I picked up an Arcadia MSS on Ebay, the AMSS like the Nintendo Playchoice 10 allowed people to play one of 1 to 10 games. The system was based on Amiga hardware and featured mainly Mastertronic and Melbourne House (owned by Mastertronic...) software although the system was funded and released by Mastertronic so it was no surprise... The games on the system, where not really suited to arcade play, a lot were budget games and it showed. Sidewinder looks a like an average shooter but it's worse then that, if the Japanese saw this at the time they would have fallen around pissing themselves laughing. Leaderboard is the only really decent game but it's golf and it's been improved... Ninja Mission is soo much pain... The only time I saw one in the flesh was at the 1987 PCW show where I saw Road Wars but since then I'Ve not seen one, in fact most people I've spoken to have never seen one. Look for a picture of the motherboard / cage and you won't find one so here are some brief pictures of the motherboard and the game carts... Amiga A500 without a floppy drive, on the left is a pcb that connects a number of the ports up to make it JAMMA. On the top right is the credit board and sound amp... The cabinet is an Electrocoin cabinet so it had it's own cabinet harness but had a JAMMA convertor bolted on. A number of the unexciting games... Although a number are more playable as you have multiple buttons rather then having to hit space as a second button...
Is Xenon not even as good as it should be? BTW thanks for posting images. I have never seen one before although I immediately recognised the Amiga motherboard. Are the chip sets named the same "Fat Agnes" etc? If you ever sell this off, I would love to have first refusal. Thanks mate!
Xenon is more playable as you have the second fire button to switch between ground and air units, but it seems rather slow nowdays. Leaderboard is good though, still playable, so playable that the pevious owners played it for nearly 11,000 hours (that's about 1 year and 3 months of solid play, if they played it for 4 hours a day then it's 7 years of play) (every other game was barely 1000 hours of play (1 month and 11 hours) , some like Ninja Mission had 600 hours clocked). This of course meant that the leaderboard screen is burnt into the monitor.... Some games are just plain rubbish like World Darts (really the Spectrum version of 180 is much better...) and said Ninja Mission... it was never really suited to arcade play. I'll take more pictures when I am in Australia and have access to the machine again. I disconnected the cage and the Amiga booted to the 1.2 Kickstart screen... so it's an early Amiga A500... I picked the machine up as I knew it was rare and I wanted to see the hardware of the system as I never found anyone with them except a couple of rom boards...
