Can I get some background info on jamma and whatnot?

Is there any way someone here could give me the lowdown on jamma cabinets, what there possibilities are and what they are compatible with? My brother owns one and I'm starting to want to buy new games, but I'm really not sure what's compatible/what I need to make stuff work. For an example, will this thing work in a standard jamma cabinet?

<img src="http://images.andale.com/f2/130/111/11335644/click2enlarge/1055335115961_1055150088254_DCP_0042.JPG" alt=" - " />

It's not a standard pcb, and I thought I saw a sort of cradle for these types of capcom games. I'm actually thinking of buying this, and was wondering what sort of stuff I can do with this jamma cab I got.

Any JAMMA compatible board should work OK in your JAMMA cab. If you wanted to play Neo, however, you would need to rewire the JAMMA connection to get stereo sound (depends on the board type you purchase) and wire up the extra button (JAMMA standard uses only 3 buttons).

All you need to do when buying a PCB is to ask if it JAMMA compatible or not. If it is, you are good to go.

I'm not a big PCB guru or anything, so I can't tell you what that is or if it will work. Find out what game it is and look it up on <a href="http://www.klov.com/" target="_blank">KLOV</a>. KLOV gives you the type of board a given game is in the descriptions.

<small>[ July 25, 2003, 11:41 PM: Message edited by: slerch666 ]</small>

So say I bought that blue one, (street fighter alpha 3) on ebay, would it for sure work with all the given hookups, or would I have to buy something special to hook it up?

That is a CPS2 board, and is JAMMA compatible. However, since JAMMA only supports 3 buttons per player, you have to add a separate kick harness for the other buttons. You have to make one for each game, as it's unique to each game(well, most CPS2 games use the same kick harness, and a few others share, but most are unique). It's not hard though.

Reznor007:
That is a CPS2 board, and is JAMMA compatible. However, since JAMMA only supports 3 buttons per player, you have to add a separate kick harness for the other buttons. You have to make one for each game, as it's unique to each game(well, most CPS2 games use the same kick harness, and a few others share, but most are unique). It's not hard though.

Click to expand...

Can't JAMMA support up to 5 pushbuttons per player? D&D on CPS2 uses JAMMA for the 4th button. I think the MVS is similar?

RiotoftheBlood:
Can't JAMMA support up to 5 pushbuttons per player? D&D on CPS2 uses JAMMA for the 4th button. I think the MVS is similar?

Click to expand...

That would likely be 5 buttons through a kick harness or something. That's only a guess though.

The JAMMA standard is ONLY 3 buttons.

Isn't the 6 buttons, ala Street Fighter, considered JAMMA+ or something?

MVS is considered MOSTLY JAMMA. You need to wire up the 4th button and you may not get sound through a harness with some MVS boards. You can't just plug an MVS into a "normal" JAMMA harness and get the 4th button.

<small>[ July 26, 2003, 06:51 AM: Message edited by: slerch666 ]</small>

By default JAMMA only supports 3 buttons+start for 2 players. The unofficial standard has one extra button for player 1/2 on the pin just after button 3, and is used by a few games(NeoGeo, Total Carnage, Gauntlet Dark Legacy, others). Any 3rd or 4th player wiring is not on the JAMMA harness. Commonly if there is only 1 extra button per player, it is the 4th button on the JAMMA harness, but if there are more than 4 buttons per player, they move everything to a separate harness.

Ok, I have street fighter using 6 buttons and all I do to get them working is use this extra connector from the joystick and it works. BUT, if I bought Alpha 3 in that capcom cps2 I would need something that looked like:
<img src="http://ebay2.ipixmedia.com/abc/M28/_EBAY_ddfe33c0982c123036df18ac560f0b82/i-1.JPG" alt=" - " />
Right?

And if I got that, I just seat the cps2 board into it and then plug the jamma cable into the cps2 harness?

For CPS2 games you need the B board(the game) and the A board, the black motherboard. The JAMMA connector connects to the A board, and a separate wiring harness for the extra buttons goes from another connector on the A board to your control panel.

no jamma can only support 3 buttons the other 3 are put thoough a special cable and any thing jamma will work in a cab basically anything from 1989 - present will work

<a href="http://www.dameon.net/BBBB/plus.html" target="_blank">All you always wanted to know about kick harness and never dared to ask.</a>