The Fuuki FG-3 and Asura Buster: The late 90’s say Hello

One thing I’ve talked about a few times on this blog is that over the course of the 1990’s, 2D arcade hardware became something you could take for granted; in fact, today you can run pretty much any 2D game you want on an incredibly cheap Raspberry Pi. Some of the later boards we’ve looked at include the lower-end Namco ND-1, the IGS PGM2, and the high-end Cave CV-1000, which used a blitter and framebuffer approach. Let’s look at a monster of sprites and tilemaps from a more modest company at the end of the 2D era: the 1998-2001 Fuuki FG-3.

Behold

The Fuuki FG-3 arrives in the form of a large green circuitboard. But it’s surprisingly spacious compared to a lot of boards we’ve looked at here; all the components are on the top side, with the exception of some bodges near the JAMMA edge connector. Also, the JAMMA edge isn’t plated, which is kind of a bummer, but very common.

On the underside, the ROMs for the board are mounted on their own board. In theory, this could imply that new games could be marketed as ROM boards alone. In practice, I don’t know if that happened, or if it would actually work, or if there are game-specific modifications to the top board as well. Something to