What I mean is, are the components common enough to be able to build one yourself for cheaper than buying an official arcade board? It seems a bit silly to spend all that money when the PCs aren't that high end and it seems like you should be able to make one yourself.
I imagine the biggest hurdle would be to get past the encryption the games use but I would think one of you tech savvy guys around here might have a few ideas.
Where will you get all the custom chips? Talk about an expensive, time consuming way to spend your time. Most PCBs can be bought for less than a day's wages, are you mad? =D
Hmm, I was very vague with my initial post
I meant PC based, like the Taito Type X, sega lindbergh, Sega Ring Edge, Sega Ring Wide, Taito Type X2, etc.
these boards are extremely expensive but are not made from custom parts, but made from intel chips, windows and linux operating systems using nvidia graphics cards.
So I was wondering if you could make one from scratch since they use off the shelf parts, or is there some sort of encryption that would disable you from playing legitimate games on them.
I've seen a few of these up close, and they seem to rely on very specific hardware combinations as a form of protection. You can't use just any old nvidia card, it's gotta be a certain family. Possibly a custom BIOS as well, easily sorted. I've also seen customized I/O boards which is where your challenge gets a little sticky.
I see, so even if you did have the right family of CPU, GPU, motherboard, etc. You'd hit a wall with the protection system, and might have to make the entire I/O segment from scratch.
Basically it's not practical to most anyone.
Well that helps, all I've seen of them are a few pictures around the net like arcade-otaku, system16, etc. so thank you.