
Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was my very first PCB. The picture however is
of my second board, originally I had a 2 player version but later I swapped it
for a 4 player board at an amusement arcade in the Great Yarmouth Pier.
The arcade operator had the 4 player board in a 1 player 'Electrocoin' cabinet. This meant you could only select
Leonardo. Duh!
However, the arcade operator was more than happy to do the swap.
This was part of the same deal from when I bought 'SpiderMan'.
You can imagine the
surprise of people passing by when he opened the two machines and handed them over to me in exchange for cash.
I can remember in the olden days when this game was first released, it was so popular you could barely get to the machine to see it, let alone play it, this game was one of the biggest reasons why I started collecting arcade games. It's a great blast from the blast and is highly addictive.
The game is really good fun on a 4 player but for some unknown reason the board has many problems due to the screen resolution on my TV.
For starters it has trouble running on my Sony TV since the screen resolution of the game exceeds the TV's tube.
Bits of pixels overlap round the other end of the tube and produce a ghosting effect stretched across the screen.
Luckily now I have my games running on RGB monitors so I don't have any more
problems.
But
at first I felt like it was the fault of the game. This picture problem was also present in Crimefighers.
I also don't understand why it takes about 5minutes to go through its testing
procedures when all my other boards take about 5 seconds. Another
annoyance is that you can't go back in the menu, only forwards, so if you go too far
by pressing the button twice by accident then you have to wait another 5
minutes to go back.
I actually thought the board was broken and wouldn't perform the test properly, I only discovered that it had an options screen when I left it
going one day by
accident instead of
turning it off.

The picture above shows where you need to wire up the connections for Player 3 and 4.
As you can see I snapped about 3 off each port as these weren't needed.
That was so I could
connect my hand made ports.
However on the 4 player board
there isn't a character select screen so often I can't be arsed to wire up Donatello
and Raphael so if I ever play the game on a 2 player with any of my maes we usually just stick with Leonardo and Michaelangelo.
The next big problem is the fact that 'Jump' and 'Attack' are the wrong way round. It isn't possible to rewire Player 1 and 2 since these connections are on the circuit board and if I changed them in the Jamma Loom every other game would be back to front.
I did manage to get around this problem by using the wiring harness I made for Cabal. You could swap the buttons round for Cabal on PCB switches which meant doing twice so would cancel out the button order swap.