LinLog

This is another one of those "note to myself because I can never remember this" posts. 

For quite a while, I've been using the vim-ps1 plugin for Powershell syntax highlighting.  It's generally fine, but I have one annoyance with it: When I open a Powershell file, the plugin opens a horizontal split with a Powershell terminal in it.  That's...fine, but most of the time I don't want that.  And the documentation doesn't say anything about it.

Well, fortunately there's a resolved Github issue with the answer.  Turns out the issue isn't actually with vim-ps1, it's with coc-powershell, which actually does mention this issue in the docs.  Why the language server is popping up a terminal window isn't clear to me, but the solution is to add this to your coc-settings.json file:
"powershell.integratedConsole.showOnStartup": false

Easy fix!  Unfortunately, I can't check that into my vim-config Git repo because I have my Intelephense license key in that file, so I need to document it someplace else.  Hence this post.

As an aside, before scouring the web for that answer, I tried asking Claude.  That didn't go well.  It's first answer was to "look at your Vim config" or try disabling plugins, which was not even remotely useful.  When I pointed that I knew there was a setting for this, it asked me where I saw it.  If I remembered that, I wouldn't need to ask the AI!  At that point, I decided it was easier to do this the old-fashioned way and ended up checking the Github issues and found the solution in a couple of minutes.

Things like that make me appreciate William Bernstein's comments in his interview with Rob Berger.  When asked about using AI in his writing and research, he said that AI is extremely useful, but it's kind of like having a very dumb graduate assistant.  That seems about right to me.  Even a dumb grad student is still smart enough to get into grad school, so they're capable of doing some very helpful work, but they still have some significant limitations.

I've had a PayPal account for a long time.  For most of that time, I barely used it.  But recently, I've been using it fairly regularly.  Mostly, that's a choice of convenience - I can easily link credit cards to my PayPal account and then pay with them through PayPal rather than directly entering my card information in a bunch of different sites.  This makes the checkout process a bit smoother and also adds a layer of indirection, and therefore control, to the payment process.  (I've also had at least one dispute where PayPal was significantly more accommodating then my bank.) 

What I hadn't done was set up a PayPal balance account.  In other words, I didn't have money sitting "in PayPal", for lack of a better description.  In fact, I didn't even have a bank account linked to PayPal, just credit cards.  That changed this year.  First, I needed to send someone money, so I actually had a reason to link a bank account.  That opened the door.  And then, I heard about the PayPal debit card.

The last year or two, I've gotten into the credit card rewards game a bit.  Not to a crazy extent, but I started actually paying some attention to the rewards structure on our cards and signing up for cards specifically to maximize the rewards.  That leads me to occasionally look at cards that would fill in gaps in rewards categories.

Important Note: For anyone who doesn't already realize this, you shouldn't be playing the credit card rewards game if you're carrying balances from month to month.  And make no mistake - it is a game.  While you can make a decent amount in credit card rewards, it's not going to be enough to change your financial situation.  And if you're paying any interest, that's going to wipe out any gains, so you've already lost before you start.  So if you're going to do this, have your financial house in order and view it as a recreational activity, not a money-making scheme.

This is where the PayPal debit card comes in.  Normally, debit cards give you little to nothing in rewards.  For example, my credit union has a program that will give you 1% back on debit card purchases, but only if you meet certain additional requirements.  The PayPal debit card, however, has a superpower - it gets you 5% back on one category.

If you're not into the credit card game, this is very good.  However, elevated rewards rates - especially as high as 5% - almost always come with a catch of some kind.  In the case of the PayPal Debit Card, there are a few catches:

1. You only earn rewards on that one category.  So if your category is "groceries", you get 5% back at grocery stores, but that's it.  You get zero on any other purchases.
2. Your rewards category must be set every month, and once it's set, it can't be changed until the next month.  Nothing you buy before setting the category earns any points, even if you set the category later.
3. The rewards are capped at $1,000 in spending per month.  So at most, you can make $50 per month, or $600 per year.

The "choose your category every month" thing is not unique to PayPal, but it is slightly annoying.  I set a calendar reminder for the first of each month, and they send you an email reminder as well, so it's not hard to remember.

