I just happen to come across a CPU and a jammit board set which after some research i have determined it to be the Atari Area51 Jammit Board system.
It's actually "Area 51 Site 4" - a newer version of Area 51.
I would like to get any info that i can about how to setup this boardset for testing. I have the two boards only, no cables,hard drive or manual.
The boards attach together plugs to plugs. One side (the non jammit side) is a basic PC motherboard, although it has a special bios on it so don't think it can be easily replaced. You should be able to plug a vga monitor into the monitor port to see *something* when you turn it on for testing. I believe its a 486 class pc but maybe running an AMD processor. I believe mine had 64 meg of ram which is standard 486 sdram dimms.
I believe there is two or three harnesses needed besides just mating up the boards - you have power to go from the jammit to the mobo (can prob make it using the wiring from an old at power supply), an audio wire (which almost looks like a cdrom audio connection), and a 2 conductor "watchdog" wire. The watchdog isn't necessary for operation as it only reboots the pc mobo if it sees a problem. The watchdog connector is in the far corner on the edge where the jamma connector is (2 pin plug).
On the jammit side, there's a power led near the power connectors, then a few leds near the parallel port connection. The parallel port leds should flicker while the pc mobo boots up and the game starts to come to action (its parallel activity).
PC Mobo takes a standard IDE hard drive or you can use a compact flash adapter.
Does anyone know if the compact flash drive upgrade will function properly with this set?
I haven't done it yet but as far as I know it should.
And can it be upgraded to play the Area51/Maximum Force combo?
This board will not run the area 51/max force combo as that was only for the area 51 board, not area 51 *site 4*. Completely different platform unfortunately.
Any and all help would be greatly appreciated...thanks, Jason
Heres some more notes from when I was learning and troubleshooting mine:
http://www.junknet.net/index.php?op...oubleshooting&catid=32:arcade-games&Itemid=99
Lastly - be very careful with voltages on this board. The actel chip on the jammit board is apparently very sensitive and could easily be killed with half a volt too much on the 5v line. Happ apparently still services the jammit boards - that Actel chip is sort of a customizable logic chip that you program, and I guess they have the original Atari program for them. You can get the chip from MCM or other places ($50) but without a socket/program to program with its useless. I got a replacement Jammit board on ebay that had a taller Actel chip and a sticker with the atari part # on it. It had a Happ repair tag.