Killer Instinct 2 Restoration/Deconversion

rydin4life

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Many, many months ago, I spotted this Midway cabinet on Facebook and picked it up with the intention of restoring and selling it. It had been converted to a Shuffleshot and everything was painted over in black so I wasn't sure what it was originally. When I arrived to pick it up, I found that it was a Killer Instinct 2 cabinet which I did not own so instead of restoring and selling to make a few bucks, I decided to keep it and de-convert/restore it and add it to my collection.

Below is a list of the work that's been done to it:

- Removed old paint with Citristip to keep original side art. The art is far from perfect, but it is original so I'm going to keep it instead of applying reproduction art to it.
- Painted coin doors and frames and cleaned all coin mechanisms and coin door parts
- Rebuilt Wells Gardner K7400 monitor chassis with full cap kit, filter cap, and solder reflow
- Rebuilt Peter Chou power supply with new capacitors including filter caps
- New Power Cord
- New marquee retainer
- New control panel wood, metal, and lexan
- New art package including control panel overlay, control panel box art, bezel instruction stickers, and marquee
- New red t-molding
- Painted front and back of cabinet along with some internal brackets/hinges
- New SUZO HAPP Competition buttons and joysticks
- New coin door locks, keys, and cash box
- New Fan
- Replaced original working hard drive with SSD upgrade


Gallery:

Video:
 
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Great job! Looks very nice.
Got any before pics?


I wish I had more - I usually take too many pictures, just didn't get many before pics of this one. Everything was just painted over in black - even the red t-molding and the control panel had a new overlay on it with the cut-out for the trackball.
 
Nice job de-converting it and saving the original side art. Looks presentable and better than repro art, IMO. Very clean inside as well.

This title doesn't get much love but I think the music is some of the best ever. Had mine on the market recently but was getting a bunch of joker lowballs, so I decided to keep it for now.

Thanks for sharing.
 
Somewhere in my garage i have a "killer kuts" CD which was a promo soundtrack for KI2. I remember when that game was delivered to the arcade where I worked at in the late 90's. I never could jive with the KI system, but I appreciated the art and concept.
 
I recently picked one up too.
Condition is great but…
Missing chassis and board has an error and corrodes rom socket.

Never rally played the ki games back in the day.
Loved mk, Tekken and Virtua fighter.
Had small time on snes sf2.

I'm gonna get it fixed up and give it a chance…
Thanks for setting a high benchmark.

Is converting to SSD difficult, or as simple as a drive clone?

Cheers
 
I recently picked one up too.
Condition is great but…
Missing chassis and board has an error and corrodes rom socket.

Never rally played the ki games back in the day.
Loved mk, Tekken and Virtua fighter.
Had small time on snes sf2.

I'm gonna get it fixed up and give it a chance…
Thanks for setting a high benchmark.

Is converting to SSD difficult, or as simple as a drive clone?

Cheers

Easy as unplugging the hard drive and plugging in the SSD and just taking out the boot rom and placing the new one it...simple process.
 
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