Mr. Do!
Update on composite Mr. Do! Bezel vector art
Love this bezel, this Mr. Do! artwork is valuable to me. But as we’ve seen, one of these bezels is worth about a whopping total of $2. That’s not private sales, that’s eBay! The fact that these bezels are about worthless doesn’t change my motivation to vectorize the artwork.
Last night and earlier this morning I finished what cherries I could on the bezel that goes to this rare “white” Mr. Do! with sideart. There are five sets of cherries on the upper right, two on the middle right, and one in the top middle. Two of the sets in the upper right repeat, which is great because those cherries are on the bezel piece that bends, that I don’t physically have.
So, as of right now, I don’t have good enough photos to trace the middle cherries on the top right, and the cherries in the top middle. I bent one of the photos I had for the top Mr. Do! bezel portion to help me piece together some things, but I again have to wait until something else comes up.
The Mame guys have the Mr. Do! scans and photos I do, so I am hoping that maybe they can do something with the top that I don’t know how to do. Here is what it looks like.
Later in the day I got additional photos that were hi-res enough to trace the missing cherries on the upper right. They also showed a sixth set of cherries I hadn’t noticed before at the very top, so I traced those too and included them in the artwork. Now all I am missing are the cherries at the top!!
Vectorizing Rare Mr. Do! Bezel Pieces
Continued working on the rare “white” Mr. Do! bezel today. I got the main large yellow portions of the Mr. Do Bezel drawn with the blue diagonal lines included. I was also able to finish the base of the ice cream dish, and I also realized that there is a slight difference in the artwork for the apples, so I made another file for that. Pretty exciting to be further along.
I can piece most of the Mr. Do! bezel together today, and will probably finish up tomorrow by drawing the cherries with the new great photos I have. After almost a year of searching, I almost have a really accurate Mr. Do Bezel in a vector artwork format.
Scanning in Mr. Do! Bezel
Today I took a lot of time to scan in the bezel, from the rare “white” Mr. Do! arcade game, in 8 different pieces and stitch it together. It doesn’t look great, there is some discoloration and one spot is just fractions of an inch from lining up, but even with all that headache and the one missing chunk, I can still perfectly finish my vector artwork for the Mr. Do Bezel.
Photo of Mr. Do! Bezel I won on ebay
Before I left for vacation I heard back from Mark, and we emailed a couple of times.
First, he did indeed end up selling his Mr. Do about 5 years ago he said, which would have been about the time he was posting looking for that bezel in the Google Groups. He said that he sold it to a couple he thought, and was remembering for some reason that they may have resold it soon after that. He offered to look through his old email to see if he could find some contact information for them. So that is very exciting.
Also….I have heard in the past that if you wait long enough you will eventually see something come back up on ebay again if you missed it the first time. Well, there was no first time that I missed it, but the White Mr. Do Bezel came up for sale under a “miscellaneous” title on ebay a couple weeks ago. I was in contact with another guy who does Mame stuff and we were going to get it either way between the two of us. Well, I bid and no one else did, I got the stupid thing for a $1. Of course there was $12 shipping, but still pretty cheap for something I wanted that bad.
I had it waiting for me when I got back from vacation, the colors look really good. There are some scratches which you couldn’t see in the auction, and it does have a small chunk missing at the bottom and some cracks / melted spots, but I don’t care. I wanted it to have it, and I knew I could use it to complete the bezel tracing that I needed to do! Here is a photo of it.
Found another email for Mark Deroller
Got the bug today, and decided to dig a little deeper.
I thought I remembered Mark DeRoller (who’s white Mr. Do started my whole search) posting a work phone number to call him back in 2001 on some of his inquiries. I looked back, but couldn’t find it right away, I didn’t have time to look through 67 posts. But, I did figure out that he has yet a third email address at a Yahoo account. The first two emails he had listed failed for me, but I see he also has a photo gallery through Yahoo from ’06, so he may still use that email.
Here’s hoping. I almost get the impression he might have stopped collecting and sold everything off, but who knows, maybe he hasn’t!!!
Another rare Mr. Do! Bezel instance found
Found something interesting tonight, found another collector who has this same bezel on some sort of Mr. Do conversion machine (maybe for all I know) from the rare white Mr. Do machine from Gleeb. His name is Daniel Tofalo, and I shot him a personal message through the KLOV group. I hope he has time to get back with me on what he knows about the machine he has and it’s history. It may give me some insight into my next lead.
Second instance of Mr. Do! doesn’t exist
I called Joe back today. Bad news. He said he didn’t have a dedicated Mr. Do in the warehouse anymore. He said business for the dedicated games has dropped with the newer games today, and they just don’t have any dedicated Do’s anymore, let alone the one I was looking for. I asked if he could find out who he sold it to, and he didn’t think he could. So, that lead is dead. And with it, for now, my project. I may find something else turn up someday, the problem being, even if it does turn up, what shape will the sideart be in? It is a double battle, waiting to find one, and to find one that has sideart that hasn’t been worn off completely.
It makes me sad, but Joe was very nice and I thanked him for his help, really good guy.
