| Arcade Collecting > Restorations & repair |
| X-men 4-player cabinet Restoration/Conversion |
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| opt2not:
Restoration complete! How it looks now: ============================= Won this in an auction for cheap recently, and I'm planning on restoring, it but I'm not really sure what I want to do with it yet and converting this to an X-men. One of the ideas is to follow Mike A's lead and make it a multi-PCB cabinet for 4-player games. I already have a Simpsons, X-men, and Bucky O' Hare...and one of these days I'll pick up a TMNT. Another idea is just to restore it, but the caveat is that this wasn't originally a Simpsons. Malenko has pointed out to me that this was originally a TMNT machine defined by the single speaker grill. The first order of business is (after picking it up from the auction house) to get this cleaned-up, missing pieces sourced, monitor tuned etc. After the heavy workload is done, I'll decide what to do with it. The plan is to get this fixed up and working before my birthday, mid-December so I can have it ready for a party we're throwing. It'll be aggressive but I'm sure I can get it at least playable, if not fully arted up. Details and images to follow... stay tuned. |
| opt2not:
During my lunch break I went over to the Auction house to pick up the cabinet. 3 warehouses filled with stock of classic 80's and 90's cabinets. Newer LCD-based games, Redemption machines, pinball, jukes...kiddy rides... it's just packed! These will all clear out of here in the next week or so, and I'm told they have some sort of deal with Namco that ends up dumping off a lot of cabinets on their doorstep. Just this last auction they sold 19 Time Crisis 3 cabinets, going for around $300 each. One bidder ended up buying 16 of those 19!! I don't know what you'd do with that many Time Crisis 3's. Anyway, the cabinet is in definite need of repair, but it's not too bad. The one corner on the bottom right side is completely broken off, and the entire base is a bit chipped up all around the bottom. But these issues are easily repaired. The current side art is so ghetto. It's decals of Simpsons art, taped with packing tape to the badly painted sides. I'll be stripping this cabinet down to the wood and fill and repainting for sure. I thought the cabinet didn't have the glass, but I was wrong, it was sitting inside at the bottom. I'll show that later since it's got a lot of gunk on it. But also, sitting at the bottom were 2x Simpsons PCB's!! I don't know if they work yet, I'll test them tonight, but still this is a great score! There is also a bunch of other parts just sitting in the cabinet, including some coin reject buttons. I'll sort through it all and post my finds. I didn't have a lot of time during lunch to really take a deep dive into it. More to come... |
| opt2not:
Tested the PCB's, and I'm happy to report one of them is working, while the other has major display issues. Board 1 RAM/ROM test checks out fine. Good video. Good audio. This board is 100%! Board 2 RAM/ROM test checks out fine. But with lines being drawn onscreen. Sprite drawing issues across the board. Audio is good. So having 1 working board from this cabinet is still a really good scoop. I can put the faulty board on the workbench and see about it later on, but for now I got a cabinet to work on. |
| opt2not:
Did some cabinet investigations and a bit of clean-up. The base of the cabinet was pretty filthy, but I cleaned and vacuumed up all the debris and trash that was left at the bottom. Aside from the 2 boards and the monitor glass, this is what was sitting at the bottom of the cabinet: Bunch of random cabinet bits and tokens! Still a little grimey, looks like someone spilled soda in this cabinet at some point, but it's a lot more manageable than before. I'm going to put a respirator on and give the base a run with my mouse sander: The power supply block will probably need to be rebuilt. The fuse holders are damaged and breaking off, the switching power supply looks to have been pried open at the corner -- i don't trust it -- but the transformer and perhaps the EMI filter is salvageable. Those things rarely go bad: I've built these things before, they're not difficult at all: Someone did a shoddy job at splicing the power cord to make it extend longer, this one's an easy fix: Here's an example of how the side art was applied: Literally just print-outs held on by packing tape! I'm going to strip the sides down to the bare wood with citristrip, fill any blemishes and sand and paint. The control panel. 2 weird pieces of plexi, shoddily screwed onto the CP top (also in the pic is the yellowed Simpsons marquee): I can't stand plexi on CP's, for prolonged play your hands get sweaty and stick to the plexi. I rather put that tough textured polylaminate CP material on it than have plexi installed. Yup, soda or death was spilled onto this thing: So the CP top is really rough. There's a crack down the middle, held together by that horizontal piece of wood. A few random holes for no good reason, and the back edge doesn't have a clean angle like it should. Also one of the corners is falling apart! The box it's on is still good. No damage from what I can tell, but I'm going to have to re-cut a new CP top. I've got some experience working reproducing this CP, from working on El Diablo Mechanico, so it should be a trivial task (I re-cut and wired this panel in a weekend): The coin doors were vultured pretty badly. I'll show that in my next post, along with the beginnings of stripping this bad boy down. I've got just under a month to get this cleaned up and playable, it's going to be an aggressive schedule... |
| Arroyo:
Jesus man, you've been on a tear in the last 24 hours, and is that last post from 2:30am I see? Did someone just buy a house and finally have the space to unleash years worth of pent up Arcade itches....hhmmmm? |
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