dos
Champion
I've wanted a Japanese cab, and specifically a NAC for about as long as I've been reading about games on the internet (so about as long as the NAC itself has been around). To me it's not the best or coolest cab which imo would be something metal and from the 80's, but it's the most "iconic", which hopefully doesn't make me sound like a total hipster. It's monitor is also large and excellent, and I only play 15kHz stuff. My favorite arcade in Japan, the 8th floor of Try Tower (RIP) was full of them:
For whatever reason I always missed out on group buys and local sales. I'm in South Florida, which is a complete wasteland as far as cabs go, or even people into this sort of thing. I always noticed plenty of cabs for sale in California, but shipping across the country is murder and I'm not loaded. I made do with an ancient Sigma supergun and a beat up SFII dynamo cab I bought from a friend in high school, and amassed a pretty nice set of boards. For years I made cab WTB threads on forums for something on the east coast, but got no replies, or offers of stuff like Korean and Chinese cabs. At some point my dad mentioned offhand that he knew the owner of a freight and logistics company and I realized I might finally be able to afford getting a cab across the country. I ask the obvious question and yeah, he can put a cab on a truck and bring it over, no prob.
I look around for who's selling cabs and come across "karcadegame" on this forum, out of California. I start talking to this obviously busy guy and trying to get him to show me what he has, apparently he has lots of NACs but they're hard to get to so it takes a bit of back and forth before I actually start seeing pictures of different machines (and I had to wire full payment before he would start pulling stuff down). Trying to judge a cab with blurry cell phone pictures from the other side of the country is kinda hard, and I'm sure he wasn't too happy with my constant questions about monitor quality etc. I ended up picking this one (actually the nicest one I saw if you can believe it):
Once I did everything went smoothly and he packed it up and put it on a pallet, and onto the truck it went.
I was kind of worried about the way it was packed with only plastic wrap and the placement of the locking straps, after reading horror stories about the neo-geo forums coinopstore group buy, but the trucker said he noticed that it had almost no protection and made sure it would be safe, awesome guy. A couple days later and it's in the garage:
I immediately notice the monitor has problems. There's only minor burn-in of a fighting game health bar but there's quite a bit of bleed when everything is at a decent brightness. I do a full calibration and it's mitigated a bit and I manage to get things looking "decent". I put in a new LS-32 and set of PS-14-GNs in the right color, and rotate the monitor, this is going to be a vertical cab:
After rotation the monitor's condition deteriorated, now coming up like this from a cold start and needing to warm up for ten minutes or so before looking decent again:
At this point I just wanted to enjoy the thing so I ordered a set of Nichinon caps for the MS9 chassis from Digi-Key and concentrated mostly on playing for a couple weeks, and doing some minor work. I planned to take out the monitor later for a full cab teardown and cleaning so I could recap it then. The previous operator left the control panel a total rat's nest, with wires cut and tied together without solder, lots of electrical tape etc. I wish I had taken pictures of it in this state. Only buttons 1-3 were actually talking to anything, despite the cab coming with five buttons "wired". I took everything out and hacked a temporary setup out of what was there because I didn't have any AMP pins or connectors, just spliced and soldered what I had so that buttons 1-5 went to the JAMMA harness, and just left button 6 as a dummy until I could build a proper kick harness to send buttons 4-6 to my RECO. Not sure I would even need it considering even 4 buttons is a stretch for a cab mostly playing STG and other vertical stuff, but I just want everything working and it's nice to have a lot of buttons for different autofire rates with the RECO.
I changed the old yellowed coin slot for some minor bling, this is the legendhk slot
Cleaned up the front panels and installed some locks, these are 5380 clones from paradisearcade, not in the pic but I also installed a 5575 clone from legendhk on the coin box door:
And did a general light cleaning of the cab body to get the most obvious grime off, also replaced some missing bolts on the CP and marquee and installed a grounded US power cord
Around this point the marquee lamp starter that was already on it's last legs died completely so I ordered a new FG-1E starter from atlanta light bulbs and got a Philips "Natural" 15-watt T8 fluorescent tube from home depot which is the closest color temperature they had to the Toshiba FL-15D that came in the cab; 5000K vs. the original 6500K. It's a bit warmer but I felt like the original bulb made the marquee look too washed out so it's a bonus in my book:
I tried to play Raiden and didn't get any sound and measured +0.1V on the -5V line so I opened the 400-5198-01X PSU and found the 78L05 regulator had a hole in it
Replaced that and all was good, but I'm thinking about replacing it with a 7805 so this doesn't happen again. The 78L05 is only rated at 100mA while the 7805 can handle 1A. Has anyone done this?
