Bootleg two-player Simpsons in a Targ cabinet?

[Cootster]

Well, I was at my local thrift today, and there was a better selection of games than usual (meaning something besides Combat or SMB/DH, anyway, the best was a bashed-up 2600 Spider-Man), but what most intrigued me was the coinops in the front of the store. There was the usual Truxton (probably a legit Midway version) that has been there for months, but next to it was another one . . .

 

A old-looking 2-player cabinet playing "The Simpsons". All the other cabs I've seen it in were legitimate ones and had 4-player support and much larger screens . . . MAME lists a two-player version, though. . .The monitor in this cab is teeny, can't be any bigger than my 13-inch TV, and it's oddly canted (the display area is flat, but the screen itself seems to be tilted slightly upwards).

 

And on the front of the cabinet, above the screen, was the word "Targ" inverted so that it looked like a backwards "Grat".

 

Never played Targ, and don't feel like digging it up on my favorite MAME site right now, so I'll ask this. Does it have a fuel gauge and other round gauge-looking displays on the top of the screen? These are burned in to this monitor and are quite easily visible. The words "Credits 0" are also burned in.

 

How was this done? Could this actually be a MAME cabinet? How do you take a box that held a 8-color 6502-based game and convert it into one for a more modern Z80-based game with a 2,048-color display?