4 ms·

I've never really dug into arcade hardware before but this is the third time in a week I've seen either a bare chip of a full cartridge assembly and I am curiou

I've never really dug into arcade hardware before but this is the third time in a week I've seen either a bare chip of a full cartridge assembly and I am curious now: was it possible to swap this boards between machines and they would just work, assuming they had the right controls? Was each publisher using their own connector or was there an industry standard?

bryanlarsen 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Amusement_Machine_and_Marketing_Association#Arcade_machine_standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Amusement_Machine_and_Ma...
JohnBooty 3y ago
Was each publisher using their own connector or was there an industry standard? Before the JAMMA standard, it was truly chaotic. Manufacturers didn't really have their own per-manufacturer connectors; it was more like each individual game had its own custom wiring setup. Manufacturers would sometimes release upgrade kits for specific existing machines. For example, Atari created Black Widow as an upgrade kit for existing Gravitar machines (and only Gravitar) JAMMA wasn't a magic cure for everything. It specifies pinouts for buttons and things but there can still be e.g. video sync issues. But it was a huge step forward. In Japanese arcades you would see a lot of these standardized cabinets. They allowed arcade operators to swap in a new JAMMA (etc) game at low cost with close to zero effort. Sega's Astro City cabinet is probably the most famous, I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_arcade_cabinets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_arcade_cabine...
- nsxwolf 3y ago
  There are some examples of a manufacturer using the exact system for several games. Williams, for instance - the hardware that ran Joust also ran Robotron 2049 and several other games, requiring no more than a ROM swap and controller layout change. It's actually not uncommon to find out that a Joust cabinet has painted-over Robotron 2049 panel art and vice versa, depending on how many orders of what they got in a particular week.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    Cool!! Thanks for the knowledge.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
Depends... They were mostly all swappable. I've got a vintage arcade cab that has been converted to the "JAMMA" standard/pinout. Some PCBs (but not all) that aren't JAMMA can be converted to JAMMA using an adapter you put on the PCB. It was extremely common in some places (tennis clubhouses, bowling places, etc.) to have one or two arcade cabs and then semi-regularly switch the PCB inside it. For some cabs you could even change the "marquee" (the top of the arcade cab, above the screen: typically showing the name of the game) easily too, so that it would match the PCB inside. People running bootleg arcade cabs typically wouldn't bother changing the marquee: they'd just swap the PCB (typically for a bootleg PCB).

bryanlarsen 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Amusement_Machine_and_Marketing_Association#Arcade_machine_standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Amusement_Machine_and_Ma...

JohnBooty 3y ago

Was each publisher using their own connector or was there an industry standard? Before the JAMMA standard, it was truly chaotic. Manufacturers didn't really have their own per-manufacturer connectors; it was more like each individual game had its own custom wiring setup. Manufacturers would sometimes release upgrade kits for specific existing machines. For example, Atari created Black Widow as an upgrade kit for existing Gravitar machines (and only Gravitar) JAMMA wasn't a magic cure for everything. It specifies pinouts for buttons and things but there can still be e.g. video sync issues. But it was a huge step forward. In Japanese arcades you would see a lot of these standardized cabinets. They allowed arcade operators to swap in a new JAMMA (etc) game at low cost with close to zero effort. Sega's Astro City cabinet is probably the most famous, I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_arcade_cabinets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_arcade_cabine...

nsxwolf 3y ago
There are some examples of a manufacturer using the exact system for several games. Williams, for instance - the hardware that ran Joust also ran Robotron 2049 and several other games, requiring no more than a ROM swap and controller layout change. It's actually not uncommon to find out that a Joust cabinet has painted-over Robotron 2049 panel art and vice versa, depending on how many orders of what they got in a particular week.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Cool!! Thanks for the knowledge.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

Depends... They were mostly all swappable. I've got a vintage arcade cab that has been converted to the "JAMMA" standard/pinout. Some PCBs (but not all) that aren't JAMMA can be converted to JAMMA using an adapter you put on the PCB. It was extremely common in some places (tennis clubhouses, bowling places, etc.) to have one or two arcade cabs and then semi-regularly switch the PCB inside it. For some cabs you could even change the "marquee" (the top of the arcade cab, above the screen: typically showing the name of the game) easily too, so that it would match the PCB inside. People running bootleg arcade cabs typically wouldn't bother changing the marquee: they'd just swap the PCB (typically for a bootleg PCB).