New MK3 Cabinet Owner questions

Hi. I've been fortunate enough to have been given an MK3 arcade machine as a best man's gift from my best friend's wedding. I'm a huge MK fan so this is pretty exciting for me. I won't be able to take delivery of the cabinet until I buy my house in October, but I would like to start working on tracking down PCBs for MK1, MK2 and UMK3.

My questions relate mostly to the cabinet and compatiblity of all the boards. As I understand it, MK2, MK3 and UMK3 are all JAMMA plus boards. Is MK1 just a plain JAMMA board? Should I be able to run all of these different versions of MK in my cabinet by just switching the boards out? The MK3 machine has a six button set up with the extra run button, so I know I'm good on having enough buttons for them all.

I've been reading through the forums and have seen mention of a Jamma harness that people need to get MK working. Will I have a need for this harness for any of the games given that I have an MK cabinet?

Thanks for any help you all can give me.

to answer your question, yes you can run all the Mk's in that cabinet... the only problem you are going to run into is with the "jamma" part. all the games will use the jamma harness so its a quick plug n' play type install. But for the Kick Buttons on MK1, 2, and also the Run button in 3 and ultimate. It comes in a seperate harness (plug). and the pin layout is different from 1 to 2 ( so im going to assume 3 is different as well). All you will need to do is just look for MK "kick harness" on ebay. I would just buy one for each version of MK you get so you can do a quick as possible swap out of the cab, rather than rewire your harness for each game each time you swap out MK boards.

edit- MK 1 is jamma

I know a very similar topic has come up before (I think there or maybe on another forum I read). JONESGFX pretty much summed it up but I do have a little to add. MK2, MK3, and UMK3 should all swap out with no problem in the wiring. I have an MK2 cab that was converted to UMK3. In my deconversion all I had to do was just swap boards. The MK3 and UMK3 kick harness is compatable with MK2, they just use an extra wire for the run button. MK 1 is a little different. There are 2 different versions of hardware it runs on. The first version of the hardware is not directly comptable with the kick harness for the other MK games. There is a version of MK1 that runs on the "t-unit" hardware, which is what MK2 runs on. If you find this t-unit version of MK (IIRC it was only used on version 5.0) I think it may swap out directly, but I'm not sure as I own the first version of the MK board hardware and know that version doesn't swap. Good luck!

Thanks very much for your help, guys. I really appreciate it.

If you are lucky enough to find a Mortal Kombat "MIDWAY T UNIT HARDWARE" then the kick harness would be compatible.

http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=611