I might be buying a CE cabinet soon, and would look to replace the CPS1 motherboard with a CPS2 motherboard. I know next to nothing about arcade hardware, and I was wondering if anybody could point me in the right direction for this. Thanks alot!
Awesome, thanks! Just a couple of questions:
"Just need to get both CPS2 boards (A and B)."
Are you referring to cps2 games (as in getting both a&b boards for the games), or is there general cps2 a&b boards? Know where I could buy these if this is the case?
"http://www.jammaboards.com/store/cap...s/prod_49.html"
It says that the converter supports those games, but does it mean it supports only those games? I was planning on purchasing ST (on the list), and several other cps2 games such as progear and alien vs predator, which aren’t on the list. I’m assuming they just listed the most popular games for cps2, but can’t hurt to confirm it.
Thanks again!
CPS2 hardware operates with 2 boards- the motherboard (A) and the cartridge (B). The motherboard can be used to run any CPS2 (B) board so long as it is compliant with the region of the motherboard.
There are 4 regions, each of them distinguished by the color of the (B) board and the test/volume buttons on the (A) motherboard.
Japan- Green
USA-Blue
Asia-Grey
S. America-Orange
In the case of S. America and Asia I believe they need the appropriate region motherboard to run the actual game. However Japanese and US board are interchangeable with each other. So you could have one US motherboard and play any and all US and Japanese (B) boards, or vice versa of course. Wouldnt worry too much about orange and grey boards as they dont come up too often and when they do I generally avoid them just out of preference. As for where to buy them, they are readily available on ebay and other various gaming forums. Some of them can be had for 50.00 some will run you up in the 300.00 range. Just depends on rarity and region in some cases.
So the link is to an actual CPS2 kick harness. Basically Jamma can support up to 4 buttons per player per side, so for playing Neo-Geo games or something like D&D, you dont need the kick harness.
However all of the Street Fighter games only have 3 punches per player per side available, so the kick harness is used to wire up the kick buttons on both players respective sides, hence the term kick harness. All CPS board have an additional input that the kick harness connects to to do this. CPS1 has a specific connector piece as do CPS2/3 which use the same connector type. If you buy ST you will need to buy a CPS2 kick harness OR buy one of the CPS1 to CPS2 convertors from the guy on Ebay. I am guessing that since it is a CE cabinet it will already have a CPS1 kick harness in there. Hooking up the CPS2 kick harness is a piece of cake and thats what I would recommend doing. But, if you plan on playing both CPS1 and CPS2/3 games I would leave the CPS1 harness in there and get a connector so you dont need to change the buttons connects everytime you go from CPS1 to CPS2 and vice versa.
Hope that all makes sense, you should check out this site here for more information on CPS2 stuff…
Strict JAMMA standard only supports three buttons, but since the JAMMA harness has two unused pins next to the existing buttons some systems (NeoGeo, IGS PGM, Atomiswave, probably others as well) wire their extra buttons there out of convenience. D&D however (I assume you mean TOD and/or SOM) runs on the CPS2 platform so would still require a kick harness for the fourth button.
thanks for clarifying that mayhem. I made reference of D&D since I have one in my Impress and I actually do not use the kick harness for it. The kick harness seems to just provide support for the 3rd and 4th players, is that right?
Either way man, thanks for clarifying.
Thanks alot, both of you! and thanks for the links, TigerCraneFist.
Well waddaya know, now that you mention it I looked up the pinout and it seems Capcom did after-all map button 4 to the unused pins on the JAMMA harness for the D&D games! I actually had no idea as so far I only own CPS2 titles using either the full six buttons with a kick harness or just the three allowed by the JAMMA spec. I do have a D&D SOM board in transit from Japan currently so good to know for when it arrives.
Nevertheless a fourth button isn’t part of the JAMMA standard, so not all cabinets have it already wired to the harness. It is a pretty easy thing to retrofit so the thread starter definitely shouldn’t be discouraged by it!