What is this site for?

ArcadeUK.com is run as a hobby by myself (Luke Wells) I am a collector not a business.

My sales section, which is the largest on the net for any private collector, is there mostly for me to sell on games that I have acquired that I don't need for my collection because I already have them or have decided that I don't wish to play anymore. When I sell a game 100% of the money goes back into me buying more arcade games for my collection (as well as does 50% of my salary from my main job) As I mentioned above I am not a business and don't do this for a profit. Over the years taking into account both what I have bought and what I have sold my collection has cost me around £40,000, selling my unwanted items on here helps a lot towards the huge running costs of my collection.

I have been providing free information to my site visitors for several years now. I am also happy to answer your questions by e-mail, but please bear in mind that proving a free service like this I get several hundred queries a month, so please stick to asking questions about arcade machines.

I am also able to help people out by providing repair service. I can fix your machines and pcb’s and I can do things such as build wiring looms and such. Of course I have to charge you for my time and parts, but as I am not a business you will find my prices are much lower then the professional outfits that do repairs.

If you spot any problems, mistakes on my site or have any information that you think would be useful for me to display to help others then please do get in touch and pass that information on.

My History

I started with an interest in electronics in around 1991. I started to build simple circuit out of electronics magazines. This got me interested in finding out how things worked. Once friends and family found out I had a soldering iron and was into electronics all sorts of household items would turn up at my house for me to fix. I had a pretty good success rare considering I didn't really know what I was doing.

I got my first arcade machine which was a JPM "Spot-A-Light" fruit machine in 1995. Unfortunately it broke down on me and I couldn't get it working and couldn't find anyone else who was willing to fix it for me. Frustrated by this I started getting books on electronics and electronic repair and also purchased myself my first proper test equipment. After many long nights with my head stuck in the back of the fruit machine I managed to get it working. I was really pleased with myself. I continued on with repairing all sort of broken junk that people used to bring round for me to fix.

By 1999 I had become bored with my fruit machine and after seeing some adverts for video game machines for sale in the local paper I decided that I wanted one. The prices were quite reasonable too by the look of it. I rang up the phone numbers in the adverts and quickly found out that they were ALL a scam. Firstly the free adverts are for people selling their personal possessions only and not for businesses. Every number I phoned turned out to be a business, and the call went the same for every one I called. The seller would either tell me that as interest was high in the item that the price had doubled, tripled or even quadrupled. Either that or they would tell me that the machine had sold but they had another machine, which was even better but cost 4 times as much. I spoke to one guy in Manchester who was talking absolute crap. He was quoting ridiculous prices to me over the phone (as much as 4-5 times as much as the other con-men were quoting in some cases) fortunately I realised he was talking crap and ended the phone call with him before being roped into some dodgy deal. He was telling all sorts of lies like "I have the only Star Wars machine in the UK" Funny thing is 7 years later this guy is still selling machines to people at the most incredibly ridiculous prices you could ever imagine and people are buying them! You wouldn't believe the amount of story’s I have heard about this guy over the years from people that have bought from him or spoken to him. It is a minefield out there so be careful!

Fortunately I found a local company who seemed a lot more genuine then the rest and I went over to visit them in person and choose a machine. I got an absolute bargain. I paid £100 for a nice condition Jamma machine and £40 for a bootleg Mortal Kombat board. They even delivered it to my house, took it upstairs for me and showed me how to change the games and rotate the monitor and anything else I might need to know. Their price and service was excellent and I was very pleased (I still have the machine to this day) Unfortunately the company has now moved over to just selling fruit machines so there are no more bargains to be had from them. I did buy a second machine from them before they did stop selling video games but the price had now become £190 including delivery for a machine, this was still very reasonable, as that was a few years ago and you don't see them in workshopped condition for that price anymore.

Shortly after getting hold of my first machine, I decided to set up my own website, as after my struggle to find a reputable arcade dealer that wasn't trying to rip me off, I wanted to help other people find machines of their own without falling foul to a conman.

From my first machine, things went out of control. I wanted more then just Mortal Kombat, I wanted to play all my favourite games that I remembered from my childhood. I wanted more machines, I wanted driving machines, I wanted 4 player machines, I wanted cocktail tables. There was so much that I wanted and I bought it all. I don't earn a fortune, but I was spending more then 50% of my salary every month on arcade machines and parts. By 2005 I had manage to collect an incredible amount of games. I had 25 video game machines, 10 pinball machines and around 1600 game pcb’s, making my collection one of the largest in the UK (definitely in the top 5) I also had been collecting a lot of rare games and as such according to VAPS (which used to be quite a good indicator to collectors till it went downhill) I had the 3rd largest collection of rare games in the world (I think I still do on VAPS however no-one really pays any notice to them anymore)

Due to the huge size of my collection it was inevitable that my machines and pcb’s were going to break down from time to time. I was ending up with a lot of my machines being out of action and really struggling to find anyone to fix them. Because of this I had to now start really taking repair seriously and I invested a lot of time and money in learning to fix arcade games properly. I have spent thousands on test equipment and spare electronic components and now have about a 90% success rate on repairing game boards. Due to the fact that other people were experiencing the same problems as me and couldn’t find anyone reliable to repair their pcb’s, after the huge number of people I got asking me if I would repair their pcb’s for them I decided to offer a repair service.

Over the years I have been using this website to sell off my duplicate games (every now and then when doing bulk buys of games I have needed for my collection, the seller has insisted that the deals have included certain pcb’s that I already owned) The site was serving is purpose well, as I was doing a reasonable job of selling on the games I didn't want or need and as a bonus I was getting people contacting me offering to sell me games that I desperately needed to complete my collection. Word got around about my site and people started e-mailing me to ask for help and advice. More and more and more questions kept pouring in so I decided that I needed to make more information available on my site. I wrote a few beginners guides and published them on my site. Another common request was people asking if I knew the pinout for a certain game or if I new what the switches did on a certain pcb. Because of this I decided to publish all of the 1500 pinout and switch setting guides that I had downloaded from all over the web since 1999. These have proven to be very popular and are downloaded by thousands of people. It is very interesting to read my website logs as it gives me an insight into how popular the different games are. For example would you believe that the Double Dragon switch settings have been downloaded 2900 times!

Its is now the end of 2006 and I am writing my new and updated website ready for 2007. I hope to have every more free information then ever before. As it stands at the moment my Collection currently consists of around 25 video game machines, 14 pinball machines and 1200 pcb’s, as you can see I have been selling off a lot of my pcb’s to claw some money back so that I can get a games room built to put my collection in, which to be honest out grew my house 5 years ago! Currently a lot of my machines are stacked up on their ends as I don’t have the room to have them all setup at the same time.