The limit of $50 a month isn't fantastic, but it isn't unusual.  Pretty much all of the 5% category cards I've seen have some form of limit - whether monthly, quarterly, or annually.  The only exceptions I've seen are things like the Amazon Prime Visa, that give you 5% uncapped, but only at specific retailers.  And if you're consistently spending more than $1,000 a month at just Amazon, you're either very well off or you have a serious spending problem (or both).

The rewards categories are pretty much the same ones that every other card company has.  Currently the choices are groceries, gas, restaurants, clothing, and rideshare/public transit.  If you're like me, you probably already have some cards with elevated rewards on most or all of these categories.  However, if you're willing to do a little extra work, the PayPal debit card can help you elevate some of those categories.

In my case, two of my biggest categories are groceries and restaurants.  To cover those, I have two cards:

1. The AAA Daily Advantage, which pays 5% on groceries and 3% on gas, with an annual cap of $500 in rewards on those two categories combined.
2. The Chase Freedom Unlimited, which pays 3% on restaurants.

My main issue with this setup is the annual cap on the AAA card.  If applied only to groceries, that $500 rewards cap comes to $10,000 per year in spend, and I know for a fact that I average a bit more than that on groceries and gas combined.  This past year, I correctly forecasted that I would hit that limit and drop back down to 1% on that card in October, which leaves me with a few thousand dollars of grocery spend without elevated rewards.  Of course, I can just put it on my flat 2% catch-all card, but where's the fun in that?  With the PayPal Debit Card, I have something to fill in that blank couple of months and continue to get 5% on groceries.  And after the new year, when my rewards counter reset on the AAA card, switched the PayPal Debit to restaurants and am getting 5% there instead.

The points redemption for your cash-back is pretty simple.  Of course, they offer the option to "shop with points" and similar, but you can also just opt for plain-old cash back.  You request the redemption through PayPal app and it gets deposited to your PayPal deposit account.  It seems that you can redeem points as soon as they hit your account, which is nice.  

One "gotcha" that I discovered early in using this card was the method of funding your balance account.  I initially funded it from my linked bank account, which just uses ACH transactions.  That works fine, obviously, but it generally takes at least a couple of days to go through.  I was thrown off because the first time I did that, it was credited more or less immediately.  But that didn't happen the next time, so I guess that must just be an initial funding thing.  So instead, I took their recommendation to link another debit card to my balance account.  I actually used the debit card for the same checking account at my credit union that I had linked, so the money comes from the same place.  The difference is that the debit card transactions clear almost immediately.  I tested that in grocery store one day, when I literally added funds to my PayPal account while I was standing in line and then spent them a couple of minutes later.  It worked just fine.

Of course, manually reloading your balance account is tedious and annoying, so who wants to do that?  That's why PayPal also has auto-reload features.  I have two of these turned on: 

1. An automatic timed transfer.  The amount and time frame are configurable, within some parameters.  I do a token $25 every Monday.
2. Reload when your balance drops below a given threshold.  You can set the threshold wherever you want, but the reload amount has to be at least as large as the threshold amount.  I have both my threshold and reload amount set at $100.

As far as the card loading, I have two goals.  First, I want to have enough money in my account to cover anything I would reasonably buy with it, but no more.  Second, I want to have 12 reloads per month.  Why?  Because I can use them to get extra rewards, of course!  I tested it and discovered that the PayPal balance account reloads count for the rewards program I'm enrolled with at my credit union.  The program gives you an elevated interest rate on your savings account, currently 5% on the first $10,000 (compared to the normal 0.03%), provided you meet certain criteria.  Those include direct deposit, e-statements, and at least 12 debit card transactions on your linked checking account.  So by manually triggering a few extra transfers each month, I'm able to unlock an extra $500 in interest.  Not bad.

It's been about 3 months and so far I'm pretty happy with the PayPal debit card.  Even though it's not a credit card, it fits nicely into my rewards care lineup.  It's easy to use and the category picking isn't too annoying.  I'm definitely going to keep it around.

It's time for the obligatory annual Christmas Mission post!

This year it was a grimdark Christmas, because the mission theme was Warhammer 40,000.  Well, sort of - the mission was another Murdle, but this time set at a Warhammer tournament.  The best player has been found dead and it was my son's job to figure out who did it, how, and why.  The suspects included the game store owner, a delusional player, an overly serious cosplayer, and someone who is totally not a Tyranid in a human suit.

