The Official Cool PCB You Just Got Thread!

[system11]

Yeah the SunA one - epic levels of random design, art and music. I really hope the retailer I paid for it with actually comes through, they've been very quiet since it was placed.

Missile Storm is an Italian Missile Command bootleg - full cabinet, I restored it when we rescued 120 or so cabs as part of a group buy from an old beached leisure ship:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p75GO2uoOhs

[Ed Oscuro]

Huh, there's a reminder about the impermanence of things. I see a Tail Gunner 2 on there too - there's another game that you don't see in MAME.

[WarLord]

Hmm, lets see, system11 started this forum long ago, the definitive shmup community resource on the net, pays for it out of his own pocket every month, and you ask why he collects shmup PCBs?

That's not because he has to pay every months for this forum that he's obligated to buy all Shmup boards.
I don't understand very well what you mean because you can be passionate without perforce buying all boards, isn't it ?
It's not easy to be able to pay for all of this.

If you can't tell he's completely crazy by now, then you are a lot newer than your post count indicates.

Crazy, crazy, I don't know. If his wallet allows him to buy so much and if that's what he really wants, he's not crazy. He does what he wants.
Some people buy drugs for example. I prefer buying boards. ^_~
Honestly, if I could buy so much, I'll do it too but I'd pick however.
I wouldn't buy a bad or an average game.
That's for this reason I asked if his goal is to own all Shmups PCBs because it seems to me there are some "strange" titles sometimes, but if you want to have all of these, I understand this approach.

That's all, in any cases, it wasn't naughty.

System11 : OK, I understand what you mean.
Thank you for this answer.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Huh, there's a reminder about the impermanence of things. I see a Tail Gunner 2 on there too - there's another game that you don't see in MAME.

There are plans to release such a Tail Gunner 2 clone on the Vectrex platform later on. It's quite fun to play inside an Exidy produced enviromental cab version of TG2 indeed -- the actual TG2 joystick has no springs to self center itself and is very loose but considering that it's an analog based joystick, it works well to move the targeting cursor very quickly. The overall framerate is impressive giving the player a sense of urgency to keep a player on his or her A-game at all times as not to miss a single enemy fightercraft or use the shield to bounce 'em back and pick 'em off within a certain timeframe.

What's interesting is that a single Vectrex title by the name of Cosmic Chasm released back in 1982 on that standalone gaming platform got the full arcade game release in 1983 from the likes of Cimenatronics with a new dedicated arcade control scheme and full color vector graphics update. How cool is that? I've seen and played the rare '83 Cosmic Chasm arcade cab at a couple of past CAX shows but it'd only appear for a single day at best. On the rare occassion that it'd appear out of the blue, the CC cab was in immaculate condition for it's age.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[gbaplayer]

Hmm, lets see, system11 started this forum long ago, the definitive shmup community resource on the net, pays for it out of his own pocket every month, and you ask why he collects shmup PCBs?

That's not because he has to pay every months for this forum that he's obligated to buy all Shmup boards.
I don't understand very well what you mean because you can be passionate without perforce buying all boards, isn't it ?
It's not easy to be able to pay for all of this.

If you can't tell he's completely crazy by now, then you are a lot newer than your post count indicates.

Crazy, crazy, I don't know. If his wallet allows him to buy so much and if that's what he really wants, he's not crazy. He does what he wants.
Some people buy drugs for example. I prefer buying boards. ^_~
Honestly, if I could buy so much, I'll do it too but I'd pick however.
I wouldn't buy a bad or an average game.
That's for this reason I asked if his goal is to own all Shmups PCBs because it seems to me there are some "strange" titles sometimes, but if you want to have all of these, I understand this approach.

That's all, in any cases, it wasn't naughty.

System11 : OK, I understand what you mean.
Thank you for this answer.

maybe system11 is STV after all...
just kiddin. james is a nice guy and i bought some awesome pcbs from him.

but it would be the greatest conspiracy in history ever.

[system11]

Air Attack - bought a second one, corner damaged in shipping due to bad packaging. I needed a second one to compare to a small bug I was seeing on my first board. Interestingly, this one turned out to be a whole different board revision so the comparison is pointless.... Clock rate is slightly higher, yet it appears to suffer some extra slowdown during fast background scrolls. I think the problem with the earlier one from looking at this, is they just chucked random speeds of RAM into these while building them.




G-Darius Ver2 - labels aren't in the best shape since someone has cleaned it, but seems to be a legit V2 board (factory upgrade it looks like). However, now that I've played it properly, honestly I'm trying to decide whether to keep my old one or just sell this on instead - I preferred the original difficulty.




Big Karnak - not a cheap board, unless you know where to look Got this for 45 euros...

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Yeah, some folks prefer ver.1 over ver.2 of G-Darius PCB. Of course with version 2, Taito added the 3rd button support (along with some extra modes as well) from the get-go whereas with the earlier version, it's a two button affair at best. For a long time, I just had it at version 1 -- bit the bullet and had two of the required eproms to convert it into a version 2 PCB, indeed, courtesy of Hobby Roms. Easy as pie. As usual, Taito allows the arcade operator the choice to go with either mono or stereo sound output. It does sound much better in stereo via the on-board 4-pin stereo pinout interface. YMMV with your candy cab if it's setup for mono at best, so be it.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[system11]

It's time for the cool PCB thread....

HELLO KOREA <3 edition!

