Surface Tension Arcade Table

Did anyone know this? I just came across and I think it's a nice piece of retro gaming, although not only retro gaming.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18...ee-table-1.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18...ee_table_2.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18...ade-tables.jpg

It comes in some different setups. The PC inside includes a 160MB disk, MAME and about 100 preinstalled games. It has Wifi, and iTunes is also installed, so you can also use it as Jukebox. There's many more stuff, go have a look for yourselves at www.surface-tension.net, unfortunately I cannot access the site from here due to restrictions, will have a look when I'm home.

You can also find some videos on YouTube.

Only downside is the price, it's approximately 2500-3000£, which is quite expensive.

Nice idea to have a cocktail style arcade setup that slides away into a coffee table, and their set-ups do look very nice. But...

It would be possible to make one yourself for a lot less. Buying a standard coffee table and converting it. From Gremlin Solutions you can now buy a complete arcade control setup kit from £65 to £135, so not that expensive, and that includes everything including the i-Pac controller, full labelled wiring harness, all the joysticks and buttons... and the £135 one even comes with a coin door! Great for the price. Then it's just DIY skills with some MDF, and some time measuring, cutting, assembling, painting etc.... much cheaper than it ever used to be to do this.

And their PCs are far from up to date... I had a look and their are Shuttle SFF PCs with Dual Core Pentiums, so bottom of the current available CPUs, 500GB HDD and 2GB of ram. You could build such a system for well under £200 these days. So the cost of the PC and the controls would come to around £300, a decent coffee table suitable would probably be another £150-200, so lets say £500. The MDF and other materials wouldn't cost much more to finish it off, say £50 max, so you could built this yourself for around £500-600. A bit different to the £3000 these are asking. :blink: That is some profit margin they have going on there.

True, it's way overpriced, but that's always with that kind of stuff, people try to sell it like it was something "new, never existed before", 100!!! games aso.

Normal people like us (although not quite normal) already know that since years there's stuff like emulators existing, and that it's easy to build such thing for a lot less.

But my question is, who is the potential buyer for these? Someone that doesn't know what to do with his money? Some rich parents with pain in the ass kids?

Rich people who either don't know about MAME and emulation, or arcade fans that do, but can't be bothers to built it themselves?