The format was the same as usual.  I printed out an introduction to put in the Christmas tree and hid the clues in various places around the house, each with an encoded message leading to the next.  I toned the codes down a little bit this year.  Last year, he got a little frustrated with some of them, which makes the whole thing less fun than it should be.

For some of them, I stayed with what we did last year and used the revolutionary-era style decoder disk that we got when we went to Gettysburg a few years ago.  It's just a little disk with a rotating center and the alphabet written on both parts, so you just turn it to two corresponding values to get a simple substitution cypher.  Nothing fancy.

For some of the other clues, I got a little creative-ish and introduced him to the concept of typing things out on a non-smart phone.  You know, the good old "code" of typing out numbers on your 12-key phone to spell words.  Thus we got codes like "7 777 444 66 8 33 777".  I did have to add the spaces between letters because otherwise it's ambiguous whether, for example, "7777" is supposed to be "S", "PR", "QQ" (unlikely), or "RP".  I suppose I could have made him figure it out, but again, I didn't want to turn it into an ordeal and suck all the fun out of it.

To go with the "phone" theme, I formatted some of the clues in the for of a text conversation.  Again, nothing fancy - just a couple of back-and-forth messages each.  Just enough to add a little flavor.  

As we did last year, my wife and I teamed up on it.  We came up with the plot together.  She wrote the puzzle and came up with the clues for it.  I did the codes and distributed the clues.  All in all, it worked out pretty well and our son was happy enough with it.

Here's a PDF of the full mission, if you're interested.  I always break it up into multiple pages so he can switch back and forth, and cut up the clues into partial sheets.  So while it might be weird in digital form, it works in analog.

And while I'm at it, here's the little Python script I wrote to encode the clues for me.  And by "wrote", I mean I let the Copilot plugin for Vim write it.  Or at least it wrote the functions that do all the actual work.  And I didn't really even need to prompt it - the autocomplete feature pretty much just generated it all automatically.  Nice!

As promised in my last post, this is my review of the AtGames Legends Ultimate (ALU) cabinet.  This is based on my setup experience plus about two and a half months of actually using the cabinet.

Assembly and setup

Setting up the cabinet was a relatively painless experience.  The assembly in particular was fairly easy.  The cabinet comes in one box and the only tools required are screwdrivers.  All you really need to do is assemble the base, which is essentially an empty box.  The top of the cabinet, which contains the monitor and all the electronics,  comes pre-assembled, as does the control panel.  So the assembly process is essentially:

1. Put together the box for the base.
2. Put the monitor box on top of that.
3. Put the control panel on top of the base as well.
4. Plug everything in.
5. Screw everything down.

That's it.  There really wasn't much to it.  This was simpler than most pieces of furniture I've assembled.

The more annoying part was the software setup.  This wasn't difficult, but it involved connecting the cabinet to my WiFi and creating an account with AtGames, both of which are awkward without having an actual keyboard to work with.  The account signup was also a little weird in that I initially wasn't sure that it actually worked.  It did, so I think it was just a UI issue, but it was still a bit strange.  But for the most part, it was no big deal - just going through the setup wizard.

One thing that's worth noting is that the Legends Ultimate doesn't actually take up as much room as you might think.  I can stand at the controls, stick my arm out, and reach the back of the cabinet.  Since it's using a modern LCD display, rather than a vintage CRT, it's fairly compact.  That means it can be tucked into a nook or corner with relative ease and not end up dominating an entire room.  

Navigation and UI

The ALU has a...quirky UI.  I assume that the reason for this is so that they can re-use it across products.  While the ALU has a trackball and spinners in addition to the joystick and buttons, the ALU Mini (a smaller, single-player version of the ALU) does not.  So the UI is designed to be used with just the joystick and buttons.

The UI itself looks nice enough, and has configurable background colors and music.  The navigation is odd, though.  It uses a two-level carousel model.  The main display area has a carousel of games/options that you move through to the left or right using the joystick.  You can "zoom out" (with the Z button) to a text-based carousel that lets you scroll horizontally through the alphabet and then vertically between the available options for each letter.  This part is not super intuitive, but it's reasonable and it works.

Below the main carousel is a menu bar that lets you navigate the various sections of the UI.  This includes things like the built-in games section, the ArcadeNet section, the settings section, etc.  You use up and down to switch between the main carousel and menu bar.  The menu bar also has sub-menus that are accessed by pressing the Y button on the appropriate item.  To get back, you have to go back to that same item in the sub-menu and press Y again.  It's not that bad once you get used to it, but it's definitely a weird and unintuitive user experience.

