Dav

On mine half the main board is covered is covered with greenish blue fuzz or a layer of white gunk and if you touch any of the chips they fall off. I'm told if you can find a cockpit the board is mounted so that the corrosion isn't so bad. If the damage is not too bad apparently Richard Cross in Canada does repairs.

The board will likely cost you more than a working machine. It's only value really is to mame it. You can sell the monitor for use in an asteroids machine, but they usually have pretty bad burn in. Pole Position and Omega Race are two games that are famous for not being able to find working boards for.

I've never heard of anyone claiming to have it or even seen it. You'll probably have to hack stargate, kind of a pain, but not completely impossible.

I have one, I'm hoping to use to copy sega arcade floppy disks. I haven't gotten around to doing anything with it yet though. I'm not sure if it will be sufficient for the task or not. Apparently Anadisk can read the disks, but no one's been able to make a copy yet. I have a couple of boxes of apple 2 stuff around here somewhere I might run through it too if it works out. 957187[/snapback] This device is somewhat similar and I'm keeping my eye on it. It doesn't support Atari yet but I'm hoping the next incarnation will... http://www.thesvd.com/SVD/ ~telengard 957464[/snapback] That is interesting, I was thinking of doing something like that myself. That would be very useful for sega arcade boards as they don't just load once and run, they keep loading constantly.

I have one, I'm hoping to use to copy sega arcade floppy disks. I haven't gotten around to doing anything with it yet though. I'm not sure if it will be sufficient for the task or not. Apparently Anadisk can read the disks, but no one's been able to make a copy yet. I have a couple of boxes of apple 2 stuff around here somewhere I might run through it too if it works out.

Would those be considered "cabaret" style cabinets, or are they shorter than that? Are they really 2-sided, 2-player games? Does the control panel have an overhang to allow the players legroom underneath? -Sort of like cockpit style cabinets but without actual cockpit seating or enclosure, seating to be provided by the location manager? Is there another name for this cabinet style? It's basically like this 953579[/snapback] I have a couple those. I like them as it's fairly easy to rotate the monitor, and you can get to everything from the front. They're also much lighter than anything with that size monitor. About the only thing I don't like is the sticks aren't the standard sticks. They pop in instead of bolting like the rest of my games. It's a better system I guess, but I don't have any spare sticks for it.

No, ms pac/galaga is similar to the original hardware although reimplimented with modern components. You mean like a Flashback 2 where it's all reduced down to a new chip? 948777[/snapback] No, it's not near as bad as that, they've just reduced the number considerably. Iirc the cpu's are still seperate as are the roms.

No, ms pac/galaga is similar to the original hardware although reimplimented with modern components. Konami did '80's gallery a while back, japan only I think also, although a friend of mine imported a bunch of them for resell: Gyruss, Time Pilot, Super Cobra, Scramble, Pooyan, Roc'n Rope, Yie Ar KUNG FU, Shao-Lin's Road, Circus Charlie, Road Fighter

If you are a DIYer the monitor is $19 or 2 for $29 and the instructions for converting are here: http://www.mikesarcade.com/cgi-bin/spies.c...CGAtoArcade.txt

I like JROK's hack. http://www.jrok.com/hardware/lcd/lcd_panel_fun.html

Yes, ram is getting trashed, including the flip register because it's trying to draw slowdown flags on the screen over the tunnel areas. Nah, I went into debug mode and changed the level variable(4e13) to 80 something. I didn't change the difficulty to match so it's as easy as first level with long blues etc. You have to have a fairly new debug build of mame to do it. I don't remember when I changed the driver, maybe 6 months ago or so. I'm still not sure it's 100% but it should be pretty close now. Before my changes mame played fine until 141 where you got no maze or dots which is completely wrong. It usually resets the machine well before then.

Looks like this. You can go through some walls because the maze is not really upside down it works like normal and dots disapear from their correct spot, opposite of where you are.

If you run across anymore differences with mame let me know and I'll try to track them down. This one sounds like it might be tough, though.

