My ever growing collection of Nintendo cocktails was increased by two this last month with two, very sorry looking Sheriff cocktails. Both had had a rough life, but between the pair of them (plus a few extra parts) I should be able to resurrect one nice cabinet. The main missing part from both cocktails is the Sheriff boardset. This doesn’t worry me too much as I know from my research into Nintendo’s re-usage and boardsets that I should be able to create a Sheriff boardset from one of my spare HeliFire boardsets (plus a Space Fever sound board).

The first cocktail came with the Sheriff control panels, but sadly the original joysticks had been replaced (and crudely just screwed straight through the CPO *sobs*), but the all important pistol dials (cooker knobs) were present. They are missing most of the switches and one is missing the brackets that hold the switches:

Luckily, the second cocktail came with the original joysticks so between the two sets of control panels, I had all of the parts, aside from the wiring loom. As you’ll see in the pictures above, the control panels with the dials has some parts of the wiring loom, but a lot of wires have been removed and the rest have been cut short. The second set of control panels has the full wiring looms, but the connectors have been removed and they’ve been wired up to an IPAC board of sorts to allow the original controls to be used with the MAME running PC inside:

As is always the way, I’ve picked up lots of spares as they’ve come up. Last year, I purchased a set of cocktail controls panels from a Donkey Kong cocktail. I was looking through the manuals for the cocktails and after a bit of research online, it turns out pretty much all of the cocktails around that time had the same looms and connectors, just some had more wires and connections to components than others:

Going by these, I need to add four additional wires to each DK control panel loom for it to work in a Sheriff cocktail. Looking at the looms themselves, they already have the additional white required, so just three each will give me two working control panel looms:

So looking at all of the parts I have, I can completely rebuild both control panels using all original Nintendo parts. I need to find an inventive way to deal with the holes put through the Sheriff control panel overlay (for the after market joysticks), but I should have two complete and functioning control panels.

As I have two cocktails, I’m planning on using the best parts of each to make up one really nice example. The second cocktail I picked up was a UK release Sheriff and included the correct serial tag and even the original (burn free) monitor (you can just make out “TWG” on the sticker in this photo):

Unfortunately, the tub itself has had a number of holes drilled through it for extra locks and additional mounting points for the MAME PC inside. The easiest solution at this point would be to swap out the base units and move the serial tag and monitor into the other cabinet. I’m going to strip both down and send them away for sandblasting before I make a final decision. I may be able to salvage the original UK tub with some small repairs.