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I wish I'd known you was in Bedfordshire! I have a Bang & Olufsen BeoCenter 1 in full working order that you could have picked up in the van too. Free obviously for the cave! I believe it matches the one you already have.
There's a moral to this story... If you're going to jam a container full of stuff for long-term storage, always stick some arcade cabinets in the back to ensure that when you clear it out 10 years later a team of people will turn up and help you with a van 😂
The Cave really could do with an appliance dolly. Longer rails on the back which can have protective padding attached, locations for straps to tie down the loads, and many models feature an additional set of wheels to either tilt the load back at 45° or 90° without the operator bearing the weight.
One of the things about arcade restoration that makes videos like these really interesting is the enormous gamut of skills involved. You're almost doing furniture repair. But there's also electronics debugging, the recreation of complex graphic artwork, sandblasting and repainting... it truly is a tour-de-force to bring these objects back to life.
I could have cried seeing that operation wolf in such a sorry state, loved playing that at the arcade, atleast some parts shpupd be able to be saved and restored. Great episode and you've got a nice varied collection of things to add to the museum.
I really feel for Mike! I went through a similar time of enormous upheaval in my life in the 2000s with having to move 3 times in 4 years time being only part of it. Through all of that I managed to in one way or another lose many, many possessions from my teen and early adult years including most of my offline digital life that went back to the early 90s. I'm sure going through that storage container had to be hard to do emotionally!
Saving that Gauntlet is more important than saving Operation Wolf..... but great work salvaging what ever you could. I collect lots of stuff, consoles.. games, figures and video game memorabilia... I am just very thankful my container is weather proofed!
we need a road trip series , where the gang go around the world searching through rubbish tips, old abandoned warehouses and closed down malls for those elusive PCB's and weird controllers
Recover, Restore, Revive, Retro. Holly, and the boys are off to save yet another bulky and musty machine, then restore it to a state worthy of sticky fingers and freshly laid UV-reactive space and confetti themed black carpet. Get it done without the annoying usual TV production sidebar interviews and forced drama, and the like and we'll be watching for years
Seeing those arcade cabs with all that rust and water damage really breaks my heart. Hope you can salvage some of it, looking forward to a follow up video!
Some nice old stuff at least, shame about the cabinet damage. 15:52 I really wish the word intrepidation existed. Is he fearful or is he fearless, who knows! Also, got to love those one handed pickups of precious old hardware, adds a real sense of fear to the video.
Commodore Plus/4!!!!!!!! That's a real blast down memory lane for me! It was the family computer when I was a wee lad and I have fond memories of loading games on the tape deck with my dad and waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for them to load. I'm stretching my memory back almost 40 years but I can remember playing Frogger on tape, as well as some text based adventure games on cassettes. This was the machine that got me into computers and games.
I worked in industrial sandblasting for 7 years and that rust doesn't worry me, because I know you can blast it to white metal, ie, class 3. I myself built a blasting cabinet, and coupled with a decent compressor, it comes in quite handy.
We had a flood a few years back in our outside shed, the ceiling seal went and I lost a lot to the water damage and didn't know about it for a long time, till the better weather appeared and I opened the shed looking for some old games to find all the horrible things that had gone on (R.I.P. original big box SotB) this vid gave me PTSD (lol) good luck with the reclamation looking forward to the Trash to Treasure series.
So the chassis are honestly trivial - recut from MDF and sorted. The plastics are cleanable, being in the storage container they have been out of the UV. The majority of steel I've seen is rusty, sure, but it's all surface rust. A sandblaster should do a lovely job cleaning up steels. God that Op. Wolf is sad. What a tragic trip.
There's a lesson to be learned here. If you're going to stash your arcades away in a dank storage unit, then just sell the games to someone that will enjoy and care for them instead.
I'd argue the same thing with attics. My mate damaged a Sega Saturn by storing it in a damp, variable temperature place, assuming that it would fine in there because it's inside a house.
