Arcade memories...The ultimate Jamma cabinet thread

[agbulls]

I've always dreamnt of owning my own Jamma cabinet. I think the big appeal is the ease at owning one cab while having multiple jamma cards that you can "plug and play."

However, this just seems to easy to be true. Is it really that simple? If I went out and bought a Simpsons or TMNT cab, I could just buy another Jamma board and hot swap it? Any info and real experience would be fantastic. My wife and I live in a Chicago apartment, so this isn't going to happen for quite a while. However, she knows that one day I'll own my own cabinet. The whole mame-thing just seems like an easy way to promote my videogame attention deficit disorder ;) and I would very much like to avoid that. Also, I want a real legit Konami cabinet.

There just isn't anything like having four guys with a couple beers slugging it out while playing X-Men. I've been lucky enough to have that experience once...Good times :) It almost is as good as remembering my brother and I avoiding dinner to play Simpsons and Street Fighter II at Fuddruckers (their burgers were average at best, but we insisted on going because of their games :)). Ahh the memories.

EDIT: After actually looking on Google, I found a great Jamma Q&A. Hit the link for some good info:

http://www.jammaboards.com/jcenter_jammaFAQ.html

[98PaceCar]

The actual Jamma standard only covers power, video, sound (but not always), and 2 players with up to 3 buttons each. Different harnesses will have different player and button configurations, but not rarely will have more than 2 players with 3 buttons each.

Jamma should be thought of as a way to know for sure that you can test a board to functionality in pretty much any jamma cab without fear of blowing it up, but there are even exceptions to this (one of the Neo Geo boards will fry the audio circuit if you put it in a standard jamma cab).

So no, Jamma isn't an end all be all to easy arcade swapping. It makes it easier to do as at least part of it is consistant, but not enough to make it pure plug and play.