After this I concentrated on just using the cab for a while, putting off the major work to do with the monitor and full teardown. I started to get annoyed with the inescapable bleed on some games, particularly darker stuff like Sky Shark and Twin Cobra. Getting these games to look acceptably bright also meant tons of bleed thanks to this chassis' failing caps. The recapping wouldn't be a big deal but since I wanted to strip and clean the cab when I had the monitor out, the cab would end up out of commission for a while. I decided to man up and get it over with
The chassis and tube were super clean compared to the rest of the cab, which was unbelievably filthy (more on this later). I had posted a thread over in the monitor help subforum about my monitor issues, and through that I learned that I actually have a newer MS9 chassis that auto syncs between 15 and 24kHz with no jumper needed, it's replaced by a relay. I'm certain this is not the cab's original monitor, but a newer one put in later at some point. Judging by the PSU model and some date code stickers found in the cab this is a very early NAC.
Here's the chassis pre-recap, with the relay visible
I replaced every cap but the 1000µF B+ filter, which I forgot to order but is now on it's way to me. A Hakko FR-300 desoldering gun made this job super easy and everything was painless
When I plugged in the monitor to test, I was amazed. Not only was the slow warmup issue gone but the general picture quality was awesome. I was kind of bummed thinking I got a dog of a monitor and that this was a tired and worn out tube but this thing now looks almost like a PVM. No hint of bleed or any weirdness at all.
This is post-recap but pre-post-recap recalibration so I'm pretty sure it will look even better once that's done, click it for a bigger pic
With that out of the way I can focus on cleaning this thing up, which is going to be quite a job. I'm pretty sure this cab was used as a portajohn at some point
I stripped everything, all metal plates and brackets, harnesses, etc.
I went to work on the big stuff first, the cab shell parts. After some hours with simple green and a water hose it's all looking much better
So this is where I'm at right now, with the cab in a million pieces. Tomorrow I go to work cleaning all of the smaller parts, which are just as grimy. This cab does have a fair amount of scratches and other impossible to remove marks, which I'm just going to leave as they are. Never liked the idea of painting one of these unless it's really hopeless, some character is nice. I do want to find some way to get rid of the two very prominent cigarette burns right above the control panel which I'm just tired of staring at. I'm not sure I can figure out a way to do this without making it look worse though. Any thoughts about taking care of these burns?
For whatever reason I always missed out on group buys and local sales. I'm in South Florida, which is a complete wasteland as far as cabs go, or even people into this sort of thing. I always noticed plenty of cabs for sale in California, but shipping across the country is murder and I'm not loaded. I made do with an ancient Sigma supergun and a beat up SFII dynamo cab I bought from a friend in high school, and amassed a pretty nice set of boards. For years I made cab WTB threads on forums for something on the east coast, but got no replies, or offers of stuff like Korean and Chinese cabs. At some point my dad mentioned offhand that he knew the owner of a freight and logistics company and I realized I might finally be able to afford getting a cab across the country. I ask the obvious question and yeah, he can put a cab on a truck and bring it over, no prob.
I look around for who's selling cabs and come across "karcadegame" on this forum, out of California. I start talking to this obviously busy guy and trying to get him to show me what he has, apparently he has lots of NACs but they're hard to get to so it takes a bit of back and forth before I actually start seeing pictures of different machines (and I had to wire full payment before he would start pulling stuff down). Trying to judge a cab with blurry cell phone pictures from the other side of the country is kinda hard, and I'm sure he wasn't too happy with my constant questions about monitor quality etc. I ended up picking this one (actually the nicest one I saw if you can believe it):
Once I did everything went smoothly and he packed it up and put it on a pallet, and onto the truck it went.