My experience with no sound has generally been the amp is not working. And usually that was because the voltage supplying the amp was dead. The amp usually runs at a different volage so if the powersupply quit suppling it the rest of the game will work. Other than amp I think my second most common experience is the volume pot getting knocked off the board. How that applies to SI I don't know, I haven't looked at an SI schematic in a very long time. Dave

No unfortunatly not. At this point I'm planning on inlcuding top secret because I have the free space but I don't expect anyone to be able to play it. I've seen the control panels on ebay before but I've always been outbid. I'm assuming if you had the original contol panel you could swap it out to play. If someone were to do it, the buttons are straight forward and could be wired in. I haven't figured out the steering control/throttle at all. It does look like it might be worth figuring out, kind of like spy hunter meets stocker. It's not too late for me to include some kind of port on the board design, but even if I do convert it to buttons instead of analog steering for say a sega joystick, a 6 button stick woudln't get it. I count 9 buttons plus R&L for steering All the other games use the standard gun + start button. Showdown actually uses 6 buttons instead of a gun but it auto detects if you have a gun installed and switches to gun only when you pull the trigger.

This is my design. I will probably sell a few beta test versions eventually, after I've fixed the freeplay dips to be the same on all games. I was hoping the dips would line up and I wouldn't have to patch the software at all. I'm handling the protection in hardware rather than patching. That reminds me though, I still have to work out some way to lock out some of the games. Chiller and crackshot both have breif nudity as well as violence and I'll probably have a dip or something to lock those.

I know I've mentioned here I was planning on making my crossbow run multiple games. Well, I finally got around to doing it. I haven't installed it in my crossbow yet. I'm running it in a jamma cab. Anyway it has a menu that lets you pick between all the exidy 440 games when you boot. So I can finally play chiller I still have to move some of the dips around so they all have the same freeplay dip but for the most part it's done.

That's not a good analogy. The people that watch the movie can't magically make an original copy appear, however there's any number of people that would have added the correct color prom to make trax seven years ago if it had been broken instead of using one that's almost correct. If it's not broken it's less likely to get fixed. Nobodies said that. There's no doubt in my mind that they will be.

I've not yet seen the whole schematic of pong (though I've been looking at the pieces someone has in his blog). Given that the whole thing is clocked off a 4*burst crystal (except two RC's to read the paddles) I see no reason a computer simulation shouldn't be perfect. To be sure, real simulation might be difficult (though probably not impossible given that most things are driven by divided-down clocks) but I see no reason not to perform the obvious optimizations (e.g. rather than evaluating the effects of certain logic every scan line, just draw the net as an overlayed graphic). Indeed, even an IBM XT should be able to manage a frame-perfect pixel-perfect simulation of PONG given how little stuff is actually going on (and given the XT's 4*burst dot clock). A game like Fonz is a trickier proposition since there are a number of interacting RC timing circuits. Further, the behavior of the game can be affected substantially by operator settings. The "Fonz" one person remembers may play quite differently from what another person remembers. Even there, however, I would suggest that it's better to simulate what one can, documenting the limitations of one's simulation, than let the old games float into complete obscurity. 915857[/snapback] As you say, we know it can be perfect. So why would we let garbage in? Experience has shown if you lower your standards that's what you'll get. When they put galaga in they used the galaxian starfield and guess what? Nobody bothered to fix it since it wasn't obviously broken. What you want is a C port. Someone could write one in a few hours and with feedback from pcb owners it could be just as accurate.

Pong was removed because it was not accurate and had no hope really of being an accurate documentation of the original hardware. It had nothing to do with copyright. You can't copyright a circuit design so the actual game of pong is not copyrighted. The ironic thing is some of the other companies like allied sold more "pong" machines than atari did as they were better able to handle the production since they were mature companies. We've had some discussion about adding the non-cpu games, no one is directly opposed to it if done correctly. Some dev's have said the internal archetecture is not well suited for non cpu's games, I couldn't say about that. Current pc's would likely only get 1 or 2 frames a second though. I've tried emulating a few of the circuits from tank. I did the electron beam in red so you could watch it slowly go across the screen drawing mines. As for a stand alone emulator, that is the best bet. And here it is http://www.ascotti.org/programming/tickle/tickle.htm Complete with mame quality accuracy and slowness. Hopefully it will attract some devs to work on it.

It's an illegal mame on a board with a jamma adapter. Don't bother going down there as you can play better at home since the hardware they use is weak.

