Hardware
The Vs. System was designed primarily as a kit to retrofit Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Popeye, and Mario Bros. machines; as such, they require the same special monitor that these coin-ops used. These monitors use inverse voltage levels for their video signals as compared to most arcade monitors. Commercially available converters allowed one to use any standard open frame monitor with the game.
Almost all the games on the Vs. System ran on identical hardware, with the notable exception that four special PPUs (video chips) were also made, each containing a different palette (each of which appears to arrange the colors completely randomly). Most boards could be switched to a new game simply by swapping the program ROMs, though the appropriate PPU would also have to be used—if not, the game would appear with incorrect colors. Several of the later Vs. games employed further measures of protection by using special PPUs which swapped pairs of I/O registers and/or returned special data from normally unimplemented regions of memory—attempts to run these games in other Vs. systems would result in the game failing to even start.
There were some dedicated Vs. double cabinets produced which looked like two games butted together at an angle. A single motherboard powered both games on those models.
A steel sit down cabinet for the Dualsystem, nicknamed the "red tent" due to its upper portion's resemblance to a pup tent, allowed play for up to four players simultaneously. This cabinet used the same motherboard as the double cabinet referred to above.
Read more about this topic: Nintendo Vs. System
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