NBA Jam TE... or not?

Hello everybody, i have a little problem and i hope someone can help me out..

you see i recently aquired a pcb of NBA Jam TE from ebay and after plugging it into
my cabinet all i get is regular NBA Jam instead of Tournament Edition..

at first i thought i got screwed until i took a close look at the soundboard,
turns out there are Tournament Edition roms on there!

yet on the pcb of the game itself there is no mention of TE whatsoever..

i have no idea how the upgrading of NBA Jam to NBA Jam TE goes so i dont know
if perhaps i'm missing something or forgot to turn something on via dipswitches or something..

the auction specificly stated "NBA Jam T.E. orig. Midway Videospielplatine PCB Jamma"

also the ribbon cable that connects the sound board to the pcb seems to be missing..

perhaps thats whats keeping TE from booting up?

i'm such a noob when it comes to pcb's and jamma's

i also emailed the seller asking if i'm doing something wrong but she is very slow with emailing so i've not yet gotten a response..

here are some pics.

Main PCB

Soundboard

soundboard closeup

main pcb roms closeup

closeup of the dipswitch area of the mainboard

should i be screwed would it be very difficult to upgrade to the Tournament Edition
by finding someone who could burn eproms?

well i hope someone can help me..

I dont know much about these boards, do have a MK2 though.

Sounds like youve got a NBA Jam TE sound board and a regular NBA Jam mother board.

I think the sound board may work if hooked up correctly, or do you get a sound rom error ?

This may have been better placed in arcade central thread.

I have got the exact same mobo and i can say 100% that you have recieved a NBA Jam mainbaord. Im not sure about the soundboard though as i dont own a copy of TE.

If you plug that board into a cab with the soundbaord, youll probable get a sound IRQ error message in the diagnostics.

Like Berty says you do have an original NBA Jam PCB. IIRC, TE was a simple rom upgrade from regular NBA Jam, so you shouldn't be totally screwed if the seller doesn't help you out. Also there is another cable besides the ribbon cable that connects the sound PCB to the main PCB. This other cable provides the power that drives the sound PCB. Without that you won't get sound at all. The ribbon cable is what transfers the data. Finally, you may also need a sound pot that attaches to the sound board (it allows you to adjust volume). NBA Jam requires this sound pot to be there in order to get sound, but I'm not sure about TE. If it's running off the same sound PCB as regular Jam, I would assume it still needs the sound PCB. MK 1 uses the same sound pot just like NBA Jam does, but MK2 doesn't need one. That's likely because MK2 was diffferent hardware and not just a rom swap. I'm fairly sure NBA Jam TE is just a rom swap and therefore you'll need to track down the sound power cable and the volume control pot to get sound to work. Not sure what'll happen if you try to use the TE sound roms with the regular NBA Jam board, but I don't see how it could do damage (someone chime in if I'm wrong). Good luck with it.

Thanks for the replies guys! it really helps me to know what i'm dealing with,
i forgot to post a picture of what came with the auction but i got :

a mainboard
a soundboard
a cable to connect the mainboard to the soundboard with a big red volume knob attached to it (the soundpot i asume)
a 4player cable
manuals and some sort of plastic flyers.

and yes i am getting an irq error, is this because the ribbon cable is missing
or because the soundroms are from a different version?


pic that came with the ebay auction

second pic that came with the auction

strangely enough the main pcb was wrapped in bubble plastic with tape over it, and on the tape is written "nba jam tournament edition"

no ribbon cable, no correct mainboard..

okay i'm done ranting, thanks for helping me figure this out guys

Vamp said:

and yes i am getting an irq error, is this because the ribbon cable is missing
or because the soundroms are from a different version?

Click to expand...

Both. You will get that error because there is no supply to the sound board (vcc to the roms) If you had the supply the error would occur because the roms differ between the two versions.

I seem to recall on my MK2 board on boot up there were a couple of sound roms showing BAD but the game still played with distorted sound in parts. Picked up another sound board so its now working.

You can get by without the sound pot if you short the connection on the sound board. There is a molex connector on one side of the board with three pins, two of them are close together, if you bridge these two connectors then you wont need a pot for sound.