Collectors call them “boards.” Technically they’re printed circuit boards — PCBs — and understanding how they evolved from custom one-off hardware into a standardized, swappable format is essential if you’re buying, selling, or troubleshooting arcade electronics.
Before Standardization
Early golden-age games each ran on completely proprietary hardware. A Pac-Man board and a Defender board shared essentially nothing — different connectors, different voltages, different wiring conventions — which meant swapping games between cabinets required custom harness work every single time. This made sense when arcade games were still a new medium and every manufacturer was solving problems independently, but it made life miserable for operators trying to refresh a cabinet’s game selection.
The JAMMA Standard
The Japan Amusement Machine Manufacturers Association introduced the JAMMA standard in the mid-1980s: a common 56-pin edge connector carrying power, video, audio, and control signals in a fixed pinout. Once manufacturers adopted it, an operator could pull one JAMMA board out of a cabinet and drop in a completely different game in minutes, without rewiring anything. This single standard is the reason the used-board market exists at all today — it’s why you can buy a bare PCB online and reasonably expect it to work in almost any standard cabinet with a JAMMA harness.
Notable Architectures
- Capcom CPS1 / CPS2 / CPS3 — Capcom’s arcade platforms through the late 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, running everything from Street Fighter II to Marvel vs. Capcom.
- SNK Neo Geo MVS — a cartridge-based multi-game cabinet system, letting one cabinet host up to four swappable game cartridges.
- Williams / Midway custom hardware — powered classics like Defender, Robotron, and Mortal Kombat, largely pre-dating widespread JAMMA adoption in the U.S. market.
The Battery Problem
Many boards from the late 80s through 2000s rely on an onboard battery — often a CR2032 coin cell or a soldered barrel battery — to preserve settings or, in some cases, decryption keys in volatile memory. When these batteries leak, the corrosive electrolyte eats through traces and components on the board, sometimes destroying it entirely. Capcom’s CPS2 platform took this a dangerous step further: it used a battery-backed security chip that permanently and irreversibly encrypted the game data the moment the battery died, effectively bricking the board — a design so notorious in the collecting community it earned the nickname “suicide battery.” Capcom eventually released tools allowing the encrypted data to be dumped and decrypted before failure, but it remains one of the best cautionary tales in arcade collecting: check and replace batteries proactively, don’t wait for a warning.
Buying and Verifying Boards
Because bootleg and clone boards are common — especially for the most popular golden-age titles — verify chip labels, board layout, and known serial or date-code patterns against reference photos before paying collector prices. A working, well-documented board from a widely respected title is a genuinely durable piece of computing history; it just takes a little diligence to make sure what you’re buying is the real thing.