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First dive into refurbishing - OK baby

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crebnel

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Helloohellio,

Managed to get my hands on an OK baby from a guy who was just keeping cabinets waiting to recycle(?) them.

Kinda just on a whim decided to get it and now faced with the mountainous task of trying to refurbish it with no prior experience (except building arcade sticks)

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The part that I'm stuck on right now is just being able to properly disassemble it. Many of the screws are either rusted or just stripped and I currently don't have the necissary tools to get em out. (did purchase some screw removal bits last night tho)

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my general plan is to:
- disassemble and deep clean (remove rust / other grime)
- remove control panel and remake the top plate
- remove the glass panel and CRT
- re-paint the whole thing
- then reassemble

If you have any tips or guidance please let me know! Sometimes I feel like I took on too big of a challenge but at the same time feel like persistence will bring a lot of reward.
 
Week 1 update:
managed to remove the CRT after many hours of work, sprayed protective layer on all the metal bits after attempting to clean the rust off.
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(forgive me for the blur, shaky hands from tiredness)

also starting to disassemble the top panel of the front panel. Also working around all the chipped screws, waiting for the screw extractor to arrive and prepping it for deep cleaning.

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thinking about replacing the front panel with a layer of aluminium and acrylic lazercut, as the current panel doesn't support japanese levers and 8 buttons.

At first I had tinges of doubt when I saw the machine for the first time, it felt like I had taken on too much. But honestly, after slowly breaking it down literarlly and in my mind, the process is still hard but not as overwhelming as I had once thought.

Looking forward to getting the exterior done so I can finally work on the interior
 
Week 2 and 3 update

After disassembly and some help with removing screws (what a journey - screw extractors only half worked and my dremel didnt work out super well, had someone come over and just cut the screw heads off)

After that blasted it with a pressure wash (again a journey as I lugged it around in the blazing sun, had a tight time limit on renting it too.

Before and after
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After that did a coat of primer and white spray paint over it. First time ever spray painting so it went pretty bad, but good enough to get by.
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And now... at last assembling the whole thing back together. Speakers and internals have been purchased, only waiting on the control board lazer cut and monitor stand. Then we are finally done .
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From a distance you can't see all the drips and cracks from the spray paint but hey at least it looks much better than before 🤣
 

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What monitor was in your cab? I’ve seen these cabs sometimes have Nanao MS9’s in them.
 
Very nice. What part of Taiwan are you in? I usually visit Taipei about once a year, and I sadly don't see that many good retro games and arcade stuff there anymore.
 
Zepherino said:
Very nice. What part of Taiwan are you in? I usually visit Taipei about once a year, and I sadly don't see that many good retro games and arcade stuff there anymore.
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I'm in Taipei. There are some small arcades, but they mostly have rhythm games or Gundam. There is an arcade in ximen that has KOF 13 and a couple of vewlixs with tekken tag and SF4 arcade edition. Other than that I haven't been able to find any places similar to mikado.

opt2not said:
What monitor was in your cab? I’ve seen these cabs sometimes have Nanao MS9’s in them.
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Not sure, the TV was dead by the time it got here so just decided to replace it with a monitor instead.
 
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Installed the levers and finally done! At first encountered a problem where only the up inputs would register, but it was because I plugged in the lever connecters backwards(?) (despite them being the right way round). Then had to rebind the hotkeys for swapping from analog left to DPAD for the gp2040s inside, which is a damn hassle on linux.

Inside is just an old pc that's running bazzite and using steam big picture as a frontend. I may switch to something else that's a lil more arcadey but right now it's more of a home console cabinet type vibe.

Used a sanwa lever I bought at akiba 7 years ago, and a 309 mj that I recently swapped from. (Which was really the whole catalyst for the whole project - wanting to find a new place for those spare parts to go)

This has been a journey and a half. Learned a lot, suffered a lot. It's been rewarding to see this through to the end and I look forward to enjoying it with friends and family!
 
crebnel said:
I'm in Taipei. There are some small arcades, but they mostly have rhythm games or Gundam. There is an arcade in ximen that has KOF 13 and a couple of vewlixs with tekken tag and SF4 arcade edition. Other than that I haven't been able to find any places similar to mikado.


Not sure, the TV was dead by the time it got here so just decided to replace it with a monitor instead.
Click to expand...

Ah I know Taipei reasonably well. In fact I'm currently in the area on vacation. I'm pretty sure the place you're talking about is HYPER GAMER in the eslite building, which sadly just closed last month according to their Facebook page. In Xinmen there's also Tom's World in the Wan Nian building, but I remember the condition of the cabs in there is usually not great.

The only other place I can think of is SPEEDRUN by VG Taipei which has several Astro Cities, but it's more of a bar/restaurant than a place to seriously play games. I see a lot of people online doing Instagram poses with the cabs instead of actually playing them. I haven't been there yet, but I'll probably check the place out this time since it's in the Linjiang Night Market area.

Sadly the vast majority of arcades or similar in Taipei are either rhythm game focused as you mentioned (with Taiko and Maimai being the most popular), or those crappy sub-letted claw game centers. If Taipei had better arcades, I probably wouldn't feel the need to go to Japan nearly as often, given how much other stuff has made it over.
 
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