I’m absolutely vibrating with nerd joy at having successfully replaced this setup with a MiSTer + MiSTercade https://ryanfb.github.io/etc/2017/11/11/converting_a_jamma_arcade_cabinet_for_mame.html
as background: I had previously converted an arcade cabinet to run off a RaspberryPi via a J-PAC for MAME and console emulation, which kinda sucked for a variety of reasons. I’ve now replaced it with a MiSTer, an FPGA that people have used to make cycle-accurate implementations of old gaming hardware, and MiSTercade, an addon that allows everything on it to run through standard JAMMA
@ryanfb I haven't looked into the actual hardware yet but it makes my preservationist heart glad to see all the MiSTer cores coming in as verilog hardware-level captures of what an old system is at the circuit level. Compared to emulators that have compat imperfections and/or only run on certain architectures and stacks, these seem like they'll be valuable reference for generations to come.
@jplebreton I was kind of thinking about playing with development for it, it’s absolutely wild how many of the popular 80’s/90’s chipsets already have open source cycle-accurate implementations
@jplebreton another thing that blows my mind is because I’m running it on an actual CRT now, I could connect a real NES Zapper to it via serial adapter and it would just work in the NES core because the real hardware would just work
@ryanfb yep! so freakin' cool, sidesteps so many of the old emulator headaches.
@ryanfb sick, @wpo keeps trying to sell everyone on MiSTer lol