks at Pac Man & some Japanese-made fighting game that has no English anywhere on the screen.  (I joined the sis-in-law for the 2-player version.  We fought together against all the thugs in thug alley.  I died on the third screen.)  I guess all I need now is to find someone who really wants one of these things, just like Ed really wanted that Ibanez.
What's really interesting to me is that had my life gone a slightly different path, I'd probably already have one of these bad boys.  You see, not so long ago, before my wife decided to hang up her lab coat and don her baker's apron (you do remember why I'm doing all this trading, right?), we had a pretty cool basement with all the bells & whistles of fun.  Pool table. Ping pong table.  Poker table.  16-Seat projection movie theater.  Yeah, nice.  But it didn't have video games.  At one point I fished out my old Super Nintendo & connected it to a forgotten color TV & stuck it on a stand.  It was... ok.  But what I longed for was a REAL game.  An ARCADE game.  And long story short, I came across the emulator concept & even bought the plans for making one.  I never did get around to even so much as designing the cabinet let alone install the emulator software & start looking for joysticks, track balls, & buttons.  And part of me has always been a little disapointed.  So I'm pretty impressed at Ed.  He did all that and he hasn't even begun his 2nd half of college yet.  So while the Ibanez guitar was cool to look at, I couldn't do a thing with it.  Ditto for the 3/4-sized Carlo Robelli acoustic job I had a few months ago.  And while I definitely like baseball & guys who make it to the hall of fame, The Camden River Sharks & even Rollie Fingers & Tom Seaver weren't my particular cup of tea.  And while the XBox & Guitar Hero were more up my alley, the Arcade Emulator is without a doubt my personal favorite item to be (temporarily) in my possession.  Right now it's sitting in the corner of my wife's soon-to-be-open bakery (335 Grape Street, Allentown, PA).  And until I find an even better trade (perhaps I might even be able to jump straight to a used Cargo Van!!), I can now take a break from installing insulation or painting walls or designing signs or calling various contractors and go play a game of Pac Man just the way Namco intended: on a full-sized standup cabinet with inch-high ghosts & resonating sound.

On second thought, maybe I should keep it unplugged. I have a tendancy to get a little... obsessed... with things sometimes. 

No, really?
;)

actual screen shots :D