That’s cool, how did you come across that?
It was in the possession of my wife’s grandmother and aunt, beyond that its provenance is unknown
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It’s time we talked about monitors. The first advice you’ll get when asking about buying a cabinet is to make sure the monitor is in good condition. Arcade monitors are some of the best looking CRTs you’ll ever see. They’re also incredibly fickle, hold enough voltage to kill you, contribute 1/4 of the weight of the cab, and are a nightmare to repair.
Every one of these cabs has had some form of monitor trouble. Luckily they are all Wells-Gardner K7000s which means parts are interchangeable. Fixing these monitors has been the majority of my work, time and money on this project, and there’s still the chance I’m going to be left with one cab not having a working screen. The two cabs I already sold were not K7000s and were rusty, so I didn’t bother working on them. I’ve long given up on documenting the process of fixing these, so here are some highlights.
This is another pic from Little Red. No matter what chassis I use–the PCB that controls power, geometry, and colour–the colours are dim and washed out. The tube itself is faded and dying, and the process known as rejuvination requires expensive hardware and is not a long-term solution. I’m going to put this tube in the Invasion cab as it’s the least desirable of all the machines.
I couldn’t get it to show on camera but the Invasion tube has burn-in. It looks like the game froze on a high score display. That one will go into the MK cab.
The MK tube appears alright, but the picture is quite blue (we’ll get to that later). I’m hoping that just requires some adjustment of the red, green and blue pots on the chassis.
The Big Red tube looks great, but it has some convergence issues.
See how the white line bends and split into colours in the bottom left? It makes that part of the picture fuzzy. This can be adjusted with magnetic strips on the back, but messing with it was making it worse. The advice I got on a repair forum, was to leave it be.
For all of these tubes, I sprayed them with 99% iso, then washed them with a garden hose, then distilled water. From there they sat in the sun for the day. I wish I had recorded the dirtiest one.
The catch is that all these tubes were tested with the Little Red chassis. I won’t get into the technical stuff, but the Big Red chassis blows a fuse every time I turn it on. I’ve replaced all kinds of parts on it so far. And gone through about 20 fuses.
Invasion booted just once for me. Notice that one of the caps is bulging, and some of the caps have leaked fluid onto the chassis. This is around the power circuit, so I’m waiting for a cap kit to come in so I can swap them.
This is what the MK chassis produces. Many of the caps were bad, so I swapped some with extras that I had on hand.
That’s a little better. I’m also going to replace the rest of the caps on this, and that should clean up the picture. This is why I believe the MK tube favours blue–it probably ran for a long time with this kind of image.
And lastly the Little Red has a broken pot on the remote board. With no V-Hold value, the picture looks like this:
For the time being I’ve swapped around the remote boards, and ordered new potentiometers.
And that’s where I’m at with the monitors. A slew of issues, none of them are going to have perfect screens by the end, I’ve spent $450, and I can’t sell any of these cabs until the kinks are worked out, due to needing to swap parts between chassis in order to diagnose. Please hurry, FedEx!
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If you’re wondering why I spent so much time and money on the pictures, know that a working screen can add $200-300 of value to each cab. And any experience working on these will pay dividends for any cabs I get in the future, or if I need to repair my Trinitron PVM.
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I finally said “screw it” to fixing one of the boards, did a ton of swapping and actually fixed the convergence issue on the Big Red tube.
My friend was ready to come pick up Big Red. First we moved the Mortal Kombat cab in his van, so I could let one cab go and bring the next one in to reinstall the monitor and list for sale. When I booted up the Neo cab to show him, the screen looked like this:
Terribly dim. I said I’d fix it while he’s out camping for the next few days. After reading some schematics and touching up some solder points, I got this:
Which looks even worse! Benimaru looks like he has a big pointy nose, lmao. Anyway the trouble point was a new capacitor I installed which was DOA. Now the picture looks great.
So for the weekend, this is what my garage looks like:
Much to the chagrin of my family. I’m waiting on a couple parts to fix the monitor for Mortal Kombat. This should be an easy fix, since the monitor worked before I had to scrap half the parts off it to fix the other monitors. Not like there’s any unseen issues that will pop up… right? I’ve plugged my Mr Driller 2 board into the machine and it powers up and plays audio, so everything else is good.
Things are finally coming together!
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My friend bought and took away Big Red. He’s very new to SNK games but we used to play KOF 98, Last Blade 2 and Mark of the Wolves on Dreamcast many years ago, so he’s eager. I lent him some of my carts to get him started.
