From my position the DECO cartridge system was launched first, then a whole hoard of proprietary edge boards standards. Remember this was Japan led and JAMMA standard was not a full standard (Taito, SNK, Capcom, Irem etc – but Sega and Namco and other took time to adopt). I remember sitting in my office at Electrocoin with hoards of ‘Harness looms’ that worked with different edge standards.

The JAMMA standard was grabbed in the US after the depression in videos hit (thanks to the laser games) – Japan created the standard as a means to control the distribution route and avoid a collapse (which they partly avoided). We have a feature in the Stinger coming about how the collapse in the money markets did not totally affect the coin-op scene till the 1984 collapse – as reference now.

JAMMA came about in 1983 after the first videogames crash. Everything was fine after that. Then they started to abandon it around the time Virtua Racing and Time Crisis came around. Then all the smaller operators closed and all the niche locations like pizza places, cinemas, bars and video stores stopped having a machine.

All the manufacturers should band together and come up with a JAMMA standard for racing and lightgun cabinets. Most of them are practically identical.

I’ve been told that Raw Thrills is about to get very competitive when it comes to pricing. Now that GVR, RT and IT are all doing what they can to bring prices down to sane levels, it’s going to hopefully put a lot of pressure on the Japanese developers to do the same. BBS Deluxe for $6000 seems like a steal, but this is what it should be – fewer games above the $10k mark, more games below the $5000 mark.

Namco dose not make ChaseHQ2, they are the distributor – Taito agreed a price with them and they claimed at the time they could sell x for that price (once they added their margin). They are now scared they have badly calculated and are thinking on cutting their margin just to clear stock. They ask operators if they will be at Y, only to clear and not to adjust pricing.

The whole GlobalVR price policy has shaken up the market – revealing how much the big five distributors have ramped up their percentage and boned the trade. Now under pressure we are seeing a rationalization of the margins (a near 20% reduction) and falling.

We do cover pinball stuff on occasion and we have one writer who usually gets the leg up on that stuff but he’s on a month long internet hiatus (Metafox) and he seemd to be on a year long hiatus before that. There isn’t a lot of news about it out there however. I forget to check pinballnews as well but I don’t want to simple cover everything that they do but I’ll see what I can do.

Just for the record – this year we have a strong line-up of games, but also we have the possibility of losing some developers/studios. It is going to be tough, but also there will be a major impetus for the consumer media to try and stick the knife in once and for all.

I used to enjoy the bits you wrote for Edge editor. At least, I think it was you who did a couple of articles.

If Sega are going to keep releasing things at very high prices they need to hype them up some more. The American arcade developers make themselves available for interviews and release more information. They’re also very in tune with what the Americans like to play even if they don’t make games quite as elaborate as Sega yet.

You know, this blog could do with more pinballs related updates. I suppose I should just got to http://www.pinballnews.com but I tend for forget about it.

Just skimmed through a copy of GAMEStm, and saw a poorly written review on RaceTV – oh how they are coming late to the game, wonder if they have changed their tune over a arcade feature?

Oh, and how much do you want to bet that the objectives will be “Rescue the hostages, kill the terrorists”?