She got her wings clipped!

AllenBomber

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Picked up a new cab tonight... I know the photo looks rough, but I assure you that it did come with a 25" monitor and Marquee as well. I got a non-functioning Surf Planet off ebay. Seller said it's a power supply issue, but I think if he actually knew what the problem was, he would have fixed it by now. Oh well, I'm really just interested in the cab for a Neo Geo board I picked up.

I was iffy on this one (especially since there weren't any pics), but hey, There hasn't been much selling reasonably lately, and I won it for $49. I also drove about 100 miles to pick it up, so call that 20 bucks in gas on top of that. I got it home and the first thing I did was recover $4 in quarters from the bowels of it. Now I have only $65 invested in it!

The next fun discovery was that it had a dollar acceptor. I've yet to own a machine with a bill mech, so that should be fun to figure out. Next, I saw a midway sticker on the back. Strange considering Surf Planet was a Gaelco game. I started poking around a little more and discovered that it was originally an NBA Jam cabinet that had the 4-player control panel replaced with a standard width, hence the clipped wings. The Midway sticker said NBA Basketball, but after taking a good long look at it, there's no denying that this was originally an NBA Jam. It still has all the harness work for the 4-player setup too. I thought this is a weird conversion considering NBA Jam was one of the most moneymaking games where as Surf Planet is just some BS Generic snowboarding game... Kinda like taking a Mercedes and slapping a Ford badge on it.

So on to the bad... It's non-functional, and nothing is tested yet. Could be a power supply, could be the whole pcb; who knows? I just got home from a few hours of driving and don't feel like really getting into it now. It came with a 25" monitor (which he claims works, but who ever trusts a seller?) so that would be great for a Neo cab providing it works. It has no burn and the chassis doesn't look fried, so fingers crossed. The cab is also a little rough. I want to strip it down, paint it red and do the graffiti-style NEO GEO stencil job anyway. I know I've seen it pictured before, but I can't find it now. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, I'd appreciate a link. The biggest issue is that the staples in the speaker panel under the marquee have half-way let go. Any suggestions on how to re-construct this? Do you guys generally try to staple cabs back together like the factory, wood glue, or just move straight to wood screws?
 

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The biggest issue is that the staples in the speaker panel under the marquee have half-way let go. Any suggestions on how to re-construct this? Do you guys generally try to staple cabs back together like the factory, wood glue, or just move straight to wood screws?

Any close up pics? How I'd fix it depends on what kind of shape the wood is in and why it fell off in the first place.
 
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The wood hasn't shattered or disintegrated. It looks like it was just stapled and glued at one time and everything has pulled straight out. Probably due to either someone hanging on it, or it could have been dropped on one edge causing the cab to rack a little. The rest of the cab is solid though. We carried it down a flight of stairs and it wasn't shifting.
 

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The wood hasn't shattered or disintegrated. It looks like it was just stapled and glued at one time and everything has pulled straight out. Probably due to either someone hanging on it, or it could have been dropped on one edge causing the cab to rack a little. The rest of the cab is solid though. We carried it down a flight of stairs and it wasn't shifting.

Looks like they ripped it up trying to get to the marquee... I'd restaple and glue it.
 
The next fun discovery was that it had a dollar acceptor.

If the DBA works, you might want to sell it. I got a crappy Arlington Horse Racing a while back with a junky Mars DBA in it. It was older and did not have the nifty bill box on it. It just dropped the bills behind it. The guy had a catcher rigged so they would fall into the coin bucket. At any rate, it was a piece but it worked. I figured "what the hell" and put it on E-bay. Got $60 for it. That was more than the cabinet was worth to me.
 
If the DBA works, you might want to sell it. I got a crappy Arlington Horse Racing a while back with a junky Mars DBA in it. It was older and did not have the nifty bill box on it. It just dropped the bills behind it. The guy had a catcher rigged so they would fall into the coin bucket. At any rate, it was a piece but it worked. I figured "what the hell" and put it on E-bay. Got $60 for it. That was more than the cabinet was worth to me.

Good call. Thanks for the advice. I'll start working on it when I get home from work, but I'd be happy if I got all my money back and still got a cab, monitor and game out of it. This one looks like it drops them into a dollar shaped cage. I think the cage is supposed to have a spring or a sponge in it, but it doesn't.

I've never really dealt with a dollar bill acceptor. Any simple ways to test them, or does anyone know of a walk-through for working on them?
 
This doesn't tell me if the machine got credited or not. I also don't know if it's wired properly. I've got to assume that the previous owner was a moron here.
 
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