Since the origianal discussions took place on several different threads, I thought I'd post the conclusion (I hope) on this new thread. People wanting to read the whole story can find parts of it at the following links:

http://www.pachitalk.com/phpBB2/view...ghlight=larlin
http://www.pachitalk.com/phpBB2/view...?p=15026#15026
http://www.pachitalk.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1314

Short story: A ebay seller (Larlin gaming) sold me a Bulldog they couldn't deliver because of a misunderstanding with their drop shipper (trademarkpoker.com / 5stardeal.com). Trademark stepped in and said they'd make everything right.

Dealing with trademark was a nightmare. What followed was 6 weeks of lots of promises that trademark failed to deliver on. The list is just tooooooooo long to get into here. Basically I was promised a pachislo would be shipped almost every day for 6 weeks, even being given a bogus tracking number one time.

It appears that the entire event has now come to a conclusion. They could never deliver the Bulldog. But they eventually did send me 2 machines - a Fire Express and a Neo Magic Pulsar.

My total cost was $200 delivered. So, if you figure a typical $65 shipping, it was like winning these machines in an eBay auction for a bid of $35 each.

They arrived today. The Fire Express was in good shape - but has pin-less locks for both the front door and reset. The Magic Pulsar didn't work out of the box. The coin diverted mechanism had come apart. Found the metal part attached to a speaker magnet. Reattached it to the spring, but the electromagnet wouldn't activate. Found a loose connector on the main CPU board. That fixed the problem. Also the door reset sensor was hanging loose and needed to be reattached.

It was a good thing I knew a little bit about pachislos. I can image if this happened to a newbie and after 6 weeks of frustration they received a machine that didn't work.