Side Arms PCB - questions for owners

The place for all discussion on gaming hardware
Post Reply
User avatar
system11
Posts: 6325
Joined: Tue Jan 25, 2005 10:17 pm
Location: UK
Contact:

Side Arms PCB - questions for owners

Post by system11 »

I'm comparing two PCBs here and the starfield behaves differently on them, and the board revisions are different - could do with help from other owners if you can answer these:

Which region is it?
During play do some of the stars flicker in addition to moving around?
What is the board number for upper and lower board (will start with 86115, near middle edge)?
System11's random blog, with things - and stuff!
http://blog.system11.org
User avatar
caius
Posts: 136
Joined: Mon Mar 25, 2013 10:07 pm
Location: Italy

Re: Side Arms PCB - questions for owners

Post by caius »

Is your starfield ROM 'b_11j' different?I can see from MAME that it's the same for all revisions.Mine (which the Youtube video refer to) was the U.S. one.
User avatar
system11
Posts: 6325
Joined: Tue Jan 25, 2005 10:17 pm
Location: UK
Contact:

Re: Side Arms PCB - questions for owners

Post by system11 »

Sigh. MAME.

I think I'm going to have to submit a whole romset for this one to correct all the labels, that's rom 04 and actually lives in 10J. Every single label is wrong, it is VERY probably another game where someone has mistaken a bootleg for the parent set.

Edit: verified - same ROM. Slightly different track layout in that area of the board though.
System11's random blog, with things - and stuff!
http://blog.system11.org
User avatar
dink
Posts: 124
Joined: Sun Jan 26, 2014 7:58 pm
Location: Detroit
Contact:

Re: Side Arms PCB - questions for owners

Post by dink »

The starfield in Side Arms is made by discrete components, so its possible that different revisions have a different starfield, or if a cap goes bad (or slightly bad) or a resistor is sligtly out of tollerance, it'll behave a bit different. The starfield in MAME & FB Alpha (shameless plug - emulator project I work on) uses a really simple algo (+plus data from the starfield rom) to generate the starfield, and should be exactly the same for every romset. Hope this clears things up a bit...

best regards,
- dink
Post Reply