D! K!Ī particularly infamous MAME inaccuracy is in Donkey Kong. Of course, the game itself is playable, and since then MAME has improved quite a bit but taking modern improvements might have compromised the ability to run on such old hardware. My poor ears! That is some clipping, and some clunky sound playback for sure. You don't have a video tag support or something? So you can't see this footage of *Gyruss*- it's for the best, really (perhaps consider lowering the volume of your headphones) So this is basically an early 2000’s low-end ARM computer running an old version of MAME, right? And this means that the emulation is very hit or miss. A bit confusing, but better than an empty menu. For example, here I have created a board for a dedicated Super Breakout cabinet that, for some reason, uses a joystick.ĭisabling all games gets you all 60. That gets rid of the iCade menu entirely this board could be lurking in more places than that. If you’re anything like me, you probably wondered what happens if you only enable one game. (The meaning of each switch? Why it’s in the manual) This is all provided by a quite elaborate test mode, which also allows you to set the DIP switches. For example, one I ran into was in a Donkey Kong cabinet, and had the options limited to Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Donkey Kong 3. That being said, most of these you see won’t be playing sixty games. Even in this era where copyright treaties encompass essentially all nations, habits from the trademark era are hard to break. Of course, game manufacturer logos are generally removed. You can select any game, and even get a preview of the game– allowing you to see the attract mode without spending your precious coin. The 60-in-1 identifies itself as “iCade”, with a set of screenshots of various games, while playing a smooth musical tune. And the answer is simple the menu is a dead giveaway. You might wonder how I identified this board at my local barcade. There’s no licensing happening here MAME licensing or the original games. It’s a bit amusing that there’s MAME support, as this thing likely runs MAME. They’ve also been around long enough that MAME has some support for it and its predecessors it seems to clock the PXA255 at 200MHz. These are still newly manufactured today or at least, enough have been manufactured that they’re very easy to get. The pin headers allow you to hook up trackballs for games like Centipede. That being said, all my captures are over the JAMMA edge. In the world of arcades, “CGA” means 15kHz analog video, rather than the digital “TTL RGBI” signal you might be more used to. But the JAMMA edge is also fully populated, and can be used to provide a 15kHz signal. These allow for use of cheaper PC LCD monitors and power supplies, without the need of an upscaler. Does that matter? As we’ll see, this board doesn’t need to do as much work as King of Fighters ‘97.Īnother key feature of the 60-in-1 is its VGA port and PC Molex power supply ports. As a result, it lacks things like “Intel® Wireless MMX™ Technology”. I’m not sure if this is a new chip or a module that was salvaged from elsewhere. This here is a PXA225, which seems to be a little older than the PXA270 the King of Fighters ‘97 board used. For example, both are powered by Intel XScale-derived ARM CPUs. (That’s half the size of a standard 8.5”x11” American sheet of printer paper, for scale) The board reminds me of the King of Fighters ‘97 pirate board I looked at a year ago. Mine came as a bare board with this adorable little folded-paper manual. Have you ever heard of the 60-in-1? If you look around on the modern retro arcade scene, this is practically ubiquitous (can easily find at least one machine featuring on on my local craigslist with less than a minute of searching), but outside of it, I’m not sure that’s so. And hey, look at that– it even plays Pac-Man. And so, doing a very scientific survey of one (1) barcade, I’ve found that there might be another competitor at least, if we only look at boards. But there have been a lot of years since 1980. What’s the best-selling arcade game? The usual answer seems to be Namco’s Pac-Man.
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