What is
MMMKII?
It stands for: "Mortal Mame
Mugen Kombat II"
Or you can put the M words in any order that pleases you actually. I don't mind.
Mame
Mugen Mortal
Kombat II
Mugen Mortal Mame
Kombat II
etc.
If you don't know what
M.A.M.E or
M.U.G.E.N. are then you are reading the wrong blog. However the above links to their
Wikipedia entries should give you an idea.
My gaming history. Feel free to skip all of this and go right down to the photos to see how I am doing with my project.
Originally when I was a child in the 80's I wanted a pinball machine.
I played some games like Ms.
PACMAN and Donkey Kong at my Karate
dojo while waiting for my dad to pick me up. My dad also went on a lot of business trips. Not to mention most of my family lived in other cities/countries. The airport was basically my arcade as a child. I was young. So I was not good and I think my parents could see their quarters
disappear. Which also made them think it was a waste of money. However for me it was coolest thing.
My brother and I would always play Super Sprint, Spy Hunter, APB and P.O.W. Neither of us were any good at them but it was fun to play.
This was before we discovered or had a
NES of course.
My second love was
PINBOT. The pinball machine. I have since found and downloaded the music for it. Never say never but I think the chances of me actually getting my hands on a
PINBOT machine seeing as I live in Japan now are slim to none. My earliest goal in life was to get a pinball machine.
My family moved around more than the average family I think and one of the neighbors at the third house I lived in had a pinball machine. Much to my surprise and jealousy. I don't remember it so well but it had some kind of American theme. They were also the second family I had seen that had a
NES. That changed everything. ATARI and
COLECO may have been first. But Nintendo raped them.
At the age of 7 I couldn't really understand why the pinball machine sat in the basement corner untouched and unloved and OFF while people jumped onto mushrooms and turtles or played that
fucking impossible game (with awesome music) Ghost and
Goblins. Seriously I never got to the first pit let alone past the first level let alone through the game twice which you have to do to beat it.
However seeing as I didn't have my OWN pinball machine and my parent promised they would buy one (when they could afford it which I actually got as a contract in
writing) I was at the mercy of my neighbors. THEY wanted to play Nintendo because obviously they had worn out their love for the old pinball machine and despite the fact that only 2 people could play the
NES and there were usually a whole bunch of us in that basement, the pinball machine was left unplugged.....
Later on I didn't have so many chances to go to arcades or play pinball. The
NES and
SNES were my only source of game fun.
I did however love the
Simpsons arcade game and T2.
The
Simpsons was the first arcade game I
actually beat. I remember the other 2 players came and went but this young girl and I stuck through it to the end. I am not sure how many quarters it cost but we did it.
The only other arcade game I beat was THE
PUNISHER which was amusing but as far as arcade games go it was pretty
disappointing.
Everything changed with the release of Street Fighter II.
That game was probably what made me give up my dream of a pinball machine. At the time of its release the arcades we buzzing with
SFII and
MKI. At the time I thought MK was bullshit. I don't know why.
It was 1992. Street Fighter seemed like the way to go but it was probably just the fact that I didn't understand how to play MK and got tooled every time I tried in the arcade.
SFII was responsible for giving me my first thumb blisters when we spent every day of an entire summer having game after game after game in my house on the
SNES.
I had decided that
SFII was the arcade game I was going to eventually own.
That was until
MKII came out.
Perhaps it was the fact that the fatalities were finally left in the home version as well as all the gore. But without a doubt once
MKII came out I didn't care about
SFII turbo at all. Even when SUPER
SFII came out I liked it but
MKII was it.
My dream, twice changed, was settled. I would some day far far away own an
MKII machine. Before I left my home country (almost 6 years ago) I phoned around and talked to
several people and businesses. NO ONE had an
MKII for sale. There were quite a few people that had
SFII and Turbo cabs for sale. But they all wanted more than $1000 each.
I considered it. I considered it pretty hard. That was about the same price as my plane ticket... But in the end it wasn't an
MKII dedicated cab so... I bought the plane ticket instead. There would be plenty of time to complete that dream when I returned to my homeland.
That was an awful lot of history, sorry if any of you got bored and fell asleep.
So what does that have to do with MAME and
MUGEN and me
writing this blog now?
Well. In the last few years I made a list of things I wanted to do in my life.
Because I am superstitious about them I won't list them here. However obviously one was to own an "Arcade Game".
With the advent and release of MAME which I discovered some years ago there was the very real possibility of MAKING my own arcade machine!
It may not have been my DREAM machine but it would probably be pretty close! So I downloaded and installed MAME on my PC and even went out and bought an arcade style PC stick.
THE BORG! (ill post a photo later when its not 3am and I can find my camera)
I gave it a good go and well. I was
disappointed. It was $25 a think and the most I had spend on anything to do with "gaming" for a long time.
I seem to use a lot of quotes and
parentheses it seems.....
While it was a step in the right direction it still
didn't feel right.
The controller was only part of it. I am still sitting in front of my PC using a PC monitor.... It just not right. Kind of like margarine when you have grown up eating butter or diet soda...
Everything sort of changed when I finally decided that Japan was indeed where I want to stay for the
foreseeable future to meet one of my
other goals in life that will remain a secret until I am on the cusp of
achieving it.
