I asked and he said he still has it. He said he has received some interest, but that no one from Retro has contacted him about it. Are we interested?
It would be nice to get some hi res photos of everything (external and internal) but since the data has already been dumped, I don't think there's a huge demand anymore.
Yeah, physical location is going to be a big determining factor here--it's not like a sit-down ride is going to be shippable in the way an arcade PCB is (and honestly, the unit itself is the valuable part now that the game part's been dumped).
How much is he asking for it? Since the game data has been online for quite a while now the only new stuff we can get from this are some hi-res photos like RyogaMasaki said. There is also the issue of shipping the thing, which will cost a hefty amount. How far away is the seller from you?
Sorry for the late response. Still learning how this new forum deals with notifications. He's from Australia so about as far away from me as possible. Since we've got the game dumped it's more of a cool factor/get some good pictures of the ride. To preserve privacy, if anyone in Australia is interested I'll private message his contact info.
If nothing else, it'd be a good idea of digitizing the operator's manual if such a thing exists, and typically they do for such big expensive equipment. The dimensions of the machine should even be within them, essentially preserving the cabinet in data. There is a documentary on youtube on how fans recreated Nintendo's Sky Skipper cabinet using custom designed scanners. Such a method could logically be applied to this and many other coin-ops for the sake of painstaking posterity.
I would prefer to buy a SegaSonic The Hedgehog Machine since it's the definitive and only less finicky way to play that game. But it's still cool that the SegaSonic Cosmo Fighter is for sale now. Kinda rare to see anyone sell them online.
Well I'm sure if someone wins the lottery they can fund us an official Sega Retro arcade. As in, a physical building somewhere that can house arcade machines, that also has a studio where you can load a machine onto a stage and take high resolution photographs from a bazillion angles (and scans, and ROM dumps). And you'd need some trained experts on-site to make sure they do it properly. You know, something that will never happen.
Oh, I also came here to talk about cabinet art preservation. There's already been talks in the MAME team about doing "3D artwork" and there was even a test made with a 3D cabinet which had the game projected on it as a texture... So I guess the sooner we start with scanning the art and making 3D models of the cabinets, the better. I'm already in talks with somebody to digitize the art from the arcade cabinets at a Spanish video game museum precisely because of this. Not exactly 3D scanning but he told me that 3D models would be possible to make, out of the images. We'll see how it turns out. EDIT: Found the video:
