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hmmmm, not sure where you live but lets assume Topeka, that would put me about 240 miles away. It would be cool to have an 80's arcade machine in my new rec room, but I would not know how difficult these would be to fix? What exactly is meant by "Monitor Kit"? If you only had Glaxian, Tempest, Defender, or Asteroids, etc...



Add 45 or so miles to topeka. I'm to the west just outside Wamego. I gave the galaxians cocktail to my boss. He just bought a new monitor and stuck it in. They're $179 I think.

They're not particularly hard to work on for the most part. A monitor kit is a collection of small parts mostly capacitors soldered to the monitor circuit board.The capacitors dry out over the years and the monitor will work, but the screen will be all goofy. The parts are $5-10, you just have to be able to install them. There's a place that rebuilds boards- www.arcadeshop.com I've never tried them but they list the boards they do and the monitor boards are $55-75 depending on model. Switching out a board easy. A case can be made for just replacing the whole monitor, tube and all, which is a little more work but it's all new then.
The Gravitar is a color vector monitor- different breed of cat. The exchange on that is $75 and they have an upgrade of some kind they reccomend thats like another 50 or so. I had that game 4 days and the monitor just quit while it was running.
The Mame deal is the slick way to go if you're focus is on playing and nothing else. Having a line of original games is more for the collector or someone after the atmospere.
If you're serious I can go into more detail on what you're looking at on the various games.