Arcade Boards

The Capcom Play System 1 was the hardware foundation for Street Fighter II, Final Fight, and Ghouls'n Ghosts, delivering sprite-scaling and large-character capabilities that defined the early 1990s arcade aesthetic.

The CPS-2 was Capcom's most important arcade platform, hosting Super Street Fighter II Turbo, all three Darkstalkers entries, and the Marvel vs. Capcom crossover series across a decade of continuous use.

The Sega System 16 was the hardware platform for Golden Axe, Altered Beast, and Streets of Rage's spiritual ancestors, producing the visually rich sprite-based 16-bit arcade games that defined Sega's mid-to-late 1980s output.

The Taito F2 System produced some of the finest shoot-'em-ups of the late 1980s and early 1990s — Raiden, Grid Seeker, and the Darius II extrapolations — with a sprite scaling and rotation capability that other boards of the era could not match.

The Namco System 86 powered Rolling Thunder and Hopping Mappy at a transitional moment when Namco was moving from its earlier 8-bit boards toward the 16-bit era, producing technically polished games that bridged the visual styles of both generations.

The Irem M92 was the most powerful hardware Irem produced for its golden era, running In the Hunt, Blade Master, and the acclaimed R-Type Leo — games whose detailed sprite work and complex parallax backgrounds represented the visual peak of the company's coin-op output.

The Konami GX was the hardware platform for Lethal Enforcers, Sexy Parodius, and Pop'n Music — Konami's primary mid-1990s arcade board, bridging the 2D sprite era and the company's transition toward rhythm games that would define its late 1990s output.

Data East's DECO arcade hardware was home to Bad Dudes, Heavy Barrel, Robocop, and Midnight Resistance — a consistent run of energetic action games that made Data East one of the most recognisable American-Japanese publishers of the late 1980s coin-op era.

The Sega X Board was the hardware platform for After Burner, ThunderBlade, and Super Monaco GP — a dual-68000 board purpose-built for sprite scaling and rotation that produced some of the most visually impressive motion simulation games of the late 1980s.

The Neo Geo MVS was the most powerful arcade-to-home unified platform of the 1990s, hosting 148 games across a fourteen-year commercial lifespan — including the Metal Slug, King of Fighters, and Samurai Shodown series — on hardware identical to the AES home console.