Sega F1 Exhaust Note arcade machine

This arcade game is a dual sitdown racer. Made by Sega in 1991. Still uses sprites (no 3D textures yet).

Gameplay

This game is not bad.. compared to current racing games it's simple (it still uses sprites and has no 3D graphics), but the game is already over 15 years old. There's only one circuit to race on unfortunately.
The music is great (it has stereo speakers in the seat behind your head).
Racing in a seat with a large screen in front of you is impressive.. You can choose between an automatic gearbox or shift at the steering wheel. And the difficulty level can be changed so it'll take quite a while until we finish first in a race ! So if you really want to master this game you'll have to practice a lot.

The most fun is in competing against other people.. that's what the game is made for and it does a good job.. although I got the impression sometimes the game cheats and in the last turn the person who was second all the time suddenly can take over and win..
If you look for a game to also enjoy playing alone then you better look for something more recent with more tracks/cars/options.

My game

You probably won't believe it, but we had this game in our kitchen !

This arcade games addiction becomes worse and worse.. I wouldn't have believed 4 years ago I would have a beast like this in our home, certainly not in our kitchen. And for those yelling 'divorce': my wife really wanted this game and said it had to go in the kitchen (as there wasn't any other room in our house left where it could fit) !

Don't get me started about getting this thing into our house. This was the worst experience we ever had with getting an arcade game into our house ! The game is huge !

The problem is our house is pretty small, especially the hallway. You've got to pass next to the stairs, and at the end is a doorway into which the head of a WPC pinball machine just passes when the door is removed from the frame. So now you know how small it is. Any game that is wider then this (even a few millimeters) will not fit into our house :-( Btw at the front door there are 3 small steps, to make things even more difficult (so forget it to roll something from the street into our house, I have to lift it to get in).

First I though this game would split up like other twin racers do. That would have been easy. At the last moment we heard it does not split. This is one wide cabinet with two screens in it !
OK, no problem.. In the worst case I could disassemble the game completely, as I've seen on this homepage, and assemble it back in my house, but that really would be the worst case scenario that I did not want to do..

so we bought the game, rented a truck to get it, and put it in storage somewhere else.. then I started to make the cabinet lighter and smaller. I removed the top dome, two monitors and the steering wheel assemblies. We measured and the game would probably fit..

OK, time to bring it to our home then. I borrow the van of a friend.. we try to load the game.. it doesn't fit !! The van is not high enough. Even sideways it doesn't fit. Aaaaargh!! At this moment I went nuts. I did not want to rent a large (expensive) truck again to move the game to my house, as it was only about 3 to 4 kilometers away. I also did not want to spend all the time it would take to disassemble the cabinet. We could borrow a trailer but that was going to take some time.. but.. the game had quite good wheels underneath it.. and it was only a few kilometers away.. one could walk the distance if he had to..

So yes.. with the help of the neighbour kid (hey if he wants to play the games he can help moving them :-) we rolled the game home. It took us almost an hour to get home. We passed some very busy crossings in Antwerp and some people looked weird at us. But in the end we made it. Home !

So that's it, we pushed the game into our house and rolled it to the back ? Not quite. The hallway was too small and the game got stuck in a doorway. In the end I even cut off one inch from the front of the game, cut a piece out from the door frame, and with a lot of effort (and a damaged door frame) it finally got in.

Worst of all: the game wasn't that much fun in the end :-( It's not bad and it's fun to race against someone else.. but racing on your own becomes boring after a while.. so after a few months we sold it the game and had to move it back through our narrow hallway.
You can be sure I've learned the disadvantage of having a narrow hallway and doorframe, and if someone offers me an arcade game that's not small enough, I pass on it.. no matter how much I'd love to have that game.. as getting it in our house is just too much effort and for some games impossible to do.