Here’s the tech used to create a nearly 20-foot-tall Donkey Kong cabinet

Working with Nintendo, and perhaps the surreal dreams of emulation enthusiasts, the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, intends to offer a nearly 20-foot-tall, yet playable, version of the 1981 classic Donkey Kong this summer.

The cabinet, built to barrel-tossing-gorilla scale, will be part of a $65 million, 90,000-foot expansion to the museum, due to open June 30. The museum, which also hosts the World Video Game Hall of Fame and contains some of the most fascinating objects of gaming history, intends to make the giga-cabinet "as authentically and true to the original game as possible," according to a press release.

The cabinet will be constructed from "an aluminum frame with MDF fiberboard." As is suggested by Strong's rendering, you won't be playing the game on a step stool or ladder, but using a human-scale, hip-height control panel from ground level. You can then be overcome with the vastness of the vertical construction worksite in which Donkey Kong holds court, whilst also holding Pauline. The game will run on "a motherboard from an original Donkey Kong cabinet," according to the Strong Museum.

We asked the Strong Museum about the specifics of the tech stack only hinted at in the wider press. Shane Rhinewald, senior director of public relations at the Strong Museum, said that a schematic for the system outlined it as such:

Donkey Kong TKG-4 Original Motherboard -> Nintendo to JAMMA Adapter -> Home Arcade System Supergun -> Micomsoft Framemeister XRGB-Mini Upscaler -> Nanolumens Processing Box -> Nanolumens Nixel Display

I ran this by Ars' Aurich Lawson, noted arcade enthusiast (and person I can reach on Slack). He explained that JAMMA, a wiring standard for arcade games named for the Japanese Amusement Machine and Marketing Association, wasn't introduced until 1985. JAMMA normalized the outputs and inputs of arcade games, such that swapping printed circuit boards (PCBs) in and out of cabinets required far less solder and schematics. Adapters exist for many pre-JAMMA board styles, including Nintendo's Kong-related boards. He grabbed one from his collection to illustrate.

With a board properly JAMMA-fied, it can be loaded into a supergun. A supergun, as defined on the Fighting Game Glossary (with video pictures provided by Lawson), is essentially a miniaturized cabinet connector, allowing you to connect video output and controllers to a mostly exposed board, without the human-sized box element. Used in this fashion, it would likely allow for connecting the controllers and generating the basic outputs, even if they're not ready to be huge-ified yet. A HAS (Home Arcade System) is a particular brand of supergun. No one knows for sure why it's called a "supergun," though it might be simply a Chinese company making the first notable product and the name sticking.

At that point, you'd have, according to Lawson, a 15 kHz video signal—"what we'd think of as 240p"—coming from the Donkey Kong PCB, meant for a CRT screen. Modern LCD screens can't handle it; those that might attempt to upscale it would add lag and not look great, especially at 370 percent size. You need an upscaler, preferably one with little lag. Before we heard from the Strong Museum, Lawson's guess was an OSSC, an Open Source Scan Converter. The OSSC takes a signal and multiplies it, without buffering or processing. Multiply 240p by five, and you're at 1080p. The museum's pick, the Framemeister XRGB-Mini, works differently, taking snapshots of video frames and sending them out. One wiki suggests that while the Framemeister's processing can add 20 ms of lag, it can actually counteract the inherent lag some displays will generate when handling 240p signals. There are more differences, but both are commonly used to get arcade signals ready for a modern display.

The museum is not using a typical modern display in this Donkey Kong, but that's what the Nanolumens tech is for, creating an LED-based Nixel video wall inside the cabinet.

Strong staff told Gizmodo that they worked directly with Nintendo to make sure their 20-foot version "played as close to the original as possible," presenting their work to the company and getting approval for it. It's a fitting tribute to the original Donkey Kong, which was itself a swap for all the unsold Radar Scope cabinets Nintendo had sitting in inventory. Creating a game that could run on the same hardware fell to Shigeru Miyamoto, new to Nintendo at that time. Miyamoto had wanted to make a game centered on Popeye's Bluto, Popeye, and Olive Oyl, but couldn't get a license for those characters. Bluto became a gorilla, Olive Oyl became Pauline, and Popeye became the world's most recognizable video game character.