Conventionally if the arcade game granted you infinite lives (which it doesn't) With more lives, you can just keep dying and eating the glitched dots until the counter is cleared. 890503[/snapback] Right so that's the confusion.. so you're saying that when you die, the glitched dots reset? i.e. you eat 9 dots, die, the screen redraws and adds the 9 dots, you eat them, repeat. Up until the point where you eat enough dots. If the glitched dots reset, that part wasn't really clear Otherwise I interepreted it as saying you could just keep going over the glitched part and eating dots until it cleared, which meant if you didn't die, you could clear the split screen. Incidentally I know the split screen is impassable. I just wanted to clarify that one paragraph 890526[/snapback] Here's the offending code since I know some of you are coders: 2BF0: 3A 13 4E ld a,($4E13) ;Level starting at 0 2BF3: 3C inc a 2BF4: FE 08 cp $08 ;if over 8 use different code, note level FF falls thru 2BF6: D2 2E 2C jp nc,$2C2E Draw fruit at bottom A number of times. At this point A should always be 7 or less, 0 is actually 256 since djnz decrements first to 255 then tests for zero. 2BF9: 11 08 3B ld de,$3B08 ;fruit data table 2BFC: 47 ld b,a ;number of fruits to draw 2BFD: 0E 07 ld c,$07 ;max loop 2BFF: 21 04 40 ld hl,$4004 ;pointer to screen 1st spot. lower right 2C02: 1A ld a,(de) 2C03: CD 8F 2B call $2B8F ;draws 4 8x8 tiles to make a 16x16 fruit at location hl 2C06: 3E 04 ld a,$04 2C08: 84 add a,h 2C09: 67 ld h,a 2C0A: 13 inc de 2C0B: 1A ld a,(de) 2C0C: CD 80 2B call $2B80 ;colors 4 tiles at location hl 2C0F: 3E FC ld a,$FC 2C11: 84 add a,h 2C12: 67 ld h,a 2C13: 13 inc de 2C14: 23 inc hl ;moves to next screen position. 2C15: 23 inc hl 2C16: 0D dec c 2C17: 10 E9 djnz $2C02 2C19: 0D dec c ;after drawing the correct number,erases the remaing spots 2C1A: F8 ret m 2C1B: CD 7E 2B call $2B7E ;erases 4 tiles in a square 2C1E: 3E 04 ld a,$04 2C20: 84 add a,h 2C21: 67 ld h,a 2C22: AF xor a 2C23: CD 80 2B call $2B80 2C26: 3E FC ld a,$FC 2C28: 84 add a,h 2C29: 67 ld h,a 2C2A: 23 inc hl 2C2B: 23 inc hl 2C2C: 18 EB jr $2C19 ============================================ tile color Tile is the first tile of 4 consecutive needed to make a square. 3B08: 90 14 cherry 3B0A: 94 0F strawberry 3B0C: 98 15 peach 3B0E: 98 15 peach 3B10: A0 14 apple 3B12: A0 14 apple 3B14: A4 17 3B16: A4 17 3B18: A8 09 3B1A: A8 09 3B1C: 9C 16 3b1e: 9C 16 3B20: AC 16 ... 3B2e: AC 16 This code runs at the start of a level or if you die. It prints the fruits across the bottom of the screen. Vram is kind of odd in pacman. The bottom 2 rows are at the start of memory and move right to left. The top 2 rows are at the end of memory and move horizontally as well. The middle section starts after the bottom section and starts upper right and moves down. So if you were to draw 256 fruits starting at the lower right it moves across the screen to the left then jumps to the upper right of the maze and starts drawing "fruit" moving down. Of course the fruit data runs out before then so it just draws random garbage from the code. The 256 runs out half way across the screen.

Impossible. All 25+ years of players experience as well as actual dissasembly of the code shows it. There are some arcade hacks that remove the split screen bug though. 877349[/snapback] The funny part is there's still people that claim to know how to get past it, of course they don't want to show anyone how. They still argue about it on the twin galaxies forums.

Hobbyroms.com is more reasonable. You're probably out of luck on the starwars kits. Clay likes to wait and let demand build up before he does another run so he sells a bunch at once. I think he just ran out last month so it could be a while.

Thanks, guys. BTW it took me 2 years off and on of hand tracing through the code in pengo to get it to run on a Pacman board. I gave up a couple of times but I kept coming back to it. I'm glad I did. Dave