One game I have very fond memories of growing up with is the original Mortal Kombat. I never got the chance to play it at the arcades much, but did sink plenty of time into playing it on the Sega Master System, Mega Drive and Amiga 500. I recently came across an original arcade Midway Mortal Kombat 1 board set, with the sound board and couldn’t pass up the chance to buy it.
The board set won’t be any good without a cabinet to play it in. I could construct a cheap and easy 2 player cabinet to house it – but that would be boring. The artwork on the original MK machines was awesome. So lets do that instead 🙂
First thing was to source an original MK owners manual. These things are filled with useful information about the boards, chips and components. It cost roughly $20 (inc shipping) from the USA, but well worth having. You can just print out the same thing from KLOV, but I prefer to have an original copy in my hands 🙂
Next up was to source a kick harness to enable the additional buttons. Thankfully they are easy to come by on www.jammaboards.com and quite cheap. I purchased a JAMMA harness to use in this machine at the same time.
Before I get too much further along into this project, I’m going to step into research mode to get as much detail about the construction required for the cabinet, along with a rough cost on parts. I’d like to set up a basic test station to hook the board and controls up to run and test boards as I get them. This project seems like a good excuse to finally do that 😉