zak wrote: ↑August 31st, 2019, 12:45 pm
RoZioN wrote: ↑August 31st, 2019, 12:33 pm
I'm not saying you have to, vutbif you've ever bought a board from a Japanese PCBshop you know that it's kind of in a league of their own. All boards I have bought over the years have looked new.
Just something to take into consideration aswell
This is generally true.
However, you can still end up with some right duffers too in my experience.
Recently happened to a friend with a Valkyrie System II PCB from Surugaya
carefully angled pics to hide damage. And "state flame" was not mentioned!
Yup, I’ve been on a full-on, duffer streak recently!
So, I’m more than happy to shatter any illusions that buying expensive PCBs from Japanese shops guarantees you’re getting mint (or even fully working boards at all)
In fact, if my experience with Valkyrie is anything to go by, don’t even count on getting the same PCB pictured.
Yugen2plus has also seemingly taken to hiding/not disclosing repairs - as I found out recently with an X-Multiply I won. Although at least in that case, the repairs were pretty clean, and the game actually worked.
RoZioN wrote: ↑August 31st, 2019, 12:49 pm
Yeah. But surugaya is not tops/mak/gfront. Last time we were there they had 400+$ boards just laying in a a pile in a box.
This is just my experience.
I doubt I’ll ever buy again from Suruga-ya after my recent experience. But surely G-Front are the worst of the lot? Genuinely lost track of the number of horror stories I’ve read about broken boards.
Tops seem the most transparent…but while a lot of their Cave games, etc are in nice shape – most of their ‘older’ stuff seems pretty hit and miss, in terms of condition. Despite the high price, the Ninja Baseball BatMan they have in, for instance, has no seal on the main board, missing ROM seals and messy repairs.