First, congrats on your purchases. These are two of my personal faves and I've got a lot of experience with owning and playing both PCBs.
John_Smith wrote:I just took delivery of a nice clean copy of Battle Bakraid to add to my Raizing collection, happy days
Anyway, it's the Japanese Unlimited version, but I want all the extra ships, special course 'n' the like unlocked without having to enter codes like the "Unlimited" MAME set!!! Is the MAME set slightly different than mine and it's just a case of reprogramming the relevant EPROMs on my board with the appropriate binaries?
Just enter the codes found at that link, and you'll be good to go. The Unlimited version is the one to have. I think it had something to do with a scoring glitch that was found on the original version that was fixed with the Unlimited roms. I think the score would max out at some strange number, hence the "Unlimited" patch. Not 100% sure about the reason for the patch, but you already have the most desirable version of the two.
John_Smith wrote:Onto Garegga. I have the original Japanese master version with the nasty hard to see realistic(ish) bullets and want to update it to one of the slightly more player friendly versions. Which of the following (rom sets available to me) would be the best choice and for what reasons other than the bullet thing.
The one you got is the one to have IMHO. I had another version and changed it to the Japanese ROM set. If you are into playing for score, most people consider only scores played on the original Japanese version with full defaults and small bullets the legit version. Anything else will bar you from entering scores in the rankings. The drastic changes between versions are many and if you get into the different ROM revisions than the Japanese one you get all kinds of differences besides the bullets. Different extends (or even no extends at all), different challenge and rank, different stage order. Also, if you want to watch replays or check our own strategy section to help your game, all the top player replays and strategies will be done on the JPN version and use tactics that may or may not work on different revisions.
If you're dead set on changing the revision due to the bullet thing, just stay away from the ones that don't give you any extends. Playing Garegga without extends at every 1,000,000 is like peanut butter without the jelly. Oh, and if you want to sell your original ROMs after replacing them, shoot me a PM. I'll take them off your hands!
