Pachislos

I currently only own two pachislo machines. Here they are for you to see:

These are my two lovely pachislos. The one on the left is Dance Night whilst the one on the right is the Hanabi Hyakkei (not long after I bought it).

They're sitting in by bedroom in this picture because it was the easiest place to make dark and see all the flashy lights. The only problem was that my bedroom was a complete and utter disaster area with boxes of crap all over the place, so they had to be moved eventually. But being the bedroom meant long sessions of pachi playing then just falling back onto the bed and passing out until the morning / lunch-time. Ah, the joys of being between jobs... So free...

As you can see in the picture on the right, though. I did eventually move them into the living room (and you can see how much of a freak for DVDs I was. That's only a tiny portion...). My father would usually pop over on his lunch break from work and end up having a go on them as well as my nephew who also became quite hooked on playing them. So much so, that he asked for a toy one for Christmas one year... He's going to grow up to be a good eye-shooter... I can feel it.

The machines gave me a lot of fun times and I miss playing them every so often when I have days off like this one (but now I have a purpose! I'm on a mission from the pachi gods!). Before leaving for China, the machines were packed carefully and put in my parents' house in their spare room. I've been back twice now, and they are perfectly fine and fully working still. We had a barbecue the first time I went back and I set the Hanabi up under the gazebo, sat down in front of it with a bottle of whisky and had a whale of a time.

This is my IGT Dance Night. It has a low serial number (001492) and was the first machine to get me started on the whole hobby of playing pachi. If I hadn't come to China, my collection would have soared in terms of numbers of machines by now (I'm sure of it). But the Dance Night will always hold a special place as being the one who introduced me to it all. The only reason I picked it up was because of my love of DDR and Japanese dance related stuff... Ahhh... Memories. It's also the machine that helped me out so much in the initial phases of creating the Pachi Battle System. I'm surprised it does still work after the amount of times I poked around inside it with multimeters and all kinds of electrical testing equipment!

And this one is Hanabi Hyakkei (Roughy translates to: Scene of hundreds of fireworks). I picked this up from a PachiTalk forum member (bigsasquatch). The book-keeping features on this machine are cool as is the fact that the reels are covered with a huge LCD screen displaying animations all throughout play. It bacame my favourite machine to shove a thousand or so coins through. It also hooked up to the first Pachi Battle System quite nicely and ran alongside the Dance Night without any problems. I knew people who collected arcade cabinets and games before, but when you're limited on your space, pachislo gives you a nice way to relax whilst not taking up too much space. I've agreed with my wife, too: When we buy our new house, I get some space to set up my own pachi parlour / games room... Might have to build an extension on to it, too... ;-)

So that's my two machines... So far. Of course I plan on getting more. What kind of pachi player do you take me for? Anyway, here are the machines side by side. The pictures have been taken from promotional pictures of the machines: