My little Restoration...

[Dragon Warrior Jasen]

Ok, you may have seen the thread converting an MVS-1 to an MVS-4... that was mine for a specific question. This thread is going to be more for the progress I make as I restore the cabinet to it's full glory of beauty.

First, the cab is not an original Neo, but I really dig the lines of it and it's size. It fits most places and does not take up a huge chuck of real estate.

It has a redone harness inside and the board is an MV-1C with stereo. The cabinet has 2 speakers in the upper portion under the marquee and a single speaker above the coin door. This is handy if I ever put a mono only board in the cab.

First things I plan on doing is pulling all of the electronics out of the cab and painting it. A good freind of mine paints cars for fun so he has all of the gear to do it and some experience. We are going to paint the sides red like an original NEO CAB, then get an overlay to paint on the NEO-GEO side art in white. After that, a nice clear coat to protect it all. The control panel, front, and back will all be piano black.

The coin door is missing a lock and is in rough looking shape. While I am painting the cab Ill look into refurbishing the coin door or just replace it if it's too nasty get nice enough to go back in.

The wiring is all nice on the inside, so other than putting some mesh sleeving all over it to keep it streamlined and nice, there is no work planned for that.

The Control Panel is going to get yanked, sand blasted and powder coated. A new overlay will be purcahsed and put on so it retains the NEO look.

Last but not least, all of the T-moulding will be replaced since it looks terrible and I plan on doing that part last!

Pictures:

[skaar]

Your Neo will be on a pedestal :D

[Arcade Antics]

It's a Blasteroids cabinet.

[PC-ENGINE HELL]

The cab looks nice as it is, however as far as stereo goes, the MV-1C was a mono only jamma board. The MV-1 and MV-1F were the only 1-slots to support stereo out. This means you are just running dual mono off the harness. If you plan to stick a 2-6 slot in there you will either have to make or buy a adapter to adapt them for normal jamma wiring, or re-wire your harness to support their configuration. If you want to look up the pin configuration info you can go to www.hardmvs.com. If you want to view a rundown of every feature every MVS board has or doesn't have : http://www.hardmvs.com/html/PCBcompare.htm

[Dragon Warrior Jasen]

Yep, you are right... it must be wired for stereo, looked at the manual for the 1C he gave me and it does state its only mono. I must have misheard him. Looking at the wiring diagram for this thing, building a supergun seems very simple.... possbily really fun too! In any case, this is staying in the cabinet.

The cab looks nicer in pictures than up close, when I get done it will look nice up close and in pictures!

[TheDomesticInstitution]

You may or may not go the multi route but someone over at KLOV posted this comparison chart detailing the difference between the carts. Figured you could get some use out of this.

http://www.tighelory.com/2010/01/choosing-neo-geo-mvs-multi-cart.html

[Dragon Warrior Jasen]

I'm going to leave it as an MVS with acutal MVS carts I think. I have been picking up a few here and there. I am up to 4 now, with a 5th on the way.

Looks like April is the breakdown and restore time. A good weekend project I think :)

[Arcade Antics]

FWIW, this project isn't a restoration, it's a conversion. If it was a restoration, it would be in the process of being restored to Blasteroids.

Only mentioning that because I clicked the thread waiting to see what game was being restored and found the title misleading. :)

[Dragon Warrior Jasen]

Potato, Potato. It's already converted to an MVS... I am not restoring it to a nice quality cabinet.

Geesh.. cut me some slack! It's an internet forum from cryin' outloud! :-P

[Dragon Warrior Jasen]

Some updates to the project! Since it's a rehab, some folks over at Neo-Geo.com called it a Rehab Cab! Any ways, I ditched the auto painting booth because my buddy is always out to sea and I got bored last weekend. I ended up painting it by hand with a good Behr Enamel and a foam roller. Came out great! Check out the gallery here to see the entire process in picture form:

http://gallery.me.com/jasenhicks#100318&bgcolor=black&view=grid

It's not quite done yet, I have a new bezel for the monitor on its way as well as a new coin door. The speaker grills are painted but I decided to stencil on the Neo-Geo logo on the top grill in white and the SNK "S" logo on the lower center grill. Give it a bit of charecter.

Atari fans will cry, but getting this thing back to a perfect Blasteroids cab was out of the questions and really out my my desire range. I like originals but at the same time like a little customization as well.

[nectarsis]

Looking sweet man. I would love to see close ups of teh speaker grills (unless I missed the pics).

[Dragon Warrior Jasen]

The Grills only have the black base coat right now. The stencils are being made by a guy up in Canada, I traded a pair of shockboxes to get them made. They shipped Friday, so I imagine that this week/weekend I will get to finally paint the stencils and put them on the cab. Closeups will be done!

[Dragon Warrior Jasen]

Finished the "sides" and got it all back up and running today. Looks great... although, I need to really get the CP finished/started because it looks like crap compared to the rest! New Coin Door is in th mail so that will seal up the big hole in the front... the original one was in worse condition than I thought.

http://gallery.me.com/jasenhicks#100318&bgcolor=black&view=grid

[Videogamerdaryll]

Nice..