Funny Strip - an actually pretty good Pac-Man clone with a few gates thrown in similar to Ladybug. Some of the ghosts turn into letters when you eat a power pill, if you can spell 'STRIP TEASE' you get an extremely tame black & white strip show, one picture for every time you spell it. Until the 6th time that is, then it goes BAM with digitised porn video and button pressing to speed it up. That was quite a surprise. Sold as working, arrived with faulty inputs, LS244 had failed.




Whizz - strange vertizontal game, let down by the sound effects blanking out part of the tune IMO. It's a variant of bootlegged Capcom (Side Arms era) hardware like most Philko games.




Whizz - bought this faulty because it was cheap, turned out to be an easy repair. Character RAM and a volume control.




Turtle Ship - probably the best Philko game, lots of stuff stolen from Side Arms in the audio, plays out a bit like Salamander by having horizontal and vertical levels.




Fantasia - Comad time! Comad made a couple of nice enough shooters, and a WHOLE STACK of 'erotic' Qix clones. This is one of them.




New Fantasia - and this is another.




Fantasia II (explicit ROM version) - and another.




Miss World 96 - .... and another. Actually one other Comad game did arrive with these, a Gulf War II but it's not pictured because I've not been able to repair it yet.




Cookie & Bibi - Semicom ripped off Puzzle Bobble and replaced the dragons with squirrels. It does the job, not as cool as Choky Choky though.




Hyper Pacman - now this one is pretty cool, there are enough new ideas here for it to stand out as not a total rip-off.




Hidden Catch - spot the difference game of very limited replay value.




Back Street Soccer - time for the SunA PCB STORM! First up a fairly decent arcade football title. As usual every goal I try is aimed directly at the keeper. Same for every football game ever, for me.




Goindol - it's an Arkanoid clone. I don't know how good it is because I don't have a spinner control to hook up to it.




Hard Head - significantly fucked up Super Mario clone. Nothing makes sense, all the characters are freakish, the music is classical compositions played on a $5 casio piano organ.




Hard Head 2 - still fucked up, characters somehow even more ugly than the previous game, but there's more involved gameplay. Now you can climb trees.




Super Ranger - Rolling Thunder, but worse. Again classical music has been poorly aped for the in-game music, everything else is stolen directly from RT, right down to the way it plays. Highlights include: an intro where the heros sit idle while bad guys jump on their table, laugh, and carry away their woman. Machine gun nests which are no use because enemies only spawn while scrolling, so they're dead before you try to use it. Lack of transparency effects on the plane when taking off at the end of stage 1, leaving blue sky square blocks all around it. Unavoidable deaths if attacked by 2 enemies at once in a knockback loop. Sold to me as faulty and now fixed, some damaged caps were making the amp burn up.




Super Ranger (Nova license) - bought because it was cheap in a big box from one seller.







Star Fighter - THE REAL ULTIMATE SHMUP EVER. I love this game, it's an insane and unexplainable cauldron of ideas, mostly stolen. We've got Galaga ship recapture, 8 different weapons as well as satellites and recapture upgrades, a weird bonus ring you can keep flying through and pushing up the screen, bits of background that scroll for no reason, a turtle ship, enemies orbiting background elements, background tiles that look like a cobra, music that sounds like it's from a circus, an awesome intro, Gaplus style starfield that reverses at bosses (missing in MAME) and so on. Found this in a retailers shop, 2 weeks went by and finally I chased them by phone to find it had failed on testing - managed to get them to ship it to me broken. Faulty caps causing the amp to burn up and a fucked volume control, happy it was an easy fix. I will be voting this as the #1 shmup of all time in the next top 25.






And that was it for Korean games, but I picked up some lowly Japanese junk too, it's not very interesting, hardly worth mentioning compared to the glorious Korean ones.

Zing Zing Zip - well it was posted from Korea...




Pac-Land - bought because it was cheap and broken, just a missing ROM.




Captain America - rough condition (even after some work), only bought it because it was in a 3 game bundle with Fantasia II.




Tokushu Butai Jackal - honestly the US/World ones play better due to their fixed-north gun.




Tokushu Butai Jackal artwork - really rare.




Gunnail - got it




Super Locomotive - incredibly rare, very cool, but it's just no Star Fighter.

[Dave_K.]

Super Locomotive - incredibly rare, very cool, but it's just no Star Fighter.

Contrats! I know you been looking for this for awhile. I remember bidding on Star Fighter and not winning when it was on eBay a couple months ago...should have bid more I guess.

[shmuppyLove]

Why can't I find Star Fighter in MAME? Just that horrible Galaxian knockoff ...

[system11]

Super Locomotive - incredibly rare, very cool, but it's just no Star Fighter.

Contrats! I know you been looking for this for awhile. I remember bidding on Star Fighter and not winning when it was on eBay a couple months ago...should have bid more I guess.

There was one on ebay? Wow, never saw that, but then at that point I probably wasn't looking for it. How much did it end at? I paid 40 euros for mine but had previously offered $200 to someone who declined to sell.

[system11]

Why can't I find Star Fighter in MAME? Just that horrible Galaxian knockoff ...

It's called 'Star Fighter (v1)' in MAME.

[BIL]

I once had the misfortune of encountering a Hard Head playthrough on youtube, by Shock Troopers master and bad games scientist BBH!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNqYss8Q0cE

"BOUNS"

[shmuppyLove]

I once had the misfortune of encountering a Hard Head playthrough on youtube, by Shock Troopers master and bad games scