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Break it down into 4 parts. P1 side, P2 side, marquee, and cabinet. The cabinet is on wheels, and rolls right up a ramp!



If you strap the machine down inside the truck, I'd guess the likelihood of something breaking is pretty slim. Drum Mania should also disassemble and roll right up the ramp.

Ayup. Liftgate is certainly handy...but not necessary. As long as you get them strapped into the truck well (get yourself some ratchet straps) and pad them with furniture blankets, you should be fine. It's also not a terrible idea to secure or remove the stuff inside the cabinets.

You don't NEED a lift gate, but it makes things a hell of a lot easier. It's well worth the extra $70 or whatever you'll spend to get it.

If you have a lift gate, you really don't need much else aside from blankets and tie-downs. The blankets are optional but highly recommended as you're almost sure to ding things up pretty badly without them. The tie-downs are required to secure the machines in the back of the truck.

I have a boatload of tie-downs and blankets you can borrow if you need them and also a couple hand trucks (traditional with pneumatic tires as well as an appliance truck).

You will absolutely want to check the inside of the cabinet for anything loose and properly secure anything you may find as such, especially if you're taking them up/down a ramp on a hand truck. Especially check that the monitor is securely bolted in place. This is not quite as big of a deal if you have a lift gate at your disposal, but it's still recommended. You might as well go ahead and pull the system unit out or at least eject the CD to prevent damage since it's not too hard to do.

I've moved most of my games at least twice and have never really broken anything aside from very minor cosmetic damage. I can't say quite the same for all the freight companies I've been exposed to... Just go slow, and be careful.

Thank you all for the advice!

The time-table for getting my shit out is dependent on my house hunting but I expect to be out around Q4 2015 or Q1 2016 (probably the latter). I'll take you up, MonMotha, on that offer to borrow some blankets / ratchet straps when the time comes.

How much of a pain is it to bolt down the monitor on a DDR cabinet? If there's one point of failure I'm worried about on that machine it's the monitor since it's probably near death and I fear that moving the cabinet will somehow result in the monitor dying.

Unless it's been unbolted and improperly re-installed or otherwise modified, they ship from the factory quite well secured in the Japanese cabinets. The Korean ones are usually at least sufficient for transport, too.

Oddly enough, I'll be doing this exact thing here shortly. Getting the pump cabinet into my apartment was actually easier than expected and if anything the 160 lb hdtv I have is going to be far harder by comparison.

The fluorescent lights that go behind my marquee had their wires that connect the bulbs to the cabinet cut in half when the shipping company initially transported my cabinet to me so I've never had working marquee lights. The wires are still physically present, just cut in half. Is there any way to reattach these wires together?

It's not the biggest deal in the world, but I'm curious to see if this is a fixable problem.

It's not the most elegant solution, but if there's enough slack, you could strip the ends and wire nut them back together.

EDIT: In case that wasn't clear, wire nut each wire back together individually, not all of the wires in to one massive bunch. That would be...bad...and the kind of bullshit hack job that I found in the IIDX cabinet I bought from the Ft. Wayne Putt-Putt. I wish that was a joke, but it's not. Fortunately, in that case, at least they weren't power wires. :/

Oh shit, I've always wondered what those little thingies were... Thanks! Clearly I don't know shit when it comes to this type of stuff.

There should be enough slack, I'll take a closer look tonight.

Welp, I'm 2 months late but I did snap a pic of one of the wires (apologies for the focus) and saw this weird little metal nub at the end of one of my wires:




Any idea what this is for?

Looks like that wire has come out of a connector. That should be inside one of those plastic connectors that you would then snap together. You said before that the wires leading up to the marquee got cut. If I had to guess, they started to take the marquee off and that wire came out of the connector when they pulled on it. Then they cut the rest.

The connector with the cut wires is probably still mated together. I'm going to guess it has 2 or 3 wires in it on the marquee side. It probably has one fewer wires on the cabinet side (the side that got cut). This is probably that missing wire. That's just a guess though. I'd want to look at it or see more (better) pictures if you want a proper diagnosis and before you go shoving wires in places they might not belong.

If they really did just cut your marquee light wires, I'm a little concerned about where the loose ends (on the cabinet side) are. Those would have full 120V house current on them to power the marquee lamp. They definitely shouldn't touch each other or anything else if their bare ends are just hanging out inside the cabinet somewhere.

Did the wires for the lights and speakers in the marquee get cut, too?

The lights and speakers were surprisingly very much intact and working right "out of the box" so to speak. I want to say they were the only part of the machine that wasn't horribly mangled in some fashion when it arrived.

You do bring up a good point, when MonMotha and I were dicking around my machine I found the cabinet-side of one of the cut wires and as I was pulling it out it grazed something metal inside the cabinet (I'm guessing a metal bracket) and sparks shot out everywhere. Looking back I probably could have seriously injured myself or bricked something (like the monitor!) in my machine. I should probably try to find the other end of those wires!

Gonna use this thread for a quick question: would a machine be able to roll up/down a 2'2" ramp? Pads excluded.

I don't think so. If you want to use a standard box truck ramp, you have to tilt the cabinet back on a hand truck and use that. Somebody on both sides is recommended to balance it. You want a spotter, too.

A lift gate is recommended.

MonMotha wrote: I have a boatload of tie-downs and blankets you can borrow if you need them and also a couple hand trucks (traditional with pneumatic tires as well as an appliance truck).

I'm going to take you up on this, sir, when it's time for me to move my shit out which is going to be relatively soon. I'll look into getting a truck with a lift gate because I will be God damned if I need to ramp these games up and make pray that they don't fall off the ramp and kill someone.