Jamma is not the issue. Plenty of Jamma boards have crossed my path. It's just that at some point,(The late 90's? early 2000's?) we went from serviceable boards to throw them away and start over. I've been tinkering with these games since about 1993-94. Back then, all us broke teenagers could lay our hands on was the older classics, as they were considered junk by everyone. So we tried to make the junk live. My first pinball cost me $10 broken at a game auction. My first Arcade games (Rush'n Attack and Tempest) cost me $30 and $25 (also broken) respectively at the very next auction. Forunately, I was working drivethru in those days, and had my own money. (glorioski!)
I committed some sins in my youth that would cause collectors to scream! My most heinous crime was picking up a TRON cocktail for cheap, (broken) and because I had not one ounce of understanding at the time about the MCR system, I converted it to a Ms. Pacman (what I wanted at the time) I then sold it after I got tired of it. My only hope is that someone down the road recognized it for what it was, and returned it to it's former glory, God rest its Digital Soul.
I'm interested in the desuicides for CPS 1, and 2. That is something I haven't tried yet. I have plenty of boards floating around here, (I never throw anything away.)
I also have Konami TMNT and Asterix pcb's on my bench right now, awaiting parts. But I'm a hardware junkie, I never really touched anything that involved software. Never even programmed my own roms. (Always passed the job off to someone else.) It might seem strange to some, but all I really have is field experience : it was my hobby from when I was a teenager, I got good enough to be hired by local ops, then ran an arcade, then worked for a distributor. I never went to school for it, so I only learned as I went. And software wasn't my area of interest.
Although I think I'm going to try my hand at building one of Eduardo's Kubuki reprogrammers. That seems pretty easy, and I doubt he has any more. I have a bunch of dead CPS1's around here anyway.
This post was longer then expected...but I'm feeling nostalgic.
-Dan
