Good day! First post here.
I'm a long-time player of arcade games (started out feeding quartes into played one of the early Pong
machines back in the day). I've often thought that it would be cool to have my own machine so when
I saw that someone down the street was tossing out an olde arcade cabinet I grabbed it and installed
it in my garage. The front graphics indicate that it is (or was) an Atari R.B.I Baseball game. I consider
myself reasonably proficient technical wise so I figured I'd take a shot at making this unit work.
Further inspection reveals that :
1) The cabinet was made by Nintendo (model MGS-UP-US).
2) There are no game circuit cards inside; only the power supplies, CRT, the CRT control card and the wiring harnesses
for the coin slots, the CRT control card and the game cards.
3) I looked on-line and determined that the wiring harness is of the type 'Nintendo VS'.
So, now to my question:
Is there any way to adapt non-Nintendo game cards (Mr. Do by Universal, any JAMMA, etc.) to the existing wiring
or do I just have to bite the bullet and replace everything? I've looked on-line and have found lots of adapters
but so far nothing for the Ninendo VS series. The big unknown, at least for me, it what to do about the video signals.
If I understand the way arcade games work most of the other connections are just from NO switches that need to
be routed to the appropriate pins on the game card.
Regarding the CRT - the operational status of the CRT unknown at the moment. I'd rather not have to replace
it if possible (at least not right away). Unfortunately without a game card I don't know of a good way to test it.
All of the above being said, just gutting the unit and installing a nice LED display and one of those multi-game
cards does have a certain appeal from a simplicity point of view.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
Thanks!