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i was talkin to the guy who works at the arcade at the mall and i asked him about this other DDR EXTREME cabinate i saw around there awhile ago.... he said they got rid of it because it was illegal.. i was like "how so?" and he said that someone put a PS2 inside an arcade cabanate and sold it to them....

have you ever heard of this happneing before?

Yes. Namco bought a bunch of these and almost immediately recalled them (before I even had a chance to go find one). Apparently someone hacked up DDR Extreme USA CS to take coins, threw it in stripped DDR cabinets or pump cabinets with a couple of cheap eBay special metal pads and tried to sell it as an arcade. That would be an unlicensed (and therefore illegal) use of the USA Extreme CS software. The pads apparently had a life expectancy of a few hours in an arcade environment as well.

Apparently you could also play the 40min (or whatever) nonstop on a single credit too. I wanted to go do that just for grins :)

yea this was a namco arcade.. but they never actually hooked it up.. they just had the cabinate in the back of the arcade... i didnt see any pads...

By all accounts I read, you didn't miss much. Although it should be noted that it was probably no more illegal than about 95% of DDR machines in this country. The big difference being that the Extreme USA machines were produced illegally whereas all these imported Japanese and Korean machines are not licensed for this country and most are running bootlegged software anyway.

Here's a link to a discussion about Extreme USA on DDR Freak:
http://www.ddrfreak.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=101032

...although it looks like the picture links are broken at this point.

I think basically Namco got duped and taken for a ride.

I got to play on these while they lasted... it was so obviously the PS2 Extreme. The machine just looked jank, I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did. Now the one in Greenwood Park Mall sits dead next to the 'real' DDR machine, serving a reminder to the public - Don't get ripped off.

does anyone know who sold all these to namco?

YEP I DONT KNOW WHAT THIS IS ABOUT HAHAHAHAHAHa