My adventures in DDR cabinet buying
Soooo.... In case you didn't know, I'm a DDR nut. My quest for the perfect pad has led me to modify both soft and hard plastic pads, both with terrific results. However, when you get down to it, only one thing is the arcade experiance, and that's an actual arcade machine. So, I had to have one. :)
My plan was to buy whatever was the cheapest (can't afford the $5000+ for a recent-ish mix) take the guts out, and put a PS in there to play the 8 or so home mixes I already own. To my pleasent surprise, I found a DDR Solo cabinet for under $500 that had no PCB or CDROM drive to begin with. Perfect. :) Yes, I would only have 1 dance pad, but as I said before, my existing home pad mods really kick ass, and player 2 could use those quite nicely. Plus, a Solo machine has two more buttons on the stage so I could still play the home Solo songs. I also know of a site that sells just the Solo pads if I ever want to upgrade and get another....
But the machine is in Chicago. I'm not in Chicago. Shipping cost more than the machine itself. $630. The whole dang thing weighs about 930 lbs! The dance pad alone weighs about 420 lbs. I guess it won't be slipping around then. :)
It is all paid for now, and I am quite relived. I just have to wait the 4 or 5 days for it to get here. I don't know if anybody has ever tried to ship something large across the country, but it is not all that straight forward. You need an independant company to come in and package it up even. You'd think the shipping company would do that, but they don't. The last headache will be getting this thing in my house. It will be shipped to a port 10 minutes away from me (to save about $300 on shipping costs), and I guess I'll have to get a Uhaul and 3 friends to move it. Then I can begin the cleaning, re-wireing for Playstation use, etc. This is going to kick ass when its done. Pictures to come in a week or so. :)
