On eBay, I beheld a NEO-GEO MVS-4-25 cabinet in very good condition…a Version 1. (The un-ugly 4-slot; Big Red.) The asking price was $400 starting bid or $500 Buy-It-Now, and unlike most cabinet sellers, being a company this one was willing to palletize and freight the cab out to me at cost. (As I have no way of transporting such a thing…) Now, the big question, being the 20th of January, the listing ending on the 23rd, and not expecting tax refunds before the beginning of February, what was I to do? First of all, I had to get a shipping quote. Including packing it up, it was going to be $154 to the nearest freight depot, or $194 to my address. Well, that was an obvious choice. But DAMN that cost a lot. I had to do some thinking, FAST!

Okay, for starters… I didn’t have the money. They wanted the money within 7 days, I wasn’t expecting any in that timeframe. This presented the first obvious problem. Now, the positive aspects… This cabinet has a monitor and coin door that works just fine. It also has a fully working 4-slot MVS motherboard. In my collection, which includes almost twenty 1-slot boards, a pair of 2-slot boards, and a pair of 4-slot boards…NONE of the multi-slot boards actually work completely. Also, this cabinet is in really fairly good condition and I could definitely use it as a template to build another. And perhaps most importantly, it is THE cabinet I want. An MVS-4-25 Version 1. Well shit… It costs less than a new monitor and coin door. And it’s my goddamn birthday, I should do something nice for myself. That decides it. But the money…

So I e-mailed the seller and laid out plainly that I really want the cabinet, but won’t have the money for another week or so after their payment deadline. I offered to hit the Buy-It-Now if he was willing to wait an extra week for the money. It didn’t look like anyone was going to bid on it, I mean there was a day left by the time I reached this point, and no one had. So it was like free money for them. (At the same time, hitting the Buy-It-Now let me get $40 Bing cashback, so it really only cost me $60 to sweeten the deal, a bargain!) He was fine with those terms, and so I did it.

Next: Part 3, in which Baka eats too much pizza in celebration…

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