Personally, I would have loved to see AtGames leverage the trackball to allow a more traditional point-and-click type of interface.  Maybe you could even facilitate scrolling with the spinners, who knows?  It's just kind of tedious to have to scroll through all the options every time.

Built-in games

AtGames advertises the Legends Ultimate as coming with 300 games.  However, as with any collection of 300 games, not all of them are good.  In fact, in this case there are some that you would just never want to play, like most of the Atari 2600 games.  (If you're too young to remember it, the Atari 2600 wasn't exactly great the first time around.  It was better than nothing, but it couldn't hold a candle to the arcade games of the time.)  And of course there are also plenty of arcade games in the mix that are stinkers.

And I should also mention that the built-in game selection contains a few duplicates.  By that, I mean it has both the arcade version and the Atari 2600 version of some games.  Which, of course, is pointless, because if you have the arcade version, why in God's name would you ever want to play the Atari 2600 version?  So the "300 games" claim is true, but a little misleading.

It's also worth noting that the game selection seems to vary.  It's not clear to me if that's due to release date or if the Sam's Club version just has different games.  But I've seen several variations of game lists, and I know that my unit did not include some of the games listed in some of them.  It did include all of the games that were shown on the cabinet, though.  It's just not clear how much you can count on any specific list.

The game selection - actually not bad

That said, it's not a bad selection.  There are a handful of "big name" classics that I was familiar with, including Centipede, Asteroids, Missile Command, Elevator Action, and Burger Time (one of my favorites).  But I've also discovered a number of games in the mix that I'd never heard of, but which are actually pretty decent (Boogie Wings springs to mind).  It takes a while to explore them, and I haven't even gotten to all of them, but it's a decent variety and there are definitely some fun games in there.  I'd guesstimate that most people can probably find at least a dozen games they like, probably more if you're adventurous.

I also found several games games for platforms other than the Atari 2600 collection.  For instance, there were a handful of NES games including R.C. Pro-Am and Battletoads.  There were also a few that appeared to be for the NeoGeo or possibly Sega Genesis  There doesn't appear to be any pattern to the choices, at least that I could see.  I assume it's just "what was affordable to license".  

Incidentally, the "extra" controls are a nice addition for some games.  It's very cool to be able to play Missile Command with an actual trackball.  Likewise, playing Tempest with the spinner is a nice touch.  And, of course, I mentioned the pinball buttons in the last post.

Speaking of which, my version of the ALU came with four built-in pinball games.  They're all from the "Natural History" series, which is apparently an AtGames original.  I'll have more to say about pinball below, but these are actually quite good.  The only problem is that they don't always run.  Sometimes the work fine, and sometimes they crash, trigger a "no input" screen, and eventually restart the unit.  Apparently that is a known issue, or was at one point - I seem to recall mention of it in some firmware release notes, but it still happens.  I find this very disappointing.

ArcadeNet service

In addition to the built-in games, AtGames has their ArcadeNet service, which allows you to download additional games.  Their website claims that there is both a free and paid tier for this service.  I got a 2-month free trial with the ALU, which recently expired, so I've now seen both.

That said, I'm not really sure what they meant by a "free" tier as described on their webpage.  From what I can tell, that just means you can browse the available titles.  It doesn't seem like you can actually play anything with it.  So maybe that page is just out of date.  (Note: Out-of-date web pages seems to be a pattern for AtGames.)

It's worth noting that the 300 games that come with the Legends Ultimate seems to account for nearly all the games in their library.  When I browse the ArcadeNet games from my ALU, nearly everything is pinball.  There's only a handful of other games available, none of which looked interesting.  And while the ArcadeNet page does have a list of games on it, not all of them seem to be available.  I browsed through some of them and found several (e.g. Metal Slug) that were not preinstalled on my ALU and were not listed for download in the ArcadeNet UI.  So apparently that list is out of date.  (See what I mean about a pattern?)

