Modding a Beast Busters : Second Nightmare PCB to JAMMA - a tutorial

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, and now that I finally found a working Beast Busters motherboard and cart I was able to.

I took inspiration for the JAMMA Nation X tutorial, but my modification is reversible and doesn’t require cutting any wires on the motherboard itself. This is part 1...it’s a four part series I did to show the work / help others.

Feedback welcome!

 

I could never work out what SNK were thinking with that system. The MVS was a huge success because you could just swap the cart and have a wide selection of games in the same cab. The Hyper NeoGeo 64 had 7 games - and 3 different mutually incompatible board types...

 

Right?? It didn’t need to be that way either. It’s all down to bios and connectors. You could boot Beast Busters on a fighting motherboard with a) a bios revision and b) extra connectors.

Should have been one motherboard and sub pcb with a JAMMA edge, some gun connectors on the back of the JAMMA pcb for gun games, and the JST connectors on the front for driving hardware.

New games ship with a bios chip to drop in. Hell its socketed from the factory

 

Part two. Unfortunately it looks like the forums won’t be around long enough for me to finish linking the project on here. Bummer. I’ll be active on NG.com / Klov / arcade-projects/arcade-otaku though