@@Nukle0n This is the real lesson here. Outdoor storage particularly in shipping containers is not safe from the elements, especially water. You can see clearly that everything got hit by water damage down to the floorboards. If this had been stored indoors let alone a climate controlled facility, would've been dusty but largely intact. My view is if you're not going to store it properly and you have no plans to get it out of there within a few years, it's best to sell. But proper storage is important in either case. I think this guy intended to get back to this stuff sooner than he did, and life got in the way. Then it just got away from him.
Owner had no plan to sell them in mint new condition. People do not have know-how and skills to restore or retromod their storage space electronics. It was left and forgotten. It was kept because of memories. Time goes on and things get broken until someone cleans place or sells it as is. Normal life.
Both painful and amazing to watch. And what an absolutely flying start it got off to with an OutRun replacement for the arcade, can’t wait to give it a go. Such a shame that Operation Wolf was in a state, at least you already have one and I really hope Gauntlet and Marble Madness can be saved
Gauntlet and Operation Wolf.😢At least you got all those lovely PCB game boards, and outrun only played that once may years ago on a cabinet, I hope you save a lot here. Good Luck, you will sadly need it.
I hope you get a chance to rebuild the cabinets and restore the machines that were badly damaged. They are all great games and deserve a new chance at life
There are certainly some candidates for astonishing restorations in this collection. I hope there are plenty of items you can do something useful with.
I would love to be able to visit the cave if I ever get over to the UK. I've been a long-time subscriber of the channel, back when it was still the Retro Man Cave and I remember the video where you announced the name change.
🙋♂️Can I have one of those OG Xbox, please 😅.... What a great vid as always. In this day and age we are still finding barn finds. I can't wait to see what's next for all those finds.❤
The first full week of the school holidays was Scout camp, the motorway system would be full of Scouts from all over the country in minibuses. At the motorway service stations there would be a queue of Scouts and leaders at the Outrun machines. Motorway service stations always had the best arcade games. better than anything in towns that didn't have arcades. Leaders including myself who had been driving for several hours would stop to refuel and rest at a motorway service station and immediately burn off the frustration of driving an overloaded and under powered minibus by playing Outrun. It became a tradition, and Outrun a classic of motorway travel.
Fun to watch but sad at times too! I must say I'd have been happy just to have the machine gun from the Op Wolf Cabinet mounted on a block of wood just as a display piece, how cool would that be?! but i do hope you can get it back to its former glory, along with the other machines too! 👍
It is so frustrating and heartbreaking seeing retro tech and other enthusiasts who both *do* bother to save important documents and items but *don't* bother to do it properly. There is a difference between archiving, collecting, and hoarding. It is very important to know the distinction.
I love this type video and would have loved to have been there to lend a hand. Sorting through and cleaning that lot up, strangely would give me a huge sense of satisfaction. Plus enjoying a Synth and drive session with the team would be excellent.
I would love a long video walk through of everything that was pulled from the storage container almost like how people do like the mail haul videos. I think that would be fun. I am heartbroken to see those cabinets in that condition... but I know they are in good hands and I look forward to seeing their amazing transformation as you restore all of them (I know you said they might be too far gone... but I have faith!)
Ooooft... Those poor Operation Wolf/Gauntlet cabs... I was hoping for a bit of a TV miracle but as you worked towards them I realised it was getting less and less likely... Good effort recovering what you could. I think using the cabs as a template to make some modern repro's would be cool though!
Re the Op Wolf gun sandblasting might be a bit harsh as it's probably only tinplate. There's an Italian restorer of historic firearms with a RU-vid channel called Backyard Ballistics. He has quite a few tips for the non-destructive removal of rust and also re-finishing. Something like Evaporust might do the job.
Some great finds and I look forward to the restoration of these items. It's a shame the OW cabinet was in such bad shape but it it will live on with being the template for a new cabinet. Plus side, you might be able to save the gun.
We call those Conex containers here in the US - and a lot of people think they are getting a deal when they buy a 72 foot model for $1,500 - $3,000 but they are HORRIBLE for storing stuff long term. No insulation whatsoever and no water / humidity protection to boot. Everything gets moldy. Avoid at all costs!
It was heartbreaking to see how badly damaged that Operation Wolf cabinet was - but part of me is super excited at the prospect of the restoration process - brand new cabinet made from templates, new side art - gun restored - it could be glorious!
