I'll just outright say it: I hate Nintendo Arcade Joysticks.I do not like their range of motion, the ball top are always too small and I just never liked the feel of using one. I always feel like I'm struggling against the sticks and even after refurbing them, they still felt stiff and clumsy as ever. I found a great deal locally where I picked up this Popeye Nintendo Cocktail machine and brought it home. It's in pretty good shape; the price was right eventhough the monitor could use a new cap kit and the control panel is just at a weird uncomfortable angle but that's just the quirks of a very old Nintendo cocktail cabinet.
I generally veer away from Nintendo cabinets because I prefer jamma cabinets and the ablity to swap out boards, but I actually really like this game. While I would never go out of my way to defend Popeye as one of Nintendo’s better arcade games, because Donkey Kong exists, it just has a special place in my heart that brings back great memories of when I was a kid playing the Popeye port on my Dad’s Atari 2600.
I do have a huge appreciation to Nintendo's build quality of their cocktail cabinets. The first thing that stands out to me about this machine is how it is mostly made of metal, instead of wood like my Pac-Man cocktail. I've been on a collecting tangent where I'm picking up older cabs to fix up and learn from but hey, at least I get to play Popeye with a Nintendo joystick that always feels like a struggle, right?
Wrong.
It was brought to my attention from BirdlandArcade on Instagram that you can easily remove the Nintendo joystick and swap it out with a standard Sanwa JLF. Needless to say, that really piqued my interest and I wanted to do this mod to my cabinet.
Here's how...
