Picked up a Thunder Force AC board locally for $50 CAD. The ROMs didn't look genuine but it DID look like a legit Sega System C2 board. The guy showed me the game played and it was only $50 so hey, I picked it up. I've never really played the series before so I just credit fed to Stage 5, and after destroying the boss the game faded to black and looped back to the title screen. Confused, I looked up the game on Youtube and found my copy is different than the retail, the most obvious to me being:
- 1) The intro on mine is missing the background and the music is completely different. No cool tech!
2) The game has no voices at all. Lame!
3) Weird little differences - font colors are slightly different on the "How to Play" screen and text is changed
4) Stage 4 is "Haides" and Stage 5 is "Ellis", which apparently don't exist at ALL in AC(?), just in Thunder Force 3 on the Genesis
5) Again, game ends after Stage 5
Here's some pics of the board and the ROMs - notably, my understanding is that it should have 5 EEPROMs instead of 4? I originally assumed that the missing voices and background could be due to the missing ROM, but the game works fine otherwise, and it wouldn't explain the different stages...
https://imgur.com/1dvFnQH
https://imgur.com/vP6aMF4
Package also included a scan of an original manual page presumably:
https://imgur.com/HhlQca5.jpg
I've gone ahead and recorded the attract screen on real hardware, which conveniently goes through all the stages in the game, albeit not to the bosses. Take a look here:
https://youtu.be/wm6afQfh1lw
I'm mostly just asking the wider community if this is some known dump, bootleg, hack or version of the game, and if it already exists on the web, I can safely replace the chips and actually play the full game haha.
If this is, somehow, an undumped version of the game, then let me know how I should properly document and dump the ROM! I own a GQ-4x4 and I imagine I could dump them, but I want to make sure I'm not forgetting some valuable board documentation