Donkey Kong Junior conversion

I picked up a Midway-style cabinet that had been converted to a Street Fighter II a few years back. After some inspection I noticed it has previously been a Ms. Pac-Man, which was made apparent by the signature bright blue paint that was over-sprayed onto the inside of the cabinet.

I have a fondness for this style of cabinet, but I already have several in my collection and didn't feel like I needed another. So it sat in the garage for a few years until a friend of mine mentioned he was looking for an arcade for his game room.

He had nostalgia for Donkey Kong Junior; the bright orange paint and the classic artwork, but did care so much for the form factor of the Nintendo cabinet. He felt the monitor marquee was too close and that it didn't allow you to really lean into the machine, like a Pac-Man cabinet would. I realized then I had the purpose use for my frankenstein'd Ms. Pac-Man cabinet!

I ended up doing a restoration / conversion combination on the cabinet. This required some custom artwork to be put together as the marquee, monitor bezel, and control panel are all different sizes between the two machines. Instead of a single game, we went with the ArcadeSD game board, which is a great multi-game board, especially for cabinets with a monitor mounted in the vertical position.

It includes a joystick, three buttons, and a trackball and has all the classics: all three Donkey Kongs, Ceneipede, Millipede, Missile Command, Mario Bros, Frogger, Galaga, Ms. Pac-Man, and the list goes on.

It was a really fun and unique build and I'm happy with how it turned out. It's definitely much more appealing than the cramped Street Fighter 2 was!

Timelapse Video

I've put together a timelapse video showing the complete restoration that runs at about 20x speed, which you can find on my YouTube channel.

Parts List

The marquee, monitor bezel, and control panel are all my custom design built in Photopea (a free Photoshop clone) and were printed by Szabo's Arcades.