KidVidiot
Thread Manager
About three shipments of control panel overlays from different companies came to me in the mail this week, my first real batch of CPO's for the games I am restoring. I guess my expectations were too high across the board, because I've found problems with nearly all of them. They're all from the different sites highly touted on these forums, and at the end of the day they're almost all disappointing. In fact, the only cpo I've gotten that I feel matches the original as closely as possible is baby pacman from phoenix arcade.
I've ordered some cpo's for nintendo cabs and it kinda bothers me that (for reasons I'm sure are reasonable) they don't have the smooth, rubber-ish feel of the originals, and that the different texture used makes the colors slightly off.
I ordered a large cpo that was predominantly blue with grey letters, and when comparing it to the original noticed that the grey on the repro had a very noticeable blue tint to it, while the originals was a solid regular grey. That same cpo (highly rated by users here) also had complete text missing in two different places. Now this latter issue I should have caught from examining the pic on the web site closely, but I guess I just assumed it would be identical when it came to graphic stuff like that.
And then today I got one where the main background was an entirely different color from the original (either version), a color I haven't been able to find used on any machine of its type in images online. Oh, and this one came with two sizeable scratches or markings on it, even though it's advertised as bullet proof or something?
At this point I'm just going to be happy with the imperfections of my original control panels, and if one of them is too messed up I will stick with finding an original replacement or hold out for a NOS overlay. This has been demoralizing, but lesson learned.
I've ordered some cpo's for nintendo cabs and it kinda bothers me that (for reasons I'm sure are reasonable) they don't have the smooth, rubber-ish feel of the originals, and that the different texture used makes the colors slightly off.
I ordered a large cpo that was predominantly blue with grey letters, and when comparing it to the original noticed that the grey on the repro had a very noticeable blue tint to it, while the originals was a solid regular grey. That same cpo (highly rated by users here) also had complete text missing in two different places. Now this latter issue I should have caught from examining the pic on the web site closely, but I guess I just assumed it would be identical when it came to graphic stuff like that.
And then today I got one where the main background was an entirely different color from the original (either version), a color I haven't been able to find used on any machine of its type in images online. Oh, and this one came with two sizeable scratches or markings on it, even though it's advertised as bullet proof or something?
At this point I'm just going to be happy with the imperfections of my original control panels, and if one of them is too messed up I will stick with finding an original replacement or hold out for a NOS overlay. This has been demoralizing, but lesson learned.



