People at my gay day job are irritating the crap out of me, so I came over here to get my sanity back. Please don’t irritate me here or I’ll have no place to hide.

The other day I received a comment from Jason at Electronic Dojo asking if I could help provide some measurements for my Final Fight cabinet. He’s working on creating a replica Karate Champ upright. Here’s the section of his website dedicated to this quest.

From that page:

The cabinet was used in a few games by Data East/Nihon Bussan/AV Japan: Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja (marquee varient), Commando, Gondomania, Kung Fu Master, Last Mission, ShootOut.

So, for the sake of anyone else that may need this I present to you these measurements, without further adieu or hesitation, straight from my desktop to yours, the dimensions that everyone has been waiting for, without any additional commas except for this next one, in all it’s hand written glory:

The width of the front of the cabinet (not counting the thickness of each side panel) is 23 7/8″. That front panel is set in from the sides by 1 1/2″ inches.

I believe Jason is in the UK, and I apologize for all the silly measurements in inches. Unfortunately our country can’t seem to get on board with the whole metric system thing.

Hey there. I had posted over in the forums at KLOV.com asking some questions about Final Fight. Scott at HyperspaceArcade.com happened to have NOS (new old stock) side art and a control panel overlay. I ordered both from them. Here is a pic after putting on the sideart:

Control panel before:

After I stripped off the original overlay, the control panel looked like swiss cheese. I used Jasco adhesive remover to get the rest of the glue off. It was messy. It is also known to cause cancer in laboratory animals, so its a good thing I’m not one of those!

The holes that I drew arrows pointing towards are the ones that needed to be filled in. I used the method shown on this page on Brian’s site. I had to do it a bit differently though. Some of the holes that needed to be filled were too close to others, and if I put the metal only over the old holes the nuts holding the buttons on underneath would sit crooked. I decided to cover more area then I needed to with metal from the back, and drill through the holes that were staying. That would give me a good base to mount the buttons and joysticks on. If you look at the pic above, I’ve drawn the shapes of the metal backing that I needed to cut. I used a thin sheet of aluminum from Home Depot. Here it is from the back after gluing with epoxy:

I drilled the holes through the patches for the holes that weren’t being patched, and stuck some buttons through them backwards to make a nice edge for the Bondo.

Speaking of Bondo…

After sanding:

Final result after putting the control panel overlay on with 2 new player 1 & 2 buttons:

Next step for this will probably be cleaning the cabinet and touching it up a bit, and working on the coin door.

I was goofing off in the afternoon when I should have been working yesterday. Around 3:30 I spotted a listing on Craigslist for a Final Fight game. It was listed for $20, and said it wasn’t working and probably had a loose connection. By then the listing was a little over an hour old, and I figured I probably wouldn’t catch it in time. I had tried to get similar deals quick and was beat by other buyers. I called anyway, and it was still available!

I drove 2 hours to pick this puppy up in Winchester MA. Got it home, popped the back off, and found the loose connection.

I put the board back where it should be, adjusted the voltage on the power supply and it came up. The monitor needed to be adjusted. Once I did that, it worked perfectly. Not bad for $20!

Here are some pics of it in the game room, after I put a bulb in the marquee and coin return buttons.