Dragon Breed and Air Duel!

[undamned]

I aquired Dragon Breed (w/ orig. art and manual!) some time ago from starpine, but to my dismay it had horrible graphical glitches. I resocketed the EEPROMS/cables and checked everything carefully, but nothing to be found. I kinda gave up on it and it sat on a table in my room for about 6 months.

I finally found an Air Duel for well under $100 (which was my target price from about 3 years ago, when I first got curious about this game) recently on ebay. I fired it up on my cab and played through a few levels w/o the monitor tated (been playing Land Maker, heh) just to verify it worked ok.

So the other day it occured to me to swap the ribbon cables from my Air Duel w/ my Dragon Breed, just to see if that helped the graphic problem and, lo and behold, that was indeed the culprit. So I've been having much fun w/ my Dragon Breed.

How have you Dragon Breed players done as far as no shooting plays? It seems that one could get pretty far that way.
-ud

[system11]

Heh - you should have posted in the hardware forum - I could have told you straight away to check the ribbon cables - they're infamous

[iatneH]

I saw the thread title and half-expected the author to be Jac2Mac.

I fiddled around with Dragon Breed a long time ago in MAME, but I couldn't figure out how to get onto my dragon after I dismounted..? That was somewhere in the first level, haha...

[dave4shmups]

I aquired Dragon Breed (w/ orig. art and manual!) some time ago from starpine, but to my dismay it had horrible graphical glitches. I resocketed the EEPROMS/cables and checked everything carefully, but nothing to be found. I kinda gave up on it and it sat on a table in my room for about 6 months.

I finally found an Air Duel for well under $100 (which was my target price from about 3 years ago, when I first got curious about this game) recently on ebay. I fired it up on my cab and played through a few levels w/o the monitor tated (been playing Land Maker, heh) just to verify it worked ok.

So the other day it occured to me to swap the ribbon cables from my Air Duel w/ my Dragon Breed, just to see if that helped the graphic problem and, lo and behold, that was indeed the culprit. So I've been having much fun w/ my Dragon Breed.

How have you Dragon Breed players done as far as no shooting plays? It seems that one could get pretty far that way.
-ud

http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?let ... me_id=6829 Air Duel looks awesome! I never knew that Irem did a warplane shmup! The graphics look gorgeous; how does it play?

[undamned]

http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?let ... me_id=6829 Air Duel looks awesome! I never knew that Irem did a warplane shmup! The graphics look gorgeous; how does it play?

Not bad, imagine the same era/feel of Varth. I love the gritty Metal Slug style art. I need to spend much more time on it to say how I feel about it, for sure, but for now I'm into Dragon Breed, heh.


So, I'll ask again:
has anybody tried focusing on "no shooting" plays?
-ud

[Damocles]

Ahhh....Dragon Breed. One of only a handful of Irem games where you're not completely screwed if you die. It took a little while to get used to the fact that the dragon can take a bullet directly to the nose, and only the rider is vulnerable.

[Fenrir]

Ahhh....Dragon Breed. One of only a handful of Irem games where you're not completely screwed if you die. It took a little while to get used to the fact that the dragon can take a bullet directly to the nose, and only the rider is vulnerable.

You know, ironically this felt pretty normal in the Amiga days. I've played DB on Amiga first (as I did with R-Type and so on) and it didn't surprise me that the dragon was invulnerable. There were some other shmups/adventures that had invulnerable characters with just a vulnerable bit around (Saint Dragon to stretch it), but some others as well. On the Commodore 64 it was pretty normal. Now that I think about it, it's since the dusk of the 16-bit era that some game features got dropped out and never used again.

*rambles incoherently*