I decided to list Marvel Super Heroes and also my Marvel vs Capcom board that I never really played. However MSH was stuck in a reboot loop at the title screen. I decided to remove every socketed ROM chip and inspect for bent or broken legs, rusting causing a bad connection, etc.
I wish I saved the photo to prove it to you, but under chip 09, on this completely sealed arcade cartridge that I broke the warranty seals on myself, was a spider egg sack. Cleaning it and the adjacent area fixed the game. Here’s the enormous MSH kit combo that I have up on eBay:
Beyond that, I removed the headphone jack/memory card combo from my Little Red cab and listed it online as well. I’ll never be using either of those features and I’ve had a large amount of interest from people looking to add those missing parts to their cabs. The sticker is still here on my cab, you just can’t plug anything in.
And in the meantime I had to order another bloody flyback to fix the MK cab. My next goal is to actually make time to play my arcade cabinet, now that it’s in good shape. It’s something I set out to do months ago.
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A strange feeling has come over me. This whole journey began from years of searching for a Neo Geo cabinet. To replicate the feeling I had as a kid playing Metal Slug at the bowling alley, Samurai Shodown at the arcade, Bust a Move at the cinema. For years I’ve been collecting the games and playing MVS titles at home with a supergun, wishing that I had the real thing. And now that I have a cabinet, I’m not any happier.
It’s not that I don’t want to play the games. I frequently get an itch for playing them, and tell myself I need to get some use out of the cabinet. At first I blamed it on fatigue–spending too long in the garage working on these machines. But as time went on I realized I didn’t like having to stand to play. I didn’t like how far the buttons were spread out, or how the monitor needs a minute to warm up every time it’s turned on, or how changing games means unlocking the coin door, reaching up and undoing the latches on the control panel, pulling that back and reaching into the cab to swap out a cart that may need multiple reseats to read properly.
In recent weeks when I’ve had a hankering to play Neo Geo, I’ve wished instead that I was using my supergun. Because pulling that out would be admitting defeat, I play the games on an emulator on an emulator. Anything to save myself the trouble of stepping into a humid garage on a rainy August afternoon.
So I decided to sell the cab. Luckily the sale is all profit compared to what I paid/invested. Sometimes it’s important to know what you don’t want in life. I had a list of cabs I wanted. But I’m reconsidering all of that now. I have these great memories of playing games in the arcade, but now I remember that some of my favourite memories across the years were of playing these games in other ways: playing Mark of the Wolves and Last Blade 2 on my Dreamcast with friends. Getting Metal Slug Anthology on PSP in the UK. Playing Neo Turf Masters over Fightcade.
To my friend who bought the Big Red Neo cab, I swapped out some of the better condition parts from my cab into his. I got in touch with someone nearby who wanted to buy the cab and we worked out a good price. He paid me a good extra amount to deliver it to his condo in Toronto.
Like me, he had been collecting arcade titles without a cabinet to play them on. I carted it right into the crammed living room of the condo he shares with his family. Reminded me why I was pressured to get rid of these cabs in the first place, and I live in a two-story house with a garage.
Anyway, I still have Mortal Kombat to go. And my next post will be coming very soon. If I’m not going the cab route then there are other ways I can improve my Neo experience beyond my clunky supergun setup.
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Post DELAYED due to FedEx sucking. Currently shipping options from Japan to Canada are limited to expensive services like internaional priority. Package has sat in Alaska since Saturday and it was only by calling FedEx that I found out I owe $140 in unpaid import fees. So $350 to ship and still no tracking update.
So anyway, quick PSA on cadmium.
My partner is a museum conservator and I’m attributing all this knowledge to her. Cadmium is a very dangerous compound that is created as zinc oxidizes. You can commonly find it on pre-21st century metal screws. Cadmium causes death, followed by cancer.
She took a UV flashlight to all of my cabinets and found small amounts of cadmium on screws in all of the coin mechanisms, which I never touched. She also found cadmium on the carriage bolts that sit on top of the Neo Geo control panel. I used a ventilation mask and disposable latex gloves to remove the old screws and threw them out in a marked ziploc bag. I threw out the gloves and used a second disposable pair when putting in the new screws. You can see two of the replaced carriage bolts in the picture above: they’re silver screws with gold nuts.
A quick lesson on the hazards associated with old stuff, and hopefully a glimpse into just how much work can go into restoring an arcade machine. I see people on forums casually talk about restoring their control panel by putting new screws in and I wonder if any of them know the risk they’re putting themselves into.
