All right, we're going to start off 2021 with an arcade pickup video. So the first arcade I picked up was Cruisin' World. So Cruisin' World came with a couple issues actually. The CRT was broken and it needs a monitor chassis recap. So what I'm going to do is I was going to convert this to an LCD, which I did and I know a lot of people are against that, but I wanted to do it so I could at least play it over the holiday. So I'll show you quickly what I did. I want to talk about something real quick before we get into that. So sometimes these boards, no matter whether they're midway or whatever, but this is obviously a midway game, you'll see the EPROMs will sometimes get loose in shipment. So if your game isn't booting up right away, something maybe you've bought via auction or some kind of local sale, you might want to try pressing these in. So these do get loose. So sometimes if the game won't post properly, just kind of go through and give them a little push. You know, don't push them too hard. Push every single EPROM. And what you'll notice is A lot of times that fixes the majority of issues because these will loosen up in shipment. So anyways, getting to the CRT to LCD conversion, you're going to need some kind of board that can convert the arcade video to something like HDMI or VGA. Now, this converter board isn't a very good one. And actually, Bob over at Retro RGB is actually sending me a new one to replace this one that they've fixed the timings and done a bunch of really cool things to make the video quality a lot better than this one. But this one did the job temporarily. So what you do is basically you splice into the video signal. And then you, right here, you splice into the video signal. You bring that video signal up to the board. And then at that point, it will convert it. Now, how do you power this board so that when I power up the arcade with the single switch, everything powers on? What I did is I tapped into 5 volts. So I know where 5 volts is on the JAMMA harness. I just took a multimeter just to make sure, but obviously this is labeled, so unless this was wrong, but I wanted to make sure. So I tapped in with a multimeter, and so this will power the board upon the arcade powering up. But then the monitor, if John Youssi there's an LCD monitor back there, how do you power that up? So I actually spliced into the wiring for that as well. And then this is actually the wiring for the original monitor So if you notice the original monitor wiring is still here but we not actually using that anymore so i spliced that into the wiring for the monitor so that everything's a single switch that turns the whole system on now we're gonna we're gonna cover this later on in subsequent videos but i just wanted you guys to take a look at this i know uh a lot of people are against lcd conversions of crts but this was just so i could get it up and running and my kids and stuff could play it for the holidays. All right, let's go to the second arcade pickup. All right, my second arcade pickup is a Neo Geo MVS. This is actually a four slot, but they converted it to a two slot. I'm not really sure why. The marquee right now is not lit, so I just temporarily went and printed out some artwork online. It's not the actual cards that would have gone in these things, but pretty cool. I'm going to actually talk with Joe Sabo and get some cards for this thing so I can get it looking more like original and then I'm actually going to fix the marquee light. I think I'm going to use just an LCD, sorry, an LED light in there. I'm not really sure. We'll see. As far as the side art goes, someone decided to paint the side of this thing. So it's actually black paint with the logo over it. Now I've seen several people do this. I'm not sure why they do it. Maybe it's just because they're lazy and they don't want to go through the work of restoring it properly, but But I'm probably going to paint it red, I'll sand it down, paint it red and get it back to its normal shape. Or I'll see if I can sand it down enough that I can put some actual vinyls on it from Joe Sabo or something like that. The control panel you'll see looks pretty good actually. It looks like they're still using the original sticks. The buttons have been replaced and it's using Cherry Micro switches. It's not wired for a four player. actually a two it's wired as a multi cart so this select game isn't going to do anything right now so I may go ahead and restore that but I'll show you what they did so when you open up the control panel here you'll see the game board down there so this game board it's actually a two slot game board believe it or not so you'll see there's actually only two slots down there and that's the 161 and one multi cart so that's just got a bunch of games on it there aren't even 161 Neo Geo games so there duplicates and things like that There actually games that aren on there like Windjammers which would have been nice if it was But anyways I have some Neo Geo carts so I may decide to restore this to original I'm not really sure. And just run four separate carts, or we'll keep the multi-cart in there. I'm not really sure yet. And then, you know, everything's kind of in good condition here. Nothing too bad. But I have a better control panel that's in better shape than this one. so I may replace this control panel with the one I have. I'm not really sure yet. So the only other issue this machine has right now is the monitor is a bit, oh look, that's the 161 glitching out a little bit. The monitor is a bit dull. I did replace it. I did a cap, not the monitor, sorry. I replaced it with a cap kit. I went through the monitor chassis and thanks to Justin, my buddy, he got me confident with a desoldering iron. So there's several issues with the monitor. I got it looking pretty decent, but you can see the coloring is still a little dull. That could actually be the CRT dying. I'm not really sure. I've done a lot of work on the chassis, so I'm thinking that's my next troubleshooting area to explore. So we'll see. But I'm excited about this. I'm excited to have this in my collection. I obviously have a Neo Geo MVSX, which is that newer system, but having the original is pretty sweet. And I do have a good collection of Neo Geo carts, so it's going to be fun to kind of play with this and see what we can do with it. So you'll definitely see more of this on the channel in the coming weeks and months. All right, before we wrap things up, here's a closer look at the Cruzen Exotica. It's in pretty good shape, actually, but like I said, I'm in the process of doing that LCD conversion, so I started to make the bezel, and I kind of did it fast and made some mistakes, but yeah, it doesn't look so bad, actually, believe it or not, and I used a 1610 aspect ratio monitor, so 1610 is actually more vertical, so it's still wide but it's higher vertically so it's a little more like a square and you'll notice I did it really quick and I actually missed a whole section. I got to re-tape this and re-spray it but I was going quickly and I just wanted to get it ready for the holidays so I did replace the marquee light. It actually had a pretty bummed out marquee light so I got that working I just replaced it with a fluorescent There these newer style fluorescent bulbs which It a fluorescent bulb fixture which looks almost identical to what was in there except there an led strip instead of a fluorescent bulb but yeah it doesn look too bad it plays well i think the 1610 monitor was a much better idea and unfortunately if you look at it from the front you don't really see that gap i have there see if you look if i look down John Youssi there's a gap but if i look up you don't really see it but yeah the image doesn't look bad on that LCD converter board, but Bob over at Retro RGB gave me a much better one. So I'm hopefully going to see that should clean up the image and make it look great. But yeah, everything works great on this. The force feedback wheel is really strong still, which sometimes those motors tend to go out on these things. And this one's actually really, really strong. I'll bring this panel down real quick so you can take a look at the mechanics behind it because this thing has a pretty crazy motor to make this force feedback work. Okay, so in here you can see the gear system, and you can see that's the motor for the force feedback. This thing is, it's surprising how strong this thing is. I mean, if you look at it, it's 90 volts DC, 1.51 amps. I mean, the thing is like, my son, it like rips his hands, so it's pretty awesome. It's pretty powerful, but anyways, yeah, everything in this cabinet's pretty clean there. you can see kind of my rudimentary mounting system for the LCD panel, but I'm going to go over that in a subsequent video, but that's, that's kind of it. It's all I really wanted to show you guys. All right guys, well, that's it for now. If you enjoy these pickup videos, let me know. I'm going to do more of these in 2021. I also want to do a lot more arcade restoration stuff. I know that's something a lot of you guys are getting into, you know, buying cabinets at auction or buying cabinets locally and you want to be able to fix them up yourself so I'm getting really into that from a hobby perspective and I think it makes just everything fun and exciting so if you like this video give me a thumbs up consider subscribing to the channel and that's it for now guys we'll see you on the next one Thank you.