Good morning!
I think I have a new project and really need to stop looking at Craigslist. Spotted an ad for a pinball machine and arcade game. The pinball is a Williams Little Chief (1975) and the arcade game was a Mr.Do (1983). Doing some digging around it turns out that the Mr.Do was a converted Moon Cresta (1980) by Gremlin/Sega Industries. The cabinet was in surprisingly good condition and had spent its last 15 years in someones heated basement.
After doing some research it looks like the Moon Cresta was converted to a Mr.Do around 1983, I found the original paperwork and manuals at the bottom of the cabinet!
Doing cleanup the last week I resprayed the black sections which were faded, polished the plexiglass window, replaced the cash door lock, made a replacement monitor bezel, swapped out the broken joystick, repaired the dead marquee lamp and did some general cleanup. One surprise was that the marquee was not very bright after fixing the lamp and much to my delight found that the "Mr. Do." marquee was actually a decal over the original "Moon Cresta" marquee which was mint!
At this point I decided to keep the machine and convert it back to a Moon Cresta unit as they seem somewhat rare.
The Mr. Do looks like a Universal Industries kit (one the of the first arcade conversions! but not JAMMA) and works fine and has a pile of paperwork with it.
I'm going to sell off the Mr. Do PCB and paperwork, pick up a 60 in 1 JAMMA board with just Moon Cresta enabled, get a new control panel overlay (available!) and see if I can get a monitor bezel printed up as the old one is beat but the side pieces are mint. I'm still on the fence about the installed joystick. The Gremlin units had only buttons, the Japan units had joysticks.
The pinball I'm going to try and flip and recoup the cash back which would be nice. I'd keep it but room is tight in the workshop..
Gary