Fast forward 7 months and the cabinet has not been touched and is sitting in my garage. Much to my wife’s displeasure, this kept me from moving the lawn furniture into the garage over the winter! Over the weekend, I decided to move the cabinet into the basement and start working on it. I did not move the lawn furniture into the garage.

I shopped around for a few months looking for an original Sanyo 20ez monitor to put in the cabinet but didn’t have any luck. I found one on E-bay that went for more than I was willing to spend and had a few offers to ship monitors to me but they all needed some form of repair. I decided to use a spare Wells Gardner K7000 monitor that I had sitting around. It took me all of 5 seconds to realize that the mounting holes on the K7000 monitor did not line up with the mounting holes on the Nintendo mounting brackets. As a matter of fact, the K7000 did not have any top or bottom mounting holes at all.

It became apparent that I would have to bolt the monitor to the monitor shelf in the cabinet. I took a few measurements to find the center of the monitor shelf and also the center of the monitor itself. I then measured the distance that the monitor in my Donkey Kong cabinet stuck out from this shelf (towards the front of the cabinet). The monitor was bolted to the shelf in almost the exact orientation as the monitor in my Donkey Kong cabinet. If I had to guess (because I didn’t measure) the monitor in this cabinet probably sits a bit lower than the monitor is supposed to but once everything is done, I don’t think it will be apparent. Here are a couple of pictures of the monitor bolted into place:

In the first picture above, you can see the original Nintendo monitor mounting bracket at the top of the monitor. You can also see that the K7000 sits short of this bracket. In the second picture you can see the bolt locations on the lower left and right sides of the monitor frame. There are also two bolts at the top that can’t be seen in this picture.

Once the monitor was mounted, I needed to find a spot to place the 120 volt isolation transformer for the K7000. 20ez monitors used 100 volt transformers so I couldn’t use the one currently located in the cabinet. I located a spot near the power supply for the isolation transformer, mounted it and then connected it to the 120 volt and ground terminals of the terminal block. Here’s a picture of the isolation transformer mounted inside the cabinet. The isolation transformer has the 4 red wires attached to it…two coming in from the terminal block and two going out to the monitor. The terminal block is to the far right of the picture:

One thing that is needed on monitors in a Donkey Kong/Donkey Kong Jr cabinet is an inverter board. Without an inverter board, the image on the monitor will appear to be a negative of what should actually be there. The majority of the image will appear to be white if the inverter board is not present. I had previously purchased an inverter board from Mike’s Arcade and made the necessary connections to it.  The inverter board requried 12 volts DC to run, so I temporarily “borrowed” 12 volts from pin 4 of the 9 pin CPU connector at the power supply.  After a bit of monitor tweeking, the image is stable and clear…my blurry picture does not do it justice:

The final picture above is the front of the cabinet that will eventually become my dedicated Donkey Kong Jr machine. It is complete with a Donkey Kong marquee and bezel but those were removed while I worked on the monitor. Right now, the wiring to the inverter board and monitor is a bit of a “hack job” as I wanted to test everything before making it permanent. I will eventually clean up the wiring and add molex connectors as time allows. As usual, a dedicated photo gallery has been set up for work on the Donkey Kong Jr cabinet. Stay tuned….

My intention is to run Donkey Kong Jr. in this cabinet.  Here’s the question…leave the cabinet original colors, etc. and just run Jr. in it, or completely convert it to a Jr. cabinet with orange paint, new side art, bezel, control panel and marquee?  Pictures later.

If you look at the following picture, you’ll see the the position of the Donkey Kong board in the cabinet:

My Donkey Kong board is the 2-board version. The original Donkey Kong board was available in both 2-board and 4-board configurations, so there is already a spot in the cabinet to add an additional 2 boards. You can see the wood railings with the slot in the middle, to the right of the Donkey Kong board, which the Donkey Kong Jr. boards will slide right in to. I’ll need to rig something up to tie the new Jr. boards to the Donkey Kong boards to keep them from flopping around.

Once I got the Jr. boards into the cabinet (I’ll have pictures later), it was simply a matter of swapping the connectors from the Donkey Kong board to the Donkey Kong Jr. board. When I fired the game on, I was met with a screen that was scrolling wildly from left to right. Adjusting the hold on the monitor didn’t seem to make a whole lot of difference as I could get the scrolling to slow but never completely stop. After about a 1/2 hour of adjusting different monitor settings I finally discovered that one of the pots on the Donkey Kong Jr. board that adjusted the image centering was bad. I was able to temporarily repair it and finally got a centered, non-scrolling image on the screen.

I apologize for the bad pictures, I had to use my wife’s fancy camera which is way too advanced for me.

I’ve ordered new pots for the Donkey Kong Jr. board to permanently correct the scrolling issue. I also ordered them for my Donkey Kong board, just to head of any problems in the future. I figured while I’m at it I might as well cap the monitor, so a cap kit is on the way as well.

Some might wonder why I didn’t just opt for the modified Donkey Kong Jr. board that plays both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. This would eliminate the need to swap the connectors between the two boards. The first issue is cost…$160 plus shipping seems pretty costly to simply make modifications to a board I already own. If I didn’t already own a Donkey Kong board as well, I probably wouldn’t balk at the price. Secondly, there are some discrepancies with the Donkey Kong sounds which are noticeable enough to me to be an annoyance. I’ve seen others who have set up rotary switchers to switch between the games, but to be honest, I have no idea how they’ve accomplished it. Another collector is apparently working on a plug and play automatic switcher which I will definitely buy if it becomes available. Regardless, it’s nice to have another game in the collection. I realized after about 1/2 hour of play last night that I’m not very good at Donkey Kong Jr. I’m going to need lots of practice.

P.S. Bonus points to those who can name the band and album of the post title.

There were two boxes on my porch when I arrived home from work yesterday. The first box contained a 3″ Happ Controls trackball assembly (white trackball), a trackball to PCB harness, a trackball mounting plate and a set of trackball mounting bolts. Unfortunately, it was also supposed to contain my jamma harness but it was nowhere to be found in the box. After quick e-mail exchange with the retailer, the error was acknowledged and the harness should arrive Thursday or Friday of this week.

The second box contained a genuine Golden Tee control panel overlay like the one pictured below:

The panel I received is in much better shape than the one pictured. It only has a couple of scratches on the underside near the trackball. If I take my time and prepare the base properly, they shouldn’t be very noticeable. The one problem with this control panel is the size. It’s much larger than the All American Football control panel so I’m either going to have to modify the cabinet or the control panel itself to get a good fit. I’m leaning toward modifying the cabinet but still haven’t made a firm decision.

Once everything arrives for this project, I’ll take pictures of all of the components which my help those unfamiliar with some of the terms. As usual all of the progress on this project will be detailed here. I’m setting up a new category, Golden Tee conversion so I won’t have to continue posting these under the All American Football category.

Finally, as of this morning, I am the proud owner of a Donkey Kong Jr. boardset. For those unfamiliar, a Donkey Kong Jr. board can be played in a Donkey Kong cabinet, it’s just a matter of swapping out the boards. The biggest challenge is coming up with a method that will allow me to easily swap between the two games. Yes, I’m familiar with the double Donkey Kong board, but it’s got some quirks with the sounds that I’m not too fond of.