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Namco System 357 / 369

A PlayStation 3 in a metal rack, with two Namco boards grafted on. The 357 (2007) runs Tekken 6, the 369 (2011) Tekken Tag Tournament 2. The game lives on a hard disk paired to a dongle — that is where preservation is decided, and what makes these boards fragile.

Identification

Field Value
Manufacturer Namco (Bandai Namco)
Years 357: 2007 · 369: 2011
Base retail PlayStation 3 motherboard, Product Code ARC = 0xA0
Board specifics no WiFi/Bluetooth module, no Blu-ray drive
Added boards 1 × Namco I/O board + 1 × JVS board
Game media hard disk, pre-installed, paired to a dongle
Video output VGA (HD-15) through the JVS board
Audio output RCA left/right
PCB format JVS — no JAMMA
Enclosure metal “rack assy”

The cabinet that goes with it

The System 357 is Tekken 6's hardware — so the one found in a Namco Noir, released the same year with that game.

Architecture

There is no arcade architecture as such: it is a PS3. The Cell processor, the RSX and the memory are the home console's. What Namco adds comes down to three things:

  • an I/O board and a JVS board, giving the PS3 arcade inputs and a VGA output;
  • a prepared hard disk holding the game;
  • a dongle, without which the disk is useless.

Disk and dongle are paired

This is not protection you work around by swapping a part: the hard disk and the dongle belong together. A disk alone will not boot, nor will a dongle alone. On the second-hand market, a board sold without its original dongle is a board with no game.

What MAME does not emulate

No MAME driver

Unlike every other platform in this wiki, the System 357 has no driver in MAME — no source file covers it. There are therefore no extracted clocks to publish here, and no software backup of these games.

The direct consequence: for these titles, the hardware is the only copy. A dead board whose dongle is lost is a lost game.

Notable games

System 357: Tekken 6 · Tekken 6 Bloodline Rebellion · Mobile Suit Gundam: Extreme Vs. · Dragon Ball Zenkai Battle Royale. System 369: Tekken Tag Tournament 2.

Common faults

Symptom Probable cause Next step
Will not boot, dongle missing disk/dongle pairing broken Without the original dongle the disk will not boot
Dead motherboard ordinary PS3 failure (YLOD, power) Replace with a donor PS3 board → conversion
No picture JVS board or the VGA output Video goes through the JVS board, not straight off the PS3
No controls I/O board or JVS wiring → JVS wiring
Disk unreadable HDD worn out An arcade hard disk runs for years without stopping

Repair (technician)

  • It is a PS3. The home console's failure modes apply: power, overheating, BGA joints. Being an arcade board changes nothing about the electronics.
  • Replacing a dead motherboard with a donor PS3 is documented in detail — it is the platform's main preservation route. → System 357 conversion
  • The hard disk is a consumable: it has been spinning since 2007. Imaging it from your own hardware before it fails is the single most useful preservation act here.

→ Methods: PCB diagnosis

Procedure — a dead board, step by step ✅

What this adds

The general method lives in PCB diagnosis. This is its application to this platform: the same order, but with the values actually expected here, so you do not have to go back and forth.

Tools: multimeter, oscilloscope (or frequency counter), current-limited bench supply, desoldering braid. → Tooling

If the board is still in a cabinet

A CRT holds its charge with the machine unplugged. → CRT safety

1. Inspection, power off. Corrosion, cut tracks, oxidised EPROM legs, leaking SMD capacitors, dubious earlier repairs.

2. The connector, before anything else. A large share of "dead boards" are a contact problem, not a fault. Clean the contacts with isopropyl alcohol and reseat — not with an abrasive eraser on a gold edge, which takes the plating off and brings the problem back worse. It costs two minutes and settles the question.

3. Power, measured on the board. Aim for +5.0 V measured as close as possible to where power reaches the board — not at the PSU output: the drop is in the loom, and that is exactly what makes a board boot on the bench and not in the cabinet. Where you probe depends on this board's connector — JAMMA edge, JVS loom or a proprietary harness — plenty of makers kept one long after JAMMA arrived — see Identification above. → Wiring Check −5 V and +12 V too if the sound stage uses them. Suspected short: bring it up current-limited and find the hot spot.

4. /RESET. It must release after power-up. Held low = the CPU never starts. A 1–2 Hz loop is not the reset circuit, it is the watchdog: the CPU is crashing at boot, so look at the bus, not at the reset.

5. Clocks. There is no measurement table for this platform — MAME's sources yield nothing usable for it. Any frequency quoted under Architecture on this page serves as a marker; otherwise compare against a working board rather than against a number: an invented value condemns healthy parts. → PCB diagnosis

6. Bus. Activity on the main CPU's address lines tells you whether it is running or frozen. Frozen with good clocks and good reset → work RAM, bus buffers, ROMs.

7. It boots but the picture or the sound is wrong — that is another job: see Common faults on this page, then signal tracing.

Modernisation & mods

  • ⚠️ Do not host firmware, keys, or disk/dongle dumps. This wiki documents the method, to be applied to your own hardware.
  • Native JVS: the platform plugs straight into a JVS cabinet. → JVS wiring

Photos / assets

(To take: the rack assy opened, the I/O board and the JVS board, the dongle, the hard disk bay, the VGA output.)

Archived original documents ✅

Two System 357 game manuals were already archived in this wiki — but cited only on cabinet pages. This page had none.

Sources & attribution

Text (synthesised here; sources listed for attribution):

  • System 357 conversion & preservation — this wiki's own page, which carries the hardware detail (ARC Product Code, absent WiFi/Bluetooth and Blu-ray drive, I/O and JVS boards, VGA output, disk/dongle pairing) and the full motherboard-replacement walkthrough.
  • MAME — checked on 4 August 2026: no driver covers the System 357/369 (namco/namcops3.cpp and namco/namcos357.cpp do not exist; namco/namcops2.cpp stops at the System 246/256). That is why no clocks are published on this page.

Review & corrections

How this space is used

Spotted a wrong value, an outdated procedure, a chip reference that does not match your board? Say so here, with what you observed (model, board revision, serial number, measurement). Every report is cross-checked against a source before anything changes — an unverifiable correction is published as “reported by …, not cross-checked” rather than silently applied.

Reading is open to everyone; posting requires signing in with Discord. Reports from the wiki's declared reviewers are handled first; anyone else's are read too, but go through a human before anything is changed.