Once I had decided to live here then came the question of all my "Stuff" back home. What to do with it etc. I crunched some numbers and it indeed simply made more sense to ship the bulk of it here than to do a small run and end up replacing a lot of it.
Unlike most people I don't have a room in a parents house that I could simply leave all my shit in until I got around to it or until my mom threw it all away so I could later curse that she threw away my priceless
collectibles.
My stuff was in storage in a friends basement with the understanding that it would be there for 1 year.... 5 years ago.
So I had to either pay for long term storage in a facility somewhere. Throw it all away or ship it to Japan. Sending a few heavy boxes of sentimental stuff (photos, journals, yearbooks etc) would have cost about half of what it cost to send pretty much everything I wanted... so I bit the bullet, bought my plane ticket and went home to sort through all my junk and prepare it for its sea journey to its new home.
However it also
occurred to me that this would probably be a good time to buy at least an empty cabinet
because wood is rare and expensive here. I thought about just importing some sheets of wood as well but then I would have to find a place to work on it and tools to cut it and lets also face it. I am pretty sloppy. This would probably be my last chance to do it!
So while I took a peak on eBay and on
craigslist and holy shit someone was selling a
MKII dedicated cabinet! They wanted $650 for it.
I phoned the guy long distance and it seems he had been trying to sell it for a while and no one had been interested. I was still about 2 months away from going home. So obviously I
couldn't put a hold on it or anything.
On the phone he told me that the cabinet had seen a lot of love and was damaged in several places. He also said the monitor had some burn in and that the second player controls had some issues.....
While not ideal it was looking not bad!
One of the people I contacted on eBay had an
MKII cabinet that had been converted to an Area 51 with guns instead of
controllers for $600.
And there was another guy on
craigslist who had several arcade games for $150 and up....
My brother phoned this guy and much to our surprise he said he also had a Mortal
Kombat II... and it was only $150 because the monitor was dead.
So I phoned him as well long distance and told him I am
coming from Japan to buy a Mortal
Kombat II dedicated arcade cabinet because they are very rare in Japan. He said that the game played fine it just needed a cap kit on the monitor and that would cost $40. I specifically asked if it was a the DEDICATED
MKII machine cab with
Raiden and all the lightning on the side and he said yes. He said it was MINT other that the monitor. I asked him to send me some photos and gave him my email address. He said he was going to storage to get it and would mail me photos the next day. Which he never did. He did however sound like a drunk. Too good to be true? Perhaps. At
any rate nothing could be decided until I got home a month or so later. It seemed there were 3 available.
I kept in touch with all 3. The drunk guy never got back to me but I talked to him on the phone once more before getting into town. He promised me photos which never came. The
eBayer sent me photos and said they would swap out the guns for me and put in the original control board (but not the game board itself) and the original guy was still sitting pretty on his kinda damaged machine. Which he sent me photos of
as well.
When my plane landed the first person I phoned was the drunk guy and left him a message. I phoned him less than an hour after my plane landed and before I had even phoned my mom who had not seen me in the flesh for 3 years.
A few days later I got an email from the first guy that said he had sold his machine. Which although limited my options I was happy for the guy but it did limit me.
Drunk guy finally got back to me and we set up one of the most
disappointing meetings of my life. Turns out he lived on some small island that is only
accessible via small ferry. My friend drove me via SUV all ready to take my prize home with me. We got the property in question and sitting out on the lawn was a medium sized all black rusted metal
trimmed many many times converted cabinet with a poorly hacked paper
MKII marquee and Street Fighter 2 controls. Drunk dude stumbled out of his house and instantly reminded me of
Hunter S Thompson. Sort of
stumbley rambly drunk. The first thing I said was. "This
isn't a dedicated cabinet" to which responded "oh yeah those are rare".....
He tried plugging it in and it
didn't even power up. He took the back off and it became clear that it was originally a centipede cabinet.. That shows how many times it had been converted. He also took me to "storage" which was a shed in his backyard where he had several other games as well. The she had holes in the roof and the sun shone through unrestricted not to mention the remains of several bees nests in the corners.
I didn't buy it obviously. $150 for a non working wood box from the 70s.
No thanks. I want to say 10000 bad things about him and how he basically lied to me on the phone. But it was really too good to be true. I knew it.
That left me with only one choice. The
MKII convert to Area 51 Reconverted back to
MKII for $600.
In total I spent about $3000 on shipping all of my
life's worth of purchases to Japan. Including one used Mortal
Kombat II dedicated arcade cabinet.
A total of 7m3 worth of stuff.
Bellow are all the photos I have of it so far. These are the photos
they sent me along the way.
My machine is due to arrive along with all my other
worldy goods this coming Tuesday.
Then I have the joy of first trying to wire in the original controls back into the machine and getting "Tumble Pop" working and once I have that up and running then ripping out the Tumble Pop board (and selling it) and then throwing my old computer inside and figuring out how to make it all work with MAME and
MUGEN.
This blog will be the ongoing saga of where I am in my dream project and and perhaps even be helpful to other people who want to go down the same road and perhaps even to me when I get lost.
Stick around! Its going to be a wild ride because I have never done anything like this before and to be completely honest I really don't know what the fuck I'm doing.
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Now playing:
Mindless Self Indulgence - Pay For Itvia FoxyTunes
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