Well, those that say that building a MAME cabinet is just a gateway drug into the arcade hobby may be right. The desire to line my basement with arcade cabinets got the better of me this past week and I picked up my first real cabinet: a Popeye for $150 dollars. It was only 20 minutes away from my house which is really rare and it seems to be complete and working besides missing the keys for the coin door and back cover. However, it has certainly seen better days. I'll be restoring it sometime in the future, and I plan to give it the full treatment. It might be a while before I can really sink my teeth into it, but I'll chip away at it this year while I can. To start, I'll document everything I can see wrong with it.
Problem #1: I don't have the keys for the cabinet, and although the coin door is locked open, the back cover is locked shut. Since I don't have the time to tear into this thing for a while, I'm going to try and procure actual K6510 keys before I drill out the locks. I'd like keep this restore as authentic as possible, right down to the locks and keys.
#2: Marquee light not lighting, should be easy enough to fix once I can get inside it.
#3: Graphics in the game have lines going through them. While I was play testing it at the seller's house, this happened for a few seconds and went away, now it seems permanent. Level42 suggested reseating the roms and I'll try this once I can get inside.
#4: Side art is going to have to go and the sides are going to need to be sanded, patched with bondo, and repainted or revinyled. I was thinking I would repaint it as I had great results spraying my scratch build, but it has been suggested that I revinyl it which would be more authentic. I'll be looking into this as an option. Its my understanding that whether I paint or use vinyl, I need to sand, patch and prime the surface the same way. There's no real way to remove the existing vinyl right? I've just got to sand it down and put primer over it?
The bottoms and the corners look the worst. This will be my first time using bondo.
#5: Tmolding will need to be replaced and I'll have to do something to fix this sloppy caulk job that was used to fill in missing tmolding. I'm thinking a blow dryer or heat gun might melt it enough for me to peel it off.
No problem here, just found this super faded VSMB marquee hiding inside the cab. Weird.
#6: Need to evaluate replacing the cp overlay. It looks like it is in pretty good condition. Its a bit faded though. We'll see, I'd really like to reuse as much of the original parts as possible. Marquee looks pretty good and I don't think I'll have to replace it.
#7: Even if I don't replace the overlay, gonna have some work to do on the control panel. Probably needs to be stripped and repainted. The controls feel suprisingly good, but replacements are readily available so I might just replace them.
#8: Don't think I can get away with this bezel. For the most part, its pretty good, but there's a lot of knicks in the art and then there is this crack. MikesArcade.com has replacement bezels for a lot of Nintendo cabs, but not Popeye. Wonder where I can get one.
#9: Coin door needs a complete restore and I need to replace all these decals. Also, only coin slot #1 is working, but after inspecting it, I can see that #2 is wired up differently than the first, so that should be easy to fix. There's a coin counter on this thing that still works and is past 26000. A few games have been played on this machine.
#10: Back side is pretty worn, but nobody looks at the back, right? Maybe a light repaint is in order.
According to the model #, this was an original Popeye. I'm still confused about the VS SMB marquee I found inside.
#11: The power cable is frayed in a couple of spots. What do I do about that? Throw some electrical tape on it and call it good? I think it's just the insulation of the cable that's fraying and not the 3 wires inside.
This is as far as I can see inside. I wonder what other treasures are hiding in there? Maybe some keys.
Definitely not a small job, but I'm excited to bring this one back. I've always liked this game and have been wanting a Nintendo cabinet. I'm suprised that there are no Popeye restore threads on this forum that I could find, but there's plenty of DK and DK jr. examples to draw from. I don't think I'll be able to get to the bulk of the work this year, but we'll see. Any suggestions are welcome!