That said, I actually have downloaded a number of pinball tables from ArcadeNet.  They appear to have most of the tables from their "pinball packs" on there, and I've found them all to be very good.  As I mentioned in the last post, my unit came with the side-mounted pinball buttons (which you wouldn't think makes much difference, but it really does) and I've really been enjoying them.  I particularly like the Zaccaria tables, as they have a nice background ambiance and have some "updated" versions of classic tables with some more modern features.  Some of the tables are a little slow to load, and slow to get back to the menu when you exit, but the play experience is very good.  (Note: if you have the pinball buttons, you'll want to change the "pro mode" setting to "side" to make them work as expected.)  I've occasionally had some slowdowns or stuttering on some tables, but that's pretty rare.  For the most part, they seem to run very smoothly once they're loaded.

However, I did not resubscribe to ArcadeNet when my free trial expired.  While I like the pinball tables, and having the leaderboard integration is cool, the price of $20/month seems high to me given what you get.  And while this page advertises "6 months for $60", which seems more reasonable, the actual purchase page says it's $100 for 6 months or $180 for a year.  (There's that out-of-date info again.)  That comes to $15/month, which is better, but it still seems high.  When you consider that they offer "pinball packs" for $30 or $50 that include between about 4 and 25 tables, the math just doesn't work.  So instead of resubscribing, I just spent $50 on the first Zaccaria pinball pack, which included 26 tables, which should hold me for a while.

Bring Your Own Games

One of the really nice things about the Legends Ultimate is that you're not limited to the AtGames offerings.  They have a "BYOG" feature to "Bring Your Own Games".  There are actually three variations on this, of varying usefulness.  Let's start with the best first.

BYOG - Loading UCE files

This is a fantastic feature.  As mentioned in the last post, the ALU has a couple of USB ports.  You can use these to access external games.  Turns out it's really easy.  All you have to do is get some games packaged in UCE format, load them on a FAT32 formatted flash drive, and stick it in the ALU.  It will pick up the drive and add a "BYOG" item to the system menu where you can access them.  (You might have to run their AddonX utility on it first, I'm not actually sure.)  They don't get all of the bells and whistles that are supported for the built-in games, but they support enough and work just fine.

I don't really know much about what the "UCE format" actually is.  From what I can gather, it seems to be a folder containing various metadata such as images for the UI, the game ROM, and possibly a the MAME core needed to play it.

Much of the documentation I found around this was focused on installing CoinOpsX on the ALU.  CoinOpsX is another MAME front-end for managing and playing your games.  Apparently it used to be available for installation on the ALU from AtGames online store, but at some point they removed it and broke compatibility.  However, it turns out that you don't actually need CoinOpsX to run external games.  It may offer a better UI - I haven't used it, so I can't say - but it is not required, so no need to worry if you can't figure out how to install it.

On-the-go (OTG) mode

The next best option for playing your own games on the ALU is the "on-the-go" mode.  This is essentially just plugging a PC into the ALU.  You just need an HDMI cable for A/V and a USB cable for the controls.  Your PC will detect the control panel as a joystick of some type and the screen as another monitor.

The nice part about this is that it's easy to use and extremely flexible.  Since the ALU effectively becomes a monitor and a controller, you can play pretty much any game your PC can run.  You may have to go into the menu to switch to OTG mode, but it's a pretty simple process.

The less nice part is the controller setup, which I still have not figured out.  To be fair, I haven't put much time into it, but the point is that Windows didn't configure the control deck as transparently as I would have liked.  The nice part is that it picked up the spinners and trackball.  However, the button and joystick mapping didn't work as I'd have hoped.  It turns out that Windows detected the joystick not as the main joystick, but as a POV hat, which is...less than helpful.

You can apparently fix this with a tool called X360CE, which stands for Xbox 360 Controller Emulator.  This allows you to make your joystick mimic an Xbox 360 controller, which nearly any modern game can handle.  However, I have not yet managed to make this work.

Legends Link streaming

The last option is their streaming solution, which was apparently called Legends Link.  I say "was" because this option apparently no longer exists.  However, they have not removed it from their website.  (Again with not keeping things updated.)  Instead, they've left the page with a broken link to the installer and this blatantly broken info box:

That's right, for the low, low price of "$ monthly", you too can have zero hours of streaming and zero persistent storage!  What a deal!

For what it's worth, I was able to find a version of the Legends Link installer on archive.org.  I tried it out and, as you'd expect, it just flat-out doesn't work.  I put in my info, clicked the "connect", button, and waited forever while it tried in vain to connect to the server.  After a few tried, I gave up.  It's a joke that they still have this on their website and in their marketing material.

