I’ve loved arcade games ever since i was little even if i was a little young to have enjoyed the golden era. Some of my personal favorites from around my hometown include a Gyruss cocktail cabinet at a local sub shop and Captain America and the Avengers at the movie theatre.
Due to this strange love of arcades i’ve always wanted my own multicade cabinet (because i just don’t have the room or the desire to be that guy who has a full arcade in his house). I’ve had an X-Arcade stick for a while and it’s fun for playing “reproductions” on the PC but it’s just not the same if you’re not standing in front of a massive wooden cabinet flailing away at a joystick.
This weekend was a big arcade auction down in NC and a few friends were taking a truck down in hopes of bringing back some pinball games. On a whim i asked them to be on the lookout for a nice cabinet in good condition with a working monitor and enough buttons to play something a little more modern than Ms. Pac-Man (not that i have anything against Ms. Pac-Man, which is a game i have many fond memories over). Luck would have it that they ended up bringing back a Tekken Tag cabinet for me! But sadly no pinball machines.
Inspecting the cabinet it seems to work fine though Ethan (757 Labs‘s local arcade repair wizard) suggests a re-capping of the monitor just to clear things up a bit as he’s has luck with that approach in the past. After Matt D. and Ethan played a quick game of Tekken (Matt coming out the victor) we got to taking things apart and figuring out what we had to work with.
The board is a Namco System 12 which was the same board used in Soul Calibur and Mr. Driller both awesome games i hope to find as swap-ins for this cabinet. Since the System 12 is a JAMMA board i’ve already ordered a J-PAC and I-PAC2 to hook a PC up to the cabinet. The next step will, hopefully, be the hardest part: waiting for parts to arrive.