={<SMOKE>}= said:
i'm interested in getting into collecting old arcade games, but i don't know much about the intricacies of how they work. is it possible to get a cabinet and just swap pcb boards for different games? if so, how do you deal with the different control configurations (if one game uses two buttons, another uses three, and u have a cabinet that has a six-button layout)?
It works like this. Up to around 1985, almost every arcade game had its own proprietary wiring harness and control setup, with few exceptions. Some Konami PCBs could be swapped between cabinets, for example, but since the controls differed so greatly it didn't really work that well. In 1985 a single standardized wiring and control setup called JAMMA was created with the goal of increasing the ease of converting old games into new ones. Up to that point you either had to get rid of old cabinets to make room for new ones, or take pains to hack a new game into an old cabinet. Hence all the horrible "Time Pilot in a TRON" types of hack-jobs you still see around sometimes.
Anyway, JAMMA is a standard wiring format that supports 2 players with 3 buttons per player. Any normal JAMMA PCB - namely, 95% of all PCBs from 1985 to now - can be simply plugged into a JAMMA cabinet and will play fine. It's as easy as swapping a SNES cart. Games like Street Fighter 2 aren't true JAMMA - they're a barely-changed version of it called JAMMA+. What that means is that you can plug the PCB into a normal JAMMA cabinet, but you'll also have to hook up a few other wires on top of the standard JAMMA wiring. In the case of Street Fighter 2, you have to plug two "kick harnesses" into the PCB that run to the 4th, 5th, and 6th buttons for each player and enable the extra buttons. The same goes for any other JAMMA game that has more than 3 buttons, more than 2 players, or any other weird additional options.
To put it in simpler terms, any JAMMA PCB will work in any other JAMMA cabinet, though occasional PCBs require a little bit more setup than others. Going in reverse, though - plugging a normal 2 or 3 button JAMMA PCB into a Street Fighter 2 cabinet - works just fine. The 3 kick buttons just won't do anything since the game isn't made to use them.
Oh, and I should add that pre-JAMMA PCBs can be played on JAMMA cabs as well, if you have the soldering skills to wire up a custom harness. It's not really that hard and can actually be kinda fun.
also, would you first need the motherboard of the system that the game runs on? for instance, i would need a cps-2 motherboard for street fighter II and it's upgrades and the a cps-3 motherboard to run street fighter III and it's upgrades?
Yeah, that's right. A lot of newer games, though JAMMA, also need the motherboard of their respective systems in order to work. CPS2, CPS3 (but not CPS1 - it's built-in), Taito F3, Neo-Geo, Sega ST-V, and others work that way. All are JAMMA PCBs, but work as motherboard-cart combos. Still, this isn't really true of many, many PCBs. I must have at least 50 PCBs and only a handful of them are carts. Even to this day, quite a few PCBs - possibly even a majority - are dedicated all-in-one boards, not motherboard/cart combos.
think i'll probably convert it permanently into a TMNT machine...
If you have a JAMMA cab, why convert it permanently into anything? Much less a one-play-through game like TMNT that you're already saying you don't want to play anymore? Bad idea.
