Saving my flooded MVS U4

Murray

Akari's Big Brother
Joined
Aug 16, 2005
Posts
2,533
Back in 2016 my house got 3ish feet of water in it and among the victims was my beloved MVS cabinet.

I'm finally in a position to start cleaning it up and it's going surprisingly smoothly!

Even though the monitor got water half way up it, no problems there.

Out of an abundance of caution, I replaced the power supply. Turns out I didn't need to... Both because the old one worked fine and the new one died almost instantly. Kind of wtf there and I bought it too far back to remember where I got it.

After that has been a whole lot of general filth and corrosion cleanup. Surprisingly enough, everything seems to work fine!

So now that the functional bit is out of the way I have one or two things left to address.

First, one of the many anonymous helpers accidentally threw out the front panel to the cabinet when we were gutting the house. Can anyone suggest a way to get or make a new one?

Second, the control panel overlay has always been a little rough since it lived in an arcade most of its life. What's a good way to freshen that up?
 

kingcuckmelon1

War Room Troll
Joined
Dec 19, 2017
Posts
2,148
That would be one of my nightmares, I had actually thought of ideas to prevent it happening to as I live in an area that very occasionally floods. Do you have any pics of the damaged cab? There are excellent control panel replicas on ebay
 

Murray

Akari's Big Brother
Joined
Aug 16, 2005
Posts
2,533
As it turns out, I spoke too soon on the 4-slot board. It's failing backup ram tests and the universe bios is reporting all kinds of exceptions so I'm waiting for a diag bios and some ram to get here. The 2-slot (which was on a shelf) is filling in for it for now.

Flooding is tricky. The area I lived in flooded sometimes but even the worst flood it had ever had (in 1983) didn't get in my house. In 2016 it got everyone. Sometimes you just don't see it coming with enough notice to do anything about it.

It was really just muddy ... and then dirty once it dried out. Unpainted metal parts had some rust on them and the joysticks need to be cleaned and relubed. I haven't opened the coin box yet but I expect it's more of the same in there.

I didn't take too many pics of the board itself but it's about what you'd expect. The area around the backup ram battery was corroded to hell and there was some rust around the legs of a lot of components. I had to pull the bios and hose it and the socket down with Deoxit before I could even get to the self tests.

The part I'd like to fix up on the control panel is the light areas around the buttons and the worn areas around the joystick dust covers. When I replaced all the buttons, I tried to get the original Seimitsu ones but apparently the flat top ones have a wider bezel than these convex ones I got so now I have this white ring around them.

 
Top