Curious jamma/mobo combo.

[OSCAR]

I snagged this pic from this auction that is about to end.

Looks to be a brundlefly of a jamma board and pc motherboard.  Must be emulator based, eh?  I wonder how they are handling video output since it doesn't say a vga monitor is required.  It looks like there is a vga output on the jamma board, perhaps a vga cable hack?  Makes me wonder if the ArcadeVGA was reverse engineered somehow?  

Anyway, I thought it was interesting...

[paigeoliver]

I have actually seen and heard of quite a few PC based JAMMA boards in the last year or two. Someone, somewhere is making them. Just like all those JAMMA Ms. Pac-Man boardsets, no one seems to know where they actually come from, but they still seem to be making them.

[OSCAR]

I've seen those jamma Ms. Pac boards and others like it, but I haven't seen anything like this one before.

Any reason to use a pc mobo with cpu/ram/sound/etc other than so it can run x86 based emulators?  Somehow I have to believe MAME, or a derivative, is behind this one.

[paigeoliver]

Well, you could also used a PC based JAMMA board to bootleg PC based arcade titles. Like Pump It Up.

I also imagine using PC based boards would make for cheaper and easier development for small companies wishing to make a game or two. I know my local Dave & Busters has a boat racing game that runs windows, I have watched it boot up before (Pentium 233, Windows 95).

[tom61]

Any reason to use a pc mobo with cpu/ram/sound/etc other than so it can run x86 based emulators?

Microsoft had an iniative to run arcade games on PC hardware. Gauntlet Legacy and Dark Legacy run on custom x86 PC hardware (as do most '3DFX' powered games). Also, as PC stuff gets cheaper, and arcade revenues continue to go down, more and more games are probably going to be based on PC hardware.

The first PC based arcade I know of is Dynamo Solitaire, which runs on a 386, and has a VGA touch screen monitor.

[OSCAR]

I agree that newer arcade & PC games can take advantage of an x86 pc platform, but this one seems to be designed to run old arcade games (292x240 @ 15kHz, too).  This is why I suspect that this particular combo is running an emulator and somehow manipulating the vga output for 15kHz.

[planetjay]

That motherboard is a VIA EPIA 5000. Click Here. Since the MB has TVout and can do video overlaying, I'd say that it can probably do 15kHz too. Maybe I'll buy one some day soon and find out.
I'm betting the software is the old Williams software for PCs.

[armad1ll0]

I saw that one at a Dave and Busters. Similar to those other multi game systems from Namco and stuff playing "classic" arcade games, this one does williams games.

I think that it's much more like Ultracade...

[IceCold]

Any reason to use a pc mobo with cpu/ram/sound/etc other than so it can run x86 based emulators?

Microsoft had an iniative to run arcade games on PC hardware. Gauntlet Legacy and Dark Legacy run on custom x86 PC hardware (as do most '3DFX' powered games). Also, as PC stuff gets cheaper, and arcade revenues continue to go down, more and more games are probably going to be based on PC hardware.

The first PC based arcade I know of is Dynamo Solitaire, which runs on a 386, and has a VGA touch screen monitor.

If Gauntlet Legends and Gauntlet Dark Legacy run on x86 hardware, shouldn't it be fairly easy to emulate it full speed?(or at least emulate it at all?)  Or is is that the MAME team doesn't want to emulate newer games?(they have their reasons, I really don't blame them at all if they want to stick with the older games).

Out of curiosity, how fast is the processor in Gaunlet Legends, and Gauntlet Dark Legacy?

[paigeoliver]

You wouldn't really "emulate" X86 based games as much as you would "crack" them, which is a whole different ball of wax.

As far as I know all X-86 based games have hardware dongles that the software checks for.

[IceCold]

You wouldn't really "emulate" X86 based games as much as you would "crack" them, which is a whole different ball of wax.

As far as I know all X-86 based games have hardware dongles that the software checks for.

The reason I said emulate was he said "custom" x86 pc hardware, so I thought maybe it was different(I'm not very knowledgable about these things).  I guess when it comes to cracking, you're definitely getting into things that could cause a lawsuit.

[paigeoliver]

You wouldn't really "emulate" X86 based games as much as you would "crack" them, which is a whole different ball of wax.

As far as I know all X-86 based games have hardware dongles that the software checks for.

The reason I said emulate was he said "custom" x86 pc hardware, so I thought maybe it was different(I'm not very knowledgable about these things).  I guess when it comes to cracking, you're definitely getting into things that could cause a lawsuit.

"Custom" usually consists of at least a hardware key (3D Studio Max, and other high end software uses).

Other things that "Custom" might entail is a boot rom. Some X86 games are also basically their own operating system, while others run off Windows or DOS. X86 games might use the hard drive, ROMS like "normal" games, or CDROMS for the actual game data.

[u_rebelscum]

If Gauntlet Legends and Gauntlet Dark Legacy run on x86 hardware, shouldn't it be fairly easy to emulate it full speed?(or at least emulate it at all?)  Or is is that the MAME team doesn't want to emulate newer games?(they have their reasons, I really don't blame them at all if they want to stick with the older games).

Emulating the x86 series (386 and above), is not easy, and won't be as fast as you'd think.  Remember, mame is programmed (mostly) in C, and designed to be portable to different OS and hardware.  Now, if mame was written only for PCs and in assembly language, it could be a lot faster than that (only when emulating the cpu), but...  it's still pretty hard.  486 and pentiums are going to be even harder to emulate, although they'll be able to use the 386 emulation code as a very high starting point.

[Lilwolf]

Someone might be able to emulate a 386 really quick... but not in mame.

Someone who wants to make something work in a todays PC could try to get it to work 100% native... with registry swapping (between the 'emulated' game and the emulation software... (ie, for every command... swap the entire registry... let one command go... then stop it).  IE, not emulate anything but let the processor do it.  

But there are some real problems with this (you want it to only do one step... it will run really fast and stepping it down will not be easy... ok for some games, not for others).

Like a HLprocessorE.  

But don't expect it any time soon.... and by then, standard emulation will probably be able to handle it... why?  Emulation programmers aren't looking at this as an option...