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yeah it really fucking sucks 
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forgive me this nitpick but
cadmuim’s an element, i imagine it’s less created as zinc oxidizes and more that the zinc oxidizing changes the grain structure of the metal and forces the trace cadmium ions to the surface? apparently a similar thing happens with brass, since 95% of brass is recycled and has been used at some point as cartridges for lead bullets. i imagine @shrug might know more about the metallurgy or actual plausibility of my claim but it sounds like heavy metals are just weird guys when it comes to alloys
anyway i had no idea about this fact so thank you very much for the heads up! can you just use any UV lamp to check for cadmium?
also i’ve been loving your tales itt please continue the updates
ETA: oh wait apparently lead is or at least was added to brass to make it more machinable. so probably screws and whatnot lol. keys too apparently!
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Don’t know how I missed this thread until now but wow what a journey. Thanks for sharing all that @rasterradio
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You’re probably right about cadmium; I’m paraphrasing. Any UV lamp can check for cadmium. We also discovered disturbed, exposed asbestos in my house after 25 years of living there, so haha whoops! Always get your house inspected.
Thanks for the kind words everyone, It’s been a heck of a ride and I wouldn’t take back any of it. I’m slowly knocking the price down on Mortal Kombat until I get a reasonable offer.
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thinking about it i bet it’s like, cadmium oxide or something which is the compound, my chemistry is not university standard but that probably makes more sense with it fluorescing under UV light
fuuuuck lol. my time in run-down sharehouses has made me fret a lot about asbestos; glad you caught it out
I also was a self-taught solderer back in university and didn’t follow any safety protocol. Definitely inhaled some lead from soldering in a basement with sealed windows. Between this and the asbestos I’m antsy about my lung x-rays. These days I have a rated respirator that I do all my sensitive work with.
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ooh yeah i def had way more unattended soldering time with lead as a kid than should be legal. absolutely gonna cop a cute respirator soon
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Big stack of boxes!
It has arrived. The Neo Geo AES. The MVS was huge in arcades across the world, and the AES lets you own arcade games at home. The games are, bit for bit, identical to their arcade counterparts with the added benefit of colourful labels, boxes, manuals, and wrapped up in a sleek console package. In contrast, this is what my home MVS setup is like:
AES and MVS games have different pinouts, but just like Famicom and NES, there are converters to let you use one cartridge on the other. So I may sell off my MVS while keeping my collection.
While MVS collecting can be quite cheap for what it is, AES is where the stereotype of expensive Neo Geo collecting comes from. The AES was intended primarily as a rental console, and the games and system were very expensive to produce and were only ever designed for a niche market. Many games had low print runs in the hundreds or even dozens. Here’s a cursatory look at eBay:
But wait! These are all US copies of the games. Neo Geo titles play in whatever language is set by the system BIOS. Real Bout costs less than $100 for a Japanese copy. KOF 98 is about $250. On MVS they are even cheaper. The Neo Geo is also the longest supported system of all time, running from 1990 to 2004, so later titles that launched on competing consoles for significantly cheaper, as the world was moving away from 2D and arcade titles, are much rarer than early games like Samurai Shodown 2. Neo collecting can be affordable, and the people who tell you it isn’t are people who are only interested in Metal Slugs, which are some of the rarest games on the system.
So for a total of 88000 on Yahoo, I got an AES, two controllers, a loose Art of Fighting cartridge, and all of these boxed games.
Recognize any games? I’ll reveal them in the next post.
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Tragic that Katana Battle Action Game didn’t become a mainstream general term.
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Revealing my collection of AES games is taking some time–not because I couldn’t read the Japanese printed on the spine, but because within an hour I had destroyed my AES console. Let me explain. Way back before I made the last post, I unboxed the system, tested it out and decided to install a UniBIOS to set the system language to English. With (most) MVS systems this is a painless process. You pry out the old BIOS and pop in the new one. Because the AES is a consumer console, SNK decided customers didn’t need a socketable BIOS to service their system and so the original BIOS is soldered in, very finely.
I had already ordered a 40-pin IC socket, so all that was to do was desolder the original BIOS, solder in a socket, and pop in the UniBIOS like with my MVS. I never considered myself bad at soldering until that day.
New BIOS socket, installed…?
