Worth trying to restore?

[blueporing]

Hey guys,

I'm new here and new to the entire arcade cabinet world. I had stumbled across an arcade closing its doors and asked about buying their cabinets. I had an offer for 550 for a Street Fighter II Champion Edition cabinet which doesn't look like its in bad shape. I can see a bit of monitor discoloration and bleeding (according to the maintenance guy its just a matter of blown caps?) and a couple of buttons weren't making contact (i opened the cabinet up and played with the switch and the jabs came out) but these repairs seemed do-able. The unit had its original marquee, CP decal with a plexy on top, glass screen infront of the monitor, original SF2:CE Move list border for the monitor, and the coin door seemed operable/salvagable.

My questions are:
 is it worth the 550 (before 13% taxes...) venture? 
 Can I run BOTH the original JAMMA with a MAME netbook on the side? (I've been going through the FAQs and TUTs but all I can see is a "either/or" answer")

I'm a HUGE street fighter fan and i'd hate to regret letting these items pass by...

Thanks for all your help/advice!

[HaRuMaN]

$550 is too high, especially if the monitor needs capping. 

You can run other JAMMA boards in there, or you can run MAME on a PC with something like a Jpac.

[blueporing]

Thanks for the timely reply! I've been digging around for pricing to see if I can even get a cheaper one (I'm in Canada) and the prices are way higher everywhere else... Would making one from scratch and buying just the JAMMA board be cheaper? The JAMMA looked pretty clean inside and worked really well; and it was haggled down from 800. lol

[HaRuMaN]

Building one from scratch would probably cost a little more I would think.  See if you can get him to knock $50 off for the monitor repairs, heh.   

[blueporing]

lol the guy is really nice about showing me around the unit so i may just leave it as is or get him to show me how to replace them. What is the normal price point for cabinets like this? I think this was just a arcade kit put together and not the OEM cabinet. So there is a way for me to run both the JAMMA and MAME at the same time? Via hard switch or something? I was under the impression Jpac was just converting everything inside to be JUST mame.

[HaRuMaN]

lol the guy is really nice about showing me around the unit so i may just leave it as is or get him to show me how to replace them. But there is a way for me to run both the JAMMA and MAME at the same time? Via hard switch or something?

If you use a Jpac for MAME and get a JAMMA switcher, yes.

[blueporing]

whoop i shouldn't have edited my previous post.