has anyone seen a Neo Geo like this

PrairieDillo

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I assume its a pretty decent clone.
 

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More pics...
Of note is that the CP is a wood piece.
 

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I've seen one before and after looking through my photo albums it seems i didn't save the pics of it.

Both yours and the first one i saw had laminate in the exact same red shade and sheen used by California Games Inc which were known to have a number of cabs that copied heavily from companies like Dynamo etc. There are some hints that hanaho/PVG/Semco made at least some cabinets for them. Besides the laminte however, i have no solid evidence that CGI or possibly Hanaho made these.
 
Don would know better than me.

Here are pics of the cab I have which is a similar form factor as the one you have.

Note the one and two player markings as well as the SNK badge on the front kickplate panel.

The back of mine is painted black.
 

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Don would know better than me.

Here are pics of the cab I have which is a similar form factor as the one you have.

Note the one and two player markings as well as the SNK badge on the front kickplate panel.

The back of mine is painted black.

Yours is official. I do believe however that these later units were not made by 3-KOAM
 
awesome don. Again you show how you are at the top of your game.

A local customer showed me these pics and I was like thats not a SNK Neo Geo. I figured that it was either a nice clone or an other territory machine but nothing on Hard MVS looks like this. His CP is a little wider than a standard US Neo Geo metal CP also.

The clear part where this isnt official are the buttons through the credit indicator LED locations on the CP. And lack no of credit counters on the CP
 
awesome don. Again you show how you are at the top of your game.

A local customer showed me these pics and I was like thats not a SNK Neo Geo. I figured that it was either a nice clone or an other territory machine but nothing on Hard MVS looks like this. His CP is a little wider than a standard US Neo Geo metal CP also.

The clear part where this isnt official are the buttons through the credit indicator LED locations on the CP. And lack no of credit counters on the CP
I've been wrong before, many times.

I've seen at least one other neo Geo MVS clone similar to this one in the past which seemed to be mass-produced. The other unit appears to have had a completely different coin door. The build quality of that unit seems to be more akin to a multicaid. I also believe there may have been either one last official MVS cabinet variant made by 3-KOAM before they folded or perhaps another official cabinet sanctioned by SNK but built by another manufacturer around that time. I'll have to find the thread on that one but it looked a lot more similar to the originals.

If I had to make an educated guess I would say that these unofficial clones came about as a necessity during the mid to late '90s when 3-KOAM was no longer making MVS cabinets and yet there were plenty of MVS boards and carts that could still be placed out on location- Even if those locations were making significantly less money than they were just a few years earlier during the fighting game and neo Geo boom. There was plenty of MVS hardware still out there in the wild. While romstar were the exclusive distributors of the MVS 1-slot motherboard kit, there were tons of spare 2-4 slot motherboards in circulation and tens of thousands of cartridges still in circulation amongst operators and distributors. Keep in mind that snk was still producing neo Geo carts well into the early 2000s. If I remember correctly one of the later metal slug games was distributed and bundled in a dynamo HS-27 cabinet.

Cutting fresh cabs even if it was for older used hardware was still a viable investment back then. I'd even go as far as to wager that a completed Neo Geo copy in this fashion probably had more value back in the late '90s than a bootleg Street fighter 2 in a dynamo clone.

So we do know that around 1996 3 - KOAM who manufactured the neo Geo cabinets in the US was already going through some financial difficulty. We know that the company was attempting to offload a bunch of debt and failed ventures as a tax write-off in 1997 and by 1999 the company had pretty much dissolved ceased operations.

The timelines all kind of match up
 
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More of these clones were just sold on Captains Auctions.

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I think the second cab in your post #11 is exactly the same cab as in post #1 and #2. The Metal Slug 4 marquee, those very faded Burning Fight and Super Sidekicks 2 marquees look exactly the same. Some damage on the side panel just left of the control panel. The Bust-A-Move marquee that was in it in post #1 looks like its on top of the marquee, so might have been removed and the Strikers 1945 could have always been underneath. And it still has the 'No Refunds, Play at your own risk' sticker on the marquee. The lock bar was removed and patch, and got a fresh coat of paint which covered up the side art and a few buttons replaced.

Could be wrong, but I think its the same one.

Other than that, it seems telling that every one of these has very late release Neo games in them. Slug 4, Slug 5, KOF 2003. Which would lend some circumstantial evidence to me to support your idea that someone was making these in the late 90s or maybe even early 2000s as a way to get a new cab out on location with the new MVS games and a few of the old ones that would have been dirt cheap at the time.
 
I think the second cab in your post #11 is exactly the same cab as in post #1 and #2. The Metal Slug 4 marquee, those very faded Burning Fight and Super Sidekicks 2 marquees look exactly the same. Some damage on the side panel just left of the control panel. The Bust-A-Move marquee that was in it in post #1 looks like its on top of the marquee, so might have been removed and the Strikers 1945 could have always been underneath. And it still has the 'No Refunds, Play at your own risk' sticker on the marquee. The lock bar was removed and patch, and got a fresh coat of paint which covered up the side art and a few buttons replaced.

Could be wrong, but I think its the same one.

Other than that, it seems telling that every one of these has very late release Neo games in them. Slug 4, Slug 5, KOF 2003. Which would lend some circumstantial evidence to me to support your idea that someone was making these in the late 90s or maybe even early 2000s as a way to get a new cab out on location with the new MVS games and a few of the old ones that would have been dirt cheap at the time.

It's probably the same one. One came up on Captain's auction so i simply did a wildcard search on their site and a few more sold listings popped up. The laminate in the clearer photos looks very much like the shade or red used by cabinets made by or made for California Games Inc/CGI. All of these clones discovered have only been spotted on the west coast and all seem to have later-era neo-geo titles.
 
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