For a long time I've been powering my old arcade cab with a PC built out of spare parts (some AMD CPU, a loose 3.5" HDD, an ArcadeVGA... stuff like that) with a minimal XP installation and Maximus Arcade.
Lately I've been pondering of this:
http://arcadeforge.net/Pi2Jamma-Pi2SCART/Pi2Jamma::248.html
Basically it's an interface sitting on a Pi 3's GPIO connector to allow it to connect to the JAMMA harness. Quite elegant, but not exactly cheap.
Anyone's worked with it? is it worth it? Any issues?
No? Nobody?
I have no direct experience from any tinkering with it, but I have tried that setup in a friends house. He have a Sega Astro City as a base cabinet, putting the Raspberry Pi + the Pi2Jamma interface inside, and it did what it was supposed to do. Now I just played some 80:s game on it running for 15khz, so I cannot say if it runs perfectly on more recent hardware but that is probably more a question of the Pi rather than the Jamma interface.
I am no arcade person, I have a Sigma Raijin and some old PCB to play Tatsujin Oh! and some other shooters that I used playing in my youth but overall I believe this solution is much better than those multi PCB things from China and probably also better than using a Windows PC. But I suppose it depends on what type of gaming you are after. :)
Thanks for the input :)
Those multi-game boards (like the Pandora boxes) are surely great in a pinch, they're very easy to set up, they work fine and are cheap, but of course they can't beat a custom-built machine.
I've got my cab running from a XP PC inside it, but of course a Pi is so much better to work with...