Congrats Fwuf and future Mrs Fwuf! And best of luck with everything!
XD Still can’t wrap my head around the games mechanics lol
Well me neither, I figured we might manage to have a laugh either way!
Gonna have to find the time for it though XD Either way I’ll see when I’m free and you’re available
No, it just plays MK 1, 2, and Ultimate 3. Have you seen anything about the Arcade1up cabinets? They’re pretty neat, they’re 3/4 sized mini replicas of the original arcade machines. I wanted to get the MK cabinet because A: the button layout is identical to the arcade games, and B: the cabinet is a MK2 replica, and the Raiden artwork on the side is awesome.
I may eventually mod it to play other games…there are a lot of tutorials online regarding installing a Raspberry Pi to play some of the earlier less demanding games, but right now I’ll likely keep it as is.
Edit: Oh, and @Fwufikins, congratulations!
Happy birthday - and this is awesome. I am strangely into this cabinet for no rational reason. Maybe because you can’t really find a reasonable emulation of mk2 or 3. Good luck with the parts. If love to hear your review.
I can tell you a few things just based on having some of the parts in my hands. The side panels show that it is going to be small. I knew that going in though…it’s as tall as my 6 year old. I plan on getting a riser for it, it adds about an extra foot to its size. I messed around with the control panel a bit too. The buttons and joysticks while not bad, they’re not as clicky as I’d like them to be, but then again they’re just as easy to replace as any typical arcade buttons, so no worries there, though I doubt I’ll change them unless they stop working. The marquee is just attached to a solid piece of wood, so it doesn’t light up, and it only has one speaker that sits in the control panel, so mono sound. I’ll say more when I’m able to get it put together, but for now that’s about all I can tell you.
None of that is surprising. How easy do you think it would be to mod it by swapping in some speakers with a sub woofer? Is it a typical 3.5mm jack or something proprietary?
I haven’t opened up the control panel so I’m not entirely sure, but from what I’ve seen on youtube it’s proprietary. There’s a video where ETA Prime modded a Street Fighter cabinet, I’m guessing they’re pretty much the same save for the button layout:
You should invite Kan-Ra to your wedding, and he will be your officiant. Trust me. He won’t do anything bad at your wedding…
Shadow Lord bless you
So, while I’ve been at work, my wife was awesome and went to pick up another MK cabinet, and thankfully it has all its parts, so I’ll be putting it together when I get home.
Thank you for the well wishes everyone! Houses we checked were a bit dumpy and financial stuff is being dumb BUT
We are still looking forward to a nice wedding, and my Uncle got me an early wedding gift that’s right up my alley. THE SWORD OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT!
Or at least a replica of the film prop

Also @G1GlaciusPrime my dad and I were actually talking about building arcade cabinets today! How serendipitous!
Ok, so here’s my review of the MK cabinet, now that I have it together and have played it a bit.
Pros:
- It’s a lot sturdier than it looks. I was expecting it to do a bit more flopping around when gameplay got intense, but it didn’t.
- the joysticks feel fairly similar to my KI TE2 fightstick, and it handles pretty well IMHO. Though keep in mind this is coming from someone that primarily plays with controllers, so someone a bit deeper into the FGC might have different opinion. Also just an fyi, they have a square gate.
- the buttons, while they feel kinda mushy just to press them, are actually pretty sensitive and responsive, so I had no issues pulling off any moves I attempted.
- the emulation to me seems spot-on.
- the games save high scores in all 3 games and unlocked characters in UMK3, though I’m not entirely sure what triggers saving. I unlocked everyone once, and later came back to find they were locked again, I unlocked them a second time, and even with the power off and cables unplugged they were still unlocked. I’m not for certain, but I think saving might be linked to getting a high score.
- putting it together is very simple and the instructions are mostly straightforward save for one issue mentioned in the cons.
Cons: - the sound isn’t too great. It does it’s job, but that’s about it. The speaker seems to do well mid-range, but the highs aren’t that high, and more importantly IMHO, there’s not much bass at all.
- the image, while fine, seems a bit to pixely for my taste. I know some people don’t care and like retro games to be as pixely as possible, but to me everything seems just a touch too jagged.
-the bat tops on the joysticks are scr3w-on, but out of the box they don’t stay screwed down well. I had to take the bottom panel off the controls and take a pair of pliers to the bottom of the joystick to keep it stationary so I could tighten it properly. - the instructions don’t tell you this, but take the protective film off the LCD panel before you attach it to anything else, because it’s a ■■■■■ to get off after it’s all together.
And the biggest con IMHO: - the volume is on a toggle that has 3 settings: mute, uncomfortably loud, and speaker distorting loud.
BTW, here’s a couple of pics of it next to my full-sized custom KI cabinet and 6-year-old, just so you get a sense of size.
Your KI cabinet remains incredibly awesome.
Thanks for the review. It sounds pretty good, although it’s a shame about the sound. I found myself in Walmart yesterday staring at a couple of these in boxes and coming close to buying it. I decided I don’t need it, but the artwork on the cabinet does look awfully good. I hope you enjoy it.
Yeah, the sound is apparently a product line- wide issue. This is mostly speculation, but my guess is since they started out making early games from the late 70s/early 80s they probably figured a single mono speaker in the cabinets would get the job done. MK doesn’t seem to have any issues being mono, but from my understanding Gauntlet on the Rampage cabinet really suffers, because the game is outputting a stereo signal for both music and sound effects, but only one of the 2 channels is being used, so it’s missing a lot of sound effects & stuff.
It’s kind of a shame because arcade machines in the 90s usually had pretty impressive audio and that was a part of the nostalgia. It’s amazing that they are selling this thing for $300, so obviously the savings have to come from somewhere. But if you could swap out your own speakers that would be a lot better.
I finally got Barricade masterpiece from Amazon I ordered! I feel like I’m becoming 7 years old again when I was very excited to open the box.
More pictures of Barricade masterpiece
Fun fact: 39 years ago today Mt St Helens erupted.
Oh, yeah, I was born then too.
Welp. Today was the day. I finally graduated high school. On to greater things in the future! College E-Sports here I come!