About

kiban.alamone.net is a non-commercial price reference for the used-market prices of arcade game circuit boards (PCBs).

It gathers price data points from public auction and shop listings over time, so collectors can see what a given board has actually been bought and sold for — rather than relying on memory or a single asking price.

Where the data comes from

Nearly every data point originates from a publicly visible listing — a Japanese auction marketplace (Yahoo Auctions), specialist arcade-PCB shops, and general used-goods retailers.

We also draw on the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine), which lets us recover historical asking prices from pages that have since changed.

A small share of data points is entered by hand from other verifiable records: in-store price tags, and sales contributed by community members — including some private sales shared with us. Every data point carries its source, so hand-entered records are always identifiable as such.

Collection is deliberately conservative and ToS-respecting:

• We honor each site's robots.txt and terms.
• We do not scrape sites that disallow it, are login-walled, or use anti-bot protection. Data from those (e.g. eBay sold prices) is only ever added by hand.
• Requests are low-rate, identify themselves, and only read listing text — title, price, date.

How prices are read

Each listing is classified so different kinds of price aren't conflated:

• Asking vs. sold — shop list prices and auction Buy-It-Now are “asking”; only realized/closing prices count as “sold.” Live auction bids are excluded.
• Condition (working / untested / junk / damaged) and authenticity (original / copy / bootleg / conversion) are read from the listing text — only disclosed bootlegs/conversions can be detected.
• Region (Japan / export / USA / …) and ROM-only kits are flagged, and premium inclusions (system motherboard, control panel, shield case, original artwork) are tagged so a bundled board isn't compared against a bare one.

Coverage & caveats

• The game catalog is built from the MAME arcade set and extended by hand — for boards MAME doesn't cover (e.g. Taito Type X, Namco System 246/256) and, for the high-score reference, for modern PC-based arcade platforms such as exA-Arcadia and NESiCAxLive. Price tracking centers on PCBs, so those modern-platform titles are cataloged mainly for their high scores and reference details — a page simply omits the price section when there is no board market to track.
• Prices are stored in their original currency; other currencies shown on the site are converted at current rates for convenience, not the historical rate of sale.
• This site is run by one person, gathering data as best I can — asking prices are not guarantees of value, and classification from text is imperfect. Treat it as a guide, not an appraisal.

Beyond prices

The site is growing into a broader reference for keeping this hardware alive: a directory of ROM hacks & mods with author attribution, a PCB repair-services directory matched to each board's era, reproduction-chip availability on game pages, a system-motherboard catalog, and per-title high-score records with a scorer directory (see below).

High scores: sources, permissions, and concept

The high-score section mirrors the STG Hall of Records (maintained by Plasmo), used with his explicit permission and credited on every score table. Each record carries its original citation — Gamest, Arcadia, Micom BASIC, JHA, or a linked post/video — because these records belong to the scorers and to the publications that tabulated them; we aggregate and cite, we do not adjudicate. No data is taken from other aggregation sites (such as high-scorer.net) — we regard those as valuable independent works and would only ever mirror one with its author's blessing.

The concept is not a replacement for any existing tabulation: it is a per-title reorganization of already-published records (current record + full history per category), integrated with the things this site already tracks — board prices, repair options, hardware. The scorer registry links published score names to scorer pages using publicly documented information only; if you are a scorer and want something corrected or removed, contact us and we will fix it.

Contribute

Spot a board we don't track? Use the request-a-game form. Have a sale we missed? The price-submission form takes sold prices with evidence. Corrections are always welcome.

Contact: @alamone on X · alamone@gmail.com