23:35 I would go with evaporust or look for mechanic shop who does have special ultrasonic cleaning and rust removing baths for the metalparts. Sandblasting can be hard for such filigree stuff.
I'll second the evaporust recommendation. That is a way to convert rust back to iron and then you can properly evaluate and prepare the metal for restoration.
Nature wants everything back. Good luck fighting the tide. That Gauntlet is a miracle compared to the Operation Wolf. Much better game too in my book. Good luck with the Marble Madness.
i feel like i need a wash and im not even there lol......nice goodies though......should keep you (and us) in vids for a while😷😷 I see many local chipboard suppliers clapping their hands lol
The first pickup was fantastic, greatest game of all time Such a shame about the container, damp really does destroy things, sad to see glorious items left to rot like that. Hopefully you can fix a lot of it up👍
Ah, such a shame to see Crystal Maze fall apart. I'd say it'd be a bit of a mental, physical, mystery & skill challenge all rolled into one. If it were working, i'd be thinking of my time acting as games tester for the reboot of the show a few years back, whilst playing it. I must get on with my own arcade controller projects....
the mouldy tubes if they are capable of working they will flicker at first and then they'll slowly become brighter and regain focus, sometimes after many many hours they'll end up as good as new but other times they won't.
Seeing some of the newer consoles in there, like Xbox 360's and the DS consoles kicking about, really makes me feel a bit old, I used to sell those when they were new in Gamestation as a teenager and seeing them jammed in a container as aged me.
Ask me... my console life pretty much stopped with the SNES because I couldn't stand the 3D controls of the N64. I got my SNES on clearance in 1997 and later added an NES to my collection. Everything past that is essentially brand new in my mind, and seeing it discarded in a storage container definitely makes me feel old.
When I hear Bedfordshire I immediately think of the Thomas Dolby song White City "Where was I? Bedfordshire. That's a lousy place, since the A45 You go round and it's utterly flat. I can't see how you can have any, any enthusiasm For that sort of thing at all... My idea when we started out was to have a, you know, rising up, and falling, kind of an Undulating, ovulating ground, which you don't get so much nowadays... Everything tends to be sort of piecemeal and staggered Which I don't think's really very exciting, do you? Ah, you're not there either. "
That CRT without a rim-guard looked worrying. I spotted several CRT TVs amongst the "junk". Those are becoming valuable themselves. I sold a 21" one to a student, younger than the TV, who wanted to build a MAME cabinet.
I know it's not exactly Cave material, but those quizzes and the Crystal Maze Team Challenge are worth a ROM dump at least, as MAME's collection of such is woefully incomplete due to how many revisions have been lost through upgrades etc, and it would be worth seeing if anything here completes the partial sets there. As for the rest of it, well, you've probably got a spare original stock 68k processor out of it ;)
*sniff* poor arcades. :( My 3 player Rampage machine suffered a similar fate when my parents wouldn't let me store it inside the house any more. I saved the boards from it and they went to a good home, but the rest of the machine was toast.
The Engelbert Humperdinck LP. As soon as I saw the cover it brought back a memory of my nan getting a new turntable in the 1970s and my dad and me setting it up for her. Nan had that Humperdinck LP. I wonder why so many og Xboxen? Did the person run a Halo LAN? Are any of them softmodded/chipped/TSOPed?
Disappointing about those cabinets but it is what it is. Also I would add my own support for putting the OG Xbox in the museum, can be modded easily and a new hard drive or SSD can be put in so games can go direct to the drive and would be a great display piece with many examples of its library on the machine. There seems to be multiple examples from the container and they probably need TLC at this point with dodgy clock capacitors that leak and thermal paste needing redoing, so I'd say its an ideal time to do it.
100% new cabs, Ply Lining Services in Waterwells Glos might be able to help, they have a large CNC cutter and might be able to make kits available for others, no harm in asking.
A couple of years ago I cleared out my old storage unit, which had been virtually untouched for fifteen years. As in this case it wasn't climate-controlled, and indeed, it was painful digging through the lot. To make matters worse, my ColecoVision (along with two dozen cartridges, and a number of the peripherals) was missing, presumably stolen. Not a happy ending.
