Ever wondered what’s inside an arcade cabinet?
Well, there’s a fair amount of fresh air.
There’s a lot of wiring for the TV display, speakers, joysticks and buttons. And then there’s a big green printed circuit board (PCB) covered in chips, capacitors and other components. This board is basically the game. All those chips are a combination of memory to store data, a CPU to run the game’s code and custom devices to create sound and graphical effects.
The board you see here is for Mortal Kombat – although you can see from the brown tag that it was actually mislabelled by the original owner as ‘Mortal Combat’.