> Arcade games were not exempt from being copied either. There was a whole black market of people working with arcade boards bought at various European fairs wh

> Arcade games were not exempt from being copied either. There was a whole black market of people working with arcade boards bought at various European fairs which would then proceed to copy each chip on the board by hand, in order to create a sort of 1:1 copy, to be sold all over the territory in hundreds of specimens. And not just arcade games. Full on arcade cabs were copied. Many people who played in Europe on arcade machines (I remember those at the bowling and tennis club) were actually playing on fully "pirated" cab and PCBs. I have such a vintage, bootleg, cab from the mid eighties since about ten years now. It looks like a Taito cab (the one they used a lot, with nice curves on the left and right of the screen: one of the nicest cab IMO) but it's not a 100% identical copy and someone obviously converted it to the JAMMA standard at some point. I've got both vintage PCBs, bootleg PCBs and a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter. Some of the games are still very fun to play.