My error was in my tool selection. When I started soldering many years ago, I didn’t know jack, and I learned through trial and error. I decided that this should be a very clean desoldering job and used lots of flux. Which was plumbing flux, because years ago the guy at Home Depot told me that would be suitable for electronics. Turns out plumbing flux is highly corrosive and should never be used on PCBs as it eats through traces. Now I’m starting to understand why I had so many monitor repair troubles with the arcade cabs.
Here’s what my AES did after the mod:
And with a cart:
After many hours of running bodge wires, checking against pinout schematics, and begging for help on forums, I gave in. I got in touch with three hobbyist repairmen on classifieds, and two soldering shops, but after showing them photos of the board they all declared they couldn’t fix it. I had one last resort. neo-geo.com.
It was lurking on the Neo forums in my middle school computer lab in 2007 that I learned people could collect an entire arcade cabinet. The Neo Geo forums are an old, harsh place. But after introducing myself in some previous posts and explaining my situation, I got in touch with a member on the East Coast who fixed it for half the price I’ve seen people charge for just installing the BIOS socket in a working system. What a hero. Here’s what it came back like:
So yeah, plumbing flux is powerful stuff! And now my system works. I’ll finally talk about these AES games in the next post, or maybe the next, next post.
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Quick aside today on Mr Driller 2, before I forget. Make note of that bar code UI–it’s delicious.
I’ll admit Mr Driller 2 was an impulse purchase. I liked Driller 1 and didn’t own a copy at the time, so when Driller 2 came up for 3500 yen on YAJ I went for it.
Like Driller 1, it runs on Namco’s System hardware which is based on the PlayStation with slightly higher specs. The low-powered hardware meant the game was cheap for operators to purchase and install in locations, and Mr Driller doesn’t exactly require beefy hardware to perform. Although Namco used the same System hardware for other games like Tekken and the game data itself sits on the ROM board on top of the system board, you can’t swap the game out like you might on a Neo Geo or Sega NAOMI.
So how does it play? Exactly like Mr Driller 1, but with multiplayer. All the sprites have been redrawn and look much nicer, but play Mr Driller G on the PS1 and you’ll get the same effect, with the addition of multiple playable characters with different stats. So it’s no surprise this one never came to the PS1. It did, however come to GBA, probably because Driller 1 was on the GBC instead.
Mr Driller 2 is a fun little diversion, but with so many iterations in the franchise out there it’s hard to recommend 2 over any other particular entry. Maybe someone with intimate knowledge of the scoring system can correct me, but as I’m paring down many items including my game collection, Mr Driller 2 has to go.
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And here’s my AES collection. Nine games in one lot from YAJ. We’ve got Samurai Shodowns 1, 2 and 3, King of Fighters 95, Fighters History Dynamite aka Karnov’s Revenge, Art of Fighting 2, Fatal Fury 1 and Special, and the loose cart is Art of Fighting 1.
With AES games there are two styles of packaging: '90-94 had a soft clamshell, while '95 onward has a hard shell “snapbox”.
Here’s an AES box next to a Genesis box. They remind me of boxes for Japanese PC games like the MSX or PC-98. The softshell slides out with a glossy cart holder inside. This holder is very thin plastic and in general, the earlier soft boxes tend to wear down. The manuals are a similar size to the carts. Sadly the inside is printed in black and white.
The later snapbox cases are superb. Best game packaging ever? You’ve got the company logo embossed on the front, this nice textured plastic, and it’s held together by a tough plastic lock. The manuals switched over to a CD aspect ratio, probably because the Neo Geo CD had released and SNK wanted to design one manual type and save on printing.
SNK went on to use this same snaplock design in miniature form for JP and PAL copies of Neo Geo Pocket games. In North America we were stick with flimsy Game Boy-esque carboard boxes. Because the NGP is region-free and has no 50/60htz issues, PAL NGP is the most desirable region to collect.
SNK has also been producing limited editions of their recent games in AES packaging–only in Japan. Pix N Love has been doing the same in Europe, while Limited Run is printing physicals in cheap softshell cases.
Comparison between the insides of the two case types.
Lastly, all AES case types and the NGP boxes have a faint yet distinct plastic smell. Like hot vinyl car seats mixed with cigarettes. I don’t smoke but I find this smell weirdly pleasing. It’s also apparently the best way to sniff out a bootleg from a legit copy.
I paid around 60000 yen for these nine games (minus those awful COVID shipping rates and import fees), with the intent of selling what I don’t want to keep. I own all three Samurai Shodown games on MVS and will probably sell those since I don’t need doubles and the AES packing is just stellar. Especially on SS3 with the later style snapbox.
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