Working with Nintendo and perhaps the surreal dreams of emulation enthusiasts, the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY intends to offer this summer a nearly 20-foot but playable version of the 1981 classic Donkey Kong.
The cabinet, built to the scale of a barrel-throwing gorilla, will be part of the museum’s $65 million 90,000-foot expansion due to open June 30, 2023. The museum, which also houses the World Video Game Hall of Fame and houses some of the most exciting pieces of gaming history, intends to make the giga cabinet “as authentic and true to the original game as possible,”according to a press release.
The wardrobe will be built from “aluminum frame with MDF fibreboard”. As Strong’s rendering suggests, you won’t be playing the game on a stool or ladder, but rather using a human-height-sized control pad from ground level. You can then be amazed by the vastness of the vertical construction site Donkey Kong holds court and also holds Pauline. According to Strong Museum, the game will run on “a motherboard from the original Donkey Kong case.”
We asked Strong Museum about the specifics of the technology stack, which is only hinted at in the general press. Shane Reinwald, senior director of public relations at the Strong Museum, said the system diagram describes it like this:
Donkey Kong TKG-4 Original Motherboard -> Nintendo to JAMMA Adapter -> Supergun Home Arcade System -> Micomsoft Framemeister XRGB-Mini Upscaler -> Nanolumens Processing Unit -> Nanolumens Nixel Display
I got this up and running with the help of Aurich Lawson, a well-known slots enthusiast (and someone I can contact on Slack). He explained that JAMMA, the arcade game wire standard named after the Japan Arcade and Marketing Association, was not introduced until 1985. JAMMA normalized the outputs and inputs of arcade games so that much less solder and circuitry was needed to replace cabinet PCBs. Adapters exist for many pre-JAMMA board styles, including Kong-related Nintendo boards. He took one from his collection to illustrate.
With the board properly configured by JAMMA, it can be loaded into a super gun. The super gun, as defined in the fighting games glossary (with video images provided by Lawson), is essentially a miniature chassis connector allowing video output and controllers to be connected to most of the open circuit board without the man-sized box element. When used this way, it will likely allow controllers to be connected and generate basic output even if they are not yet ready to be extended. HAS (Home Arcade System) is a special brand of supergun. No one knows for sure why it’s called the “super gun”, though it could just be the Chinese company making the first notable product, and the name stuck.
OSSC, Framemeister XRGB-Mini Open Source Scan Converter More differences
The museum does not use a typical modern display in this Donkey Kong, but Nanolumens technology is designed to do so, creating a Nixel LED video wall inside the cabinet.
Strong employees told Gizmodo they worked directly with Nintendo to make sure their 30-foot version “plays as close to the original as possible”while submitting their work to the company and getting its approval. It’s a fitting homage to the original Donkey Kong, which itself was a trade-in for all of the unsold Radar Scope cabinets that were in Nintendo’s inventory. Creating a game that could run on the same hardware fell to Shigeru Miyamoto, who was new to Nintendo at the time. Miyamoto wanted to make a game based on Popeye’s Bluto, Popeye, and Olive Oyl, but was unable to get a license for those characters. Bluto became a gorilla, Olive Oyl became Polina, and Popeye became the most recognizable video game character in the world.