My other shipment I received last night was my new 48-in-1 Jamma Board. This is a great board that plays 48 different classic arcade games in any vertically oriented monitor Jamma cabinet. Jamma is a wiring conversion from the late 80’s. It was developed to help arcade companies and operators to be able to swap out game boards in existing cabinets when the old game boards no longer made enough money to justify the space the game took up in an arcade. Before Jamma, when a game was changed in a cabinet, it usually required a totally new wiring harness to be installed in the cabinet with the new board. With Jamma, just the board needs changed.
New 48-in-1 board fresh out of the package!
The board comes with a really nice color manual, which includes screenshots of each game.
I decided to convert my Mr. Do cabinet to use the 48-in-1 board, because the cabinet was already a conversion. It had a Jamma cable already installed, which I used to play Mr. Do through a wiring harness adapter. To switch games into the cabinet, I would remove the old board and place in a new board. Now with the 48-in-1, I just select games from a menu. Since Mr. Do is one of the games, it works out great. Arcade collectors should be comforted to know I did not destroy an original, dedicated Mr. Do cabinet to install this board!
I installed the 48-in-1 board by taking out my existing Mr. Do board and the Jamma harness conversion adapter for the Mr. Do. I mounted the board on the side of the cabinet, since I will no longer be changing it out with other boards. I had to wire up a Test Switch and Service Switch to navigate the on-screen setup menus within the 48-in-1 board. This is crucial, since you need to be able to adjust the board settings (the default volume is WAY too loud) and individual game settings. I still need to compile a list of default dip switch settings for each of the games on the board, so I can set them to accurately match the original arcade versions. Next, I removed the old switching power supply from the cabinet, and replaced it with a computer AT power supply. The 48-in-1 board comes with connectors to allow the board to be powered by a computer power supply, use a computer VGA monitor, and even extra speakers. Since I have been having some alignment issues with the monitor mounted in the cabinet before this install, I may yet try out using an old 19″ computer monitor. From there, I cleaned out everything else not needed, including the custom screen inverting switch I added for the original Mr. Do boards. And last, I installed a new 8-way leaf switch joystick I just received from Bob Roberts!
Here are some pictures of what I did:
Board and Power Supply mounted.
Very clean installation!
One of the test screen shots.
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9 users responded in this post
Thanks for this post! You and I have talked about these multi game boards, but I haven’t researched it much more and had a lot of questions. I had no idea you could power the board with a standard ATX Power Supply, how cool is that? Makes the whole thing so easy!
Do you have any more details / photos of how you did the additional switches (test / service)? Where you mounted them?
You might want to look at your permalinking before too much longer…help with your seo stuff and keywords instead of the non descriptive ?p=39.
Jeff
Oh, and what is the minimum Wattage for the Power Supply necessary to power that board?
I used an AT power supply. An ATX may be an issue without the ability to lock it on (unless you want a separate power button). There were no wattage specs listed in the manual that I saw. The board probably doesn’t take much power due to their size. They look very efficient. I’ll look at permalinking. I’ve wanted to do so anyway, just don’t know much about it yet.
Can you tell the difference from these 48-in-1 board and a old arcade board? I heard that game “sounds” are different on some of these newer 48-in-1 boards than from the older arcade boards.
Depends on which game it is. Most are accurate, but there are a couple that have sound issues. I think the worst is Scramble. Mr. Do is actually very good in this case!
Hi Ive just fitted one of these gameboards in an old space invaders cab, do you know of any way of inverting the rgb signal from the board so that it gives a mirrored image? All I seemed to be able to do is flip the Image with dipn switch 1
Thanks
@Pickles: You should be able to swap yoke wires to accomplish this. Here is a good article from Bob Roberts explaining how this works:
http://www.therealbobroberts.net/yoke.html
Jeff you are a True God. Many thanks for responding so quickly.I read the info at http://www.therealbobroberts.net/yoke.html I went straight outside to the gamesroom removed the yoke wire connector & cut as pre insructions, reversed the Horizontal pair and now my Space Invaders Cab plays the 48 Games perfectly whilst still using the Mirror. Top Man!
Glad to hear it. Bob Roberts is really the man! Remember his site and use it often.
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