Perhaps you have heard the old saying, "There's no free lunch." Certainly, I am inclined to agree. When they say come in here for a "free set of dishes," they do not adequately warn you that in order to get them you will have to resist the purchase of a timeshare you can't really afford, located someplace you don't really want to visit again for two separated weeks every October, over the vigorous protestations of an extremely persistent salesman for a full two hour period. When the on-line merchant offers you "free shipping," it is only if you continue to load your virtual shopping cart with additional goods worth at least twice what you wanted to spend in the first place. In this respect, Supermarket coupons are certainly the most insidious. Buy something at the market, anything, and you will invariable receive at check-out a "buy 1 get one free" coupon for a similar product that you don't really like. But go ahead and use that coupon and out will come yet another for a similar product that you like even less, but this time the deal is "buy 2 and get one free" and so forth. Dear Mother Wackenhammer, God love her, was taken in by each and every one of these dastardly offers. When we finally laid her to her eternal rest, there among her most cherished possessions was a "buy 23 get one free" coupon for a brand of condensed canned milk so obscure that the label (loosely translated) read "Best in all CCCP, Yum!" And is it my imagination or is it now the rule rather than the exception that militant marketeers stalk the front of every discount shoe store (is there any other kind), their pockets stuffed with "buy one pair, get a second pair of equal or lesser value at 10% off" coupons just waiting to be thrust into the hands of any unsuspecting woman who might possibly need shoes as they pass by. It should be a crime.
In our arcade, life is much more simple. Each game has a sign that says, for example, "2 Tokens." You place 2 Tokens in the coin slot and the game begins. No fuss, no complicated discount structure, no shipping, no handling, no coupons for the next game. You simply...pay.
Some people ask us "why Tokens?" why not just use quarters at the arcade? There are a number of reasons: It keeps all the cash in the Token machine, which means thieves have no incentive to break into the games, but more importantly so that the staff can record the day's revenue by counting the money in the 1 Token machine rather than having to empty quarters out of 40 individual games. On the downside, some number of Tokens do walk away in customer pockets as souvenirs or "we'll spend these when we come back tomorrow" but they never do, so we do need to buy a quantity of new Tokens every year. The arcade was running with Tokens when we bought it, so we have stuck with them. It is actually not trivial to change back to quarters, let me explain why.
Behind the coin "slot" in an arcade game, or vending machine is a complicated little device called a coin mechanism or "coin mech" for short. Some coin mechs are purely mechanical, like the ones you see on coin-op washing machines. You put in some number of quarters vertically in a row and push in the bar they sit in. The coins disappear and the device is activated. The coins must be of a certain size or they will not fit in the slots or fall through it. There must be a correct number of coins or all the mechanical stops will not be lifted and allow the bar to be pushed in all the way. It is a simple device that rarely jams, which is nice. Also, it can be used to push either an electronic switch or a mechanical lever to unlock the functions of the game or vending machine. However, this mech can be fooled with worthless slugs that are the same size as a quarter.
More sophisticated coin mechs are called "roll down" mechs (shown in the picture) as the coin rolls down a tilted ramp past a series of slots. If the coin is the wrong size, it falls out of a slot to the coin return. If not, it falls into a chute to a capacious coin box. On the way through the chute, the coin pushes down a thin wire lever attached to a small electric switch (blue in the photo), which sends a signal to the game's brain that the coin has been deposited. These mechs typically contain magnets that divert steel slugs to the coin return as well. Better ones also have a mechanical lever on the coin chute that acts as a one-way valve. This prevents so-called "stringing," where a thief ties a string to the coin and tries to pull it back up and out of the mech once the game is activated. These mechs are unpowered and completely mechanical except for the switch. On the downside, these mechs are designed to work only for one specific coin diameter. Our Tokens are 0.94 inches, which is an industry standard, a little larger than a quarter. If we wanted to operate on quarters rather than tokens, we would have to change out the coin mechs in every game. In more modern games (1970's) this is the swap of a small square plastic module of the overall mech, in older games it means unscrewing the whole mech (like the upper one in the photo), face plate and all.
The latest technology solves this problem nicely. There is a coin holder (under red dot in the photo) on the mech where the owner inserts the desired coin. This action sets the size of the coin that the mech will accept. It also measures the electrical conductivity of the coin which is a surrogate for the coin material. Coins placed in the mech must meet both size and material property as compared to the desired coin type. Those not conforming are rejected to the coin return. If you want the game to operate with quarters today, dimes tomorrow and Tokens on Thursdays, you simply change the example coin in the mech. I use these mechs exclusively when building new games, like the Treadwall game currently in progress. One can get nice ones from China on Ebay for about $20. These are electronic, they take a 12V supply and put out a short pulse on an output line when a coin is accepted. They also have a hookup for a coin counter, a useful device which increments a set of numbered dials when it gets a 12V pulse. This lets you know how many coins have run through your games, giving you an accurate measure of their popularity and amount of usage/wear.
Who ever thought there was so much going on behind that little slot...
-Otto
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