Recently I got the itch to add something other than pinball to my home arcade. I’ve always been a fan of the Street Fighter series and thought it would be really nice to have a video arcade cabinet alongside the pinballs. But what cabinet to get? It turns out a lot of the cabinets you’d find Street Fighter games in during the 90’s were generic JAMMA cabinets. Having a standard such as JAMMA meant operators could swap games in and out as they were released. As cool as it would be to own a 90’s CRT cabinet, though, they are quite large and getting a CRT tube in excellent condition is only getting harder. It’s possible to repair them, of course, but nevertheless I started looking at more modern cabinets with HD screens. This wouldn’t look quite as authentic with classic games, but it would have the advantage of being able to play newer high-resolution Street Fighter games such as SFIV and SFV.

One of the cabinets you’d find SFIV on in arcades in Japan, from what I’ve been able to discover online, is a Taito Vewlix. This cabinet is popular enough that some kits are available to build your own cabinet in a shape inspired by the Vewlix. I bought one such kit, the Kraylix V4 2-player cabinet! This project is going to occupy my time for the next few months at least, and I will document the build as I go here.

Today the kit came in the mail. I opened the three boxes it came in to check out all the parts and ensure nothing was damaged. The construction was definitely beefier than I was expecting – very nice stuff! Everything was packed nicely and there was only very minor damage to one small piece – should be a trivial repair with some wood glue.

Let the build begin!