No I’m not pulling your leg here – contrary to what has been reported (or better said, not reported) in some circles, the latest version of the Street Fighter series, Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition isn’t just a name slapped onto the game as marketing gimmick – there actually is a bonafide coin-operated arcade version of the game that Capcom has produced before they decided to release the content to home consoles. Japanese arcades and a few who imported the kit into the US were able to enjoy the game back in December 2010 but in January there was an announcement that a new version of that same game would be released in the United States and Europe – the Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition Versus kit.
What made this different is that previously, all Arcade kits for SFIV or SSFIV had to be linked together for multiplayer sessions. That meant that if an arcade operator wanted to have a proper two player setup, they had to buy two separate PCBs and provide two cabinets to house the game in. It’s a cool setup but the problem is that it’s also a very expensive one as well.
Often you are looking at an easy $10k+ investment to put it all together. The Versus kit changes that by offering 2 players on one PCB, thus saving the operator money on the overall investment. It also was translated into English by Taito, who is officially handling distribution of the game in the United States. After I discovered the versus kit, I got on-board with ordering one for my own arcade as soon as I found out that they would be available in March. I placed my order in January with a promise that I would actually get it earlier than that, in February.
On top of that I also am paying much more for this kit (which is just the Taito Type X2 game board, artwork, wiring harness, I/O board, etc.) than you typically pay for these kind of things – $8600 is what I was looking at for this. To give you an idea, the typical fighting game kit in Japan such as King of Fighters XIII or BlazBlue Continuum Shift are around $2000-$3000 new. Well it’s now April and after a much longer and more frustrating wait than I had expected, only now have I finally got my hands on this.
But enough explanation, let’s see what’s inside the kit below!
BIG THANKS TO ANDY, WADE, LYDON AND THE UTAH STREET FIGHTERS FOR ALL OF THE EFFORT THEY PUT INTO HELPING ME GET THIS UP AND GOING!
Here’s the box. Nothing too impressive yet.
Opening…
Some of the artwork:
The Type X2 board in the packaging:
The I/O board:
The Taito Type X2 board:
Another…
Setup in the cabinet:
The game running in the cab:
I’ll add a better pic of it being played a little later and probably do a video. We’re still ironing out a few bugs as they didn’t provide a kick harness for the machine and the connector required is something quite different from other kick harnesses, which is quite frustrating.
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Dave
Just to be clear, you’re not plugging this into a JAMMA cabinet right?