I'm about to buy a 2000 s2k. I'm pretty excited. There's just one condition on my purchase, which brings me to my question.
The car has a "Mugen style hardtop" which the owner had installed because the fabric on the hardtop was worn out.
I intend on having the soft top replaced, so I want to make sure the top frame and motor work fine.
The owner told me he was fine with me removing the hardtop and testing the operation of the soft top before buying the car (with a deposit of course).

From some google searches and watching some hardtop install youtube videos I can see there are several different bracket styles.
From memory, the ones on the car look something like this:


In watching some videos It looked like the bracket with the hardtop mount point might replace a bracket that sits where the lower bolts go. Is that true? Nothing I saw showed the lower mount points very clearly.
I'm wondering if something down there might make the soft top not operate if I remove the hardtop bracket. Could some critical bracket be missing (replaced by the hardtop bracket)?

 

I misspoke and said "fabric on the hardtop" in my post above. :-p. oops. meant to say fabric on the soft-top.

 

These are some of the cheaper style rear hardtop mounts; looks like you should be using larger washers; so these kind of suck as you either need to take off all 3 bolts as there are 2 under body panels that you don't have pictured.

As far if they are good; they are the cheapest one you can get; I personally like OEM style; I have a OEM race style that is 2 piece; it's really you get what you pay for.

As far as something missing you are fine if you are using the OEM latches at front one thing to check with; make sure the softtop latches are there and it wasn't reused on the hardtop

This is VERY VERY COMMON! I had to buy another set of soft top latches one for my hardtop and one for my soft-top. I guess you could swap them in and out but it's such a pain in the butt