rgvac

A couple of people have asked what the letters in one of my email addresses means: RGVAC

It stands for rec.games.video.arcade.collecting, and is a Usenet newsgroup that I used to spend quite a bit of time on. Coin-op video game repair and restoration used to be a hobby of mine (I say "used to" because I just haven't had the time or money in the past year to do anything at all with it).

It's a fascinating hobby, actually. Restoring a video game is very much like restoring an old car. You spending months tracking down original artwork, painstakingly restoring a damaged wooden cabinet, bringing a dead monitor back to life, and doing a 4116-to-4164 conversion to get rid of that old RAM that runs too hot and requires three different voltages.

And, after all that, there's nothing like the feeling of turning the completed game on for the first time. All of your hard work is finally realized in that one moment.

Then, you load it into the back of your pickup truck, take it to an auction, and sell it to the highest bidder because your house payment for that month went into artwork, monitor parts, and new 4164 RAM. ;-)