Countries with candy cabs?

Coin-operated games and arcades.
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Deathgaze
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Countries with candy cabs?

Post by Deathgaze »

Most arcade forums seem to be mostly American and wooden arcade cabinets focused. However this forum seems be a mix of cultures focusing on candy cabs (obviously)

So I was wondering, were/are candy cabs big in your country?
I'm from Australia, Australia was mixed with candies and woodies back in the day. I've ask friends who were born in other states or live a considerable distance from where I grew up. It seems some only knew candies and some only knew woodies. I grew up in a dense Chinese populace and experienced mostly candies with some woodies here or there.
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by keropi »

here in Greece at the 80s and up until 1995-1996 the majority of cabs were made of wood locally and looked something like this:

Image

I remember in my town we had 3 arcade dens :awe: and all they had was these kind of cabs (filled of bootlegs I am pretty sure but we had no idea back then).
After 1995-6 we also started having better arcade shops that only had branded cabs and maybe some old-woodies in some corner. But the most remembered style of cab here is the one pictured above.
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by geotrig »

no like keorpi all woodies here when growing up.

@keropi when branded cabs arrived did they reverse the cp's around to match the above ?
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<trk>:I remember catching a big fat one and my friend said "throw it back in, that one already tastes like wood"
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by phillv85 »

I didn't see any candies until the NAOMI came about, which only just counts really. NAOMI's were pretty common to see in the early 2000's.
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by keropi »

geotrig wrote: November 26th, 2018, 8:30 am no like keorpi all woodies here when growing up.

@keropi when branded cabs arrived did they reverse the cp's around to match the above ?
nope, as far as I remember branded cabs where stock with the stick on the correct side: left :lol:
I have NO idea why this reversed order was chosen, I mean I remember when we played shooters that needed rapid and button presses we crossed our hands :lol: , most likely one manufacturer did it this way and the rest copied that. We did have our own chassis manufacturer though, GD'TRONICS - they were in business until recently , the owner retired.

I could not find a decent cab like the one I pictured above so I settled with the bigger version that has an 28" screen, looks like this:

Image

There are still chances to get some OK BABY! or an astro cab or a naomi one but these mean nothing to me, all my fond memories are from wooden ones...
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by JXZO »

Like in many countries, Naomi Universals were some of the first candy style cabs to make it over to Finland.

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These monstrosities were the cabinet of choice for our local arcade monopoly, housing NeoGeo hardware amongst other games.

The buttons were horrible.
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by nem »

Nope. We had quite a few candy cabs in Finland.

Transatlantic Software imported hundreds of Neo cabs. Some were sitdown cabs, some had an extra pedestal underneath to make them upright. These were playable in NeoGeo Lands across the country.

Jaleco Ponys made it to Finland. I think these were brought in by TAS as well.

Golden Games imported at least a dozen Aero Citys.

For European "candies", we had Royal Video Specials.

Finland was an absolute treasure trove. Shame we're 20 years late to it as pretty much everything has been taken to the dump or sold to some other country.
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by LEGENOARYNINLIA »

...yet 90% of gamers here only have nostalgia for dedicated woodies. Some even think candy cabs only run emulators.
Emulation's nice when done well
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by nem »

Probably because 9/10 arcade machines were dedicated woodies.

And where are the thousands of arcade cabs now? We can point our finger at Raha-automaattiyhdistys, Finland's Slot Machine Association, a government owned and supervised association that was granted monopoly status in Finland. Finnish legislation dictated that they could only operate, not sell machines in Finland, so whatever was "out of fashion" was either destroyed or sold out of the country. Candy cabs were in Finland for a very brief window.

The pics are gone, but here's one of "our" Neo cabs in the US:

https://forum.arcadeotaku.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=34622
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by keropi »

^ here the incompetent government around 2001 decided to outlaw all arcade games because they could not check and control gambling games from recreational ones. Overnight everything closed.
So 80% of cabs ended up in storage and then the landfills. I contacted 3 people in my town that owned arcade dens, all 3 told me the same story: they stored their stuff waiting for the law to change , that never happened and after 5-6 years they recycled everything since they could not pay anymore for storage.
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by SuperPang »

Our government's perfectly happy to let people cripple themselves with gambling debt so long as they get their taxes. If anything arcade games were pushed out of arcades in favour of fruit machines and the like. I remember your average 90's arcade having a few rows of fruities at the back in an adult only area which grew over the years until the games were forced out.
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by LEGENOARYNINLIA »

Same thing happened in Hong Kong in the recent years.
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by sven666 »

arcades and pinball have been pretty much outlawed in sweden since the mid 90s, you can still get an operators license but its costly and tons of paperwork for very little profit, its the same license for gambling machines, the law is pretty strict on this matter too with big fines and punishments which makes it hard to circumvent.

candy cabs were pretty nonexistent here up untill the early 2000s when people started privatley importing them from asia, they were extremely hot comodity for a while but now theyre everywhere and wood cabs have recently caught up in price and desireability.
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Re: Countries with candy cabs?

Post by landisama »

In Romania we had only wood cabinets in the 90ies. I first saw a candy cab focused arcade hall in 2005, with Virtua Tennis 2 and Dead or Alive 2 among others.
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