Bottom line

Pros

• Cool cabinet with relatively low profile that's very easy to assemble
• Good controls, including specialty controls (trackball, spinner, pinball buttons)
• Reasonable price point (especially from Sam's Club)
• Decent built-in game selection
• Easy to expand with additional games
• Really good selection of pinball games available at reasonable prices

Cons

• The AtGames website is an unholy mess of bad information
• Boot-up is slow
• Game loading/unloading is sometimes slow - usually for pinball (most arcade games are fine)
• The subscription service is a bit overpriced for what it offers
• The main navigation UI is serviceable, but a little clunky

Recommendation

Overall, I'm quite happy with my ALU.  It's not perfect, but it offers a good gaming experience, a decent game selection, and enough expandability to fill in the holes.  I would definitely recommend it.  If you have the time, money, and inclination, I'm sure you could easily build a custom MAME cabinet that offers a superior experience.  But if you're looking for a "product" rather than a "project", I think the Legends Ultimate is a good solution.

This year, I got my wife a bigger-than-usual gift for Mother's Day.  It was a vintage topaz ring that matched some earrings I'd gotten her in Mexico several years ago.  It's in a similar style to her engagement ring.

In the spirit of reciprocation, she wanted to get me something nice for Father's Day.  So I suggested a couple of things and let her choose.  She picked the cooler of the options - an AtGames Legends Ultimate Arcade cabinet.

I'd been eyeing arcade cabinets for a while.  Of course, I'd considered building a custom MAME cabinet myself, but to be honest, I didn't really want a construction project, just the end result.  I'd also looked at the possibility of just buying a cabinet, but they tend to be a little pricey.  For instance, I'd seen some custom cabinet builders selling just the cabinets (not electronics) for around $1,000.  To be fair, they were very nice cabinets, but that seemed a little much.  Also, I'm not particularly interested in putting together just the electronics either, so it would still be a little bit of a project.  So I wanted to go with something pre-built.

One option that I originally considered was the Arcade 1Up machines.  I'd seen these in the local Walmart and they actually looked pretty nice.  The design was very authentic to old-school arcade machines and they were very reasonably priced, with some of the units being as low as $300.  However, they also aren't full-size, so to be able to play the games standing up, you need to either build or buy a riser for another $60.  They also come with a limited selection of games, usually a dozen or less.  And even if you can mod them to add more, the controls are really only designed for the built-in games, so you're limited in what you can do.

The Legends Ultimate does not have such limitations.  My introduction to this cabinet was actually playing an older version of it at the Strong National Museum of Play.  They have one in the retro arcade that's free to play, and it seemed quite nice.  It had several classics that I enjoy (including Burger Time and Elevator Action) and the controls were very good and flexible enough for a variety of games.

(Correction: After going back and looking closer, it turns out the unit at the museum wasn't from AtGames.  The Strong actually had the Chicago Gaming Company Arcade Legends cabinet.  That system has been discontinued, but it was very similar to the ones produced by AtGames.  When I Googled it, I just put in "arcade legends" and the AtGames website was the top hit, hence my confusion.)

For the record, if you're considering this cabinet, I would recommend getting it from Sam's Club, which is what we did.  When I first looked it up, the list price was around $550.  However, since then it has gone up to $900 on their website.  But when my wife ordered it, Sam's Club was still offering it for $550.  And it seems AtGames has a special deal with Sam's Club to include some extras in their version.  So I got 2 free months of their  premium ArcadeNet service as well as the pinball button attachments that you can see on the side of the cabinet.  I've been enjoying those more than I thought I would.

I'll do a separate post with a review and break-down of my experiences with the Legends Ultimate, but so far I'm enjoying it.  It's got a decent selection of built-in games (they advertise 300 games, which is...technically true), good controls (including a trackball, if you want to play Centipede, and spinners for...I don't know what), and a fairly decent selection UI experience.  It's also expandible, with a very subtle expansion panel in that metal strip between the controllers and the screen.  In fact, you can see that I have a flash drive plugged into that panel.  They have a very nice BYOG (Bring Your Own Games) feature which allows you to load up a drive with games in UCE format, plug it in, and they just show up.

So I'm happy.  I've got a nice selection of vintage arcade games and a cabinet that gives me an actual authentic arcade play experience.  And, while it may not be an authentic design, I think it actually looks pretty cool.  And that counts for something.