I was kind of worried about the way it was packed with only plastic wrap and the placement of the locking straps, after reading horror stories about the neo-geo forums coinopstore group buy, but the trucker said he noticed that it had almost no protection and made sure it would be safe, awesome guy. A couple days later and it's in the garage:
I immediately notice the monitor has problems. There's only minor burn-in of a fighting game health bar but there's quite a bit of bleed when everything is at a decent brightness. I do a full calibration and it's mitigated a bit and I manage to get things looking "decent". I put in a new LS-32 and set of PS-14-GNs in the right color, and rotate the monitor, this is going to be a vertical cab:
After rotation the monitor's condition deteriorated, now coming up like this from a cold start and needing to warm up for ten minutes or so before looking decent again:
At this point I just wanted to enjoy the thing so I ordered a set of Nichinon caps for the MS9 chassis from Digi-Key and concentrated mostly on playing for a couple weeks, and doing some minor work. I planned to take out the monitor later for a full cab teardown and cleaning so I could recap it then. The previous operator left the control panel a total rat's nest, with wires cut and tied together without solder, lots of electrical tape etc. I wish I had taken pictures of it in this state. Only buttons 1-3 were actually talking to anything, despite the cab coming with five buttons "wired". I took everything out and hacked a temporary setup out of what was there because I didn't have any AMP pins or connectors, just spliced and soldered what I had so that buttons 1-5 went to the JAMMA harness, and just left button 6 as a dummy until I could build a proper kick harness to send buttons 4-6 to my RECO. Not sure I would even need it considering even 4 buttons is a stretch for a cab mostly playing STG and other vertical stuff, but I just want everything working and it's nice to have a lot of buttons for different autofire rates with the RECO.
I changed the old yellowed coin slot for some minor bling, this is the legendhk slot
Cleaned up the front panels and installed some locks, these are 5380 clones from paradisearcade, not in the pic but I also installed a 5575 clone from legendhk on the coin box door:
And did a general light cleaning of the cab body to get the most obvious grime off, also replaced some missing bolts on the CP and marquee and installed a grounded US power cord
Around this point the marquee lamp starter that was already on it's last legs died completely so I ordered a new FG-1E starter from atlanta light bulbs and got a Philips "Natural" 15-watt T8 fluorescent tube from home depot which is the closest color temperature they had to the Toshiba FL-15D that came in the cab; 5000K vs. the original 6500K. It's a bit warmer but I felt like the original bulb made the marquee look too washed out so it's a bonus in my book:
I tried to play Raiden and didn't get any sound and measured +0.1V on the -5V line so I opened the 400-5198-01X PSU and found the 78L05 regulator had a hole in it
Replaced that and all was good, but I'm thinking about replacing it with a 7805 so this doesn't happen again. The 78L05 is only rated at 100mA while the 7805 can handle 1A. Has anyone done this?
After this I concentrated on just using the cab for a while, putting off the major work to do with the monitor and full teardown. I started to get annoyed with the inescapable bleed on some games, particularly darker stuff like Sky Shark and Twin Cobra. Getting these games to look acceptably bright also meant tons of bleed thanks to this chassis' failing caps. The recapping wouldn't be a big deal but since I wanted to strip and clean the cab when I had the monitor out, the cab would end up out of commission for a while. I decided to man up and get it over with
The chassis and tube were super clean compared to the rest of the cab, which was unbelievably filthy (more on this later). I had posted a thread over in the monitor help subforum about my monitor issues, and through that I learned that I actually have a newer MS9 chassis that auto syncs between 15 and 24kHz with no jumper needed, it's replaced by a relay. I'm certain this is not the cab's original monitor, but a newer one put in later at some point. Judging by the PSU model and some date code stickers found in the cab this is a very early NAC.
Here's the chassis pre-recap, with the relay visible
I replaced every cap but the 1000µF B+ filter, which I forgot to order but is now on it's way to me. A Hakko FR-300 desoldering gun made this job super easy and everything was painless
When I plugged in the monitor to test, I was amazed. Not only was the slow warmup issue gone but the general picture quality was awesome. I was kind of bummed thinking I got a dog of a monitor and that this was a tired and worn out tube but this thing now looks almost like a PVM. No hint of bleed or any weirdness at all.
This is post-recap but pre-post-recap recalibration so I'm pretty sure it will look even better once that's done, click it for a bigger pic
With that out of the way I can focus on cleaning this thing up, which is going to be quite a job. I'm pretty sure this cab was used as a portajohn at some point
I stripped everything, all metal plates and brackets, harnesses, etc.
I went to work on the big stuff first, the cab shell parts. After some hours with simple green and a water hose it's all looking much better
So this is where I'm at right now, with the cab in a million pieces. Tomorrow I go to work cleaning all of the smaller parts, which are just as grimy. This cab does have a fair amount of scratches and other impossible to remove marks, which I'm just going to leave as they are. Never liked the idea of painting one of these unless it's really hopeless, some character is nice. I do want to find some way to get rid of the two very prominent cigarette burns right above the control panel which I'm just tired of staring at. I'm not sure I can figure out a way to do this without making it look worse though. Any thoughts about taking care of these burns?
Last edited:
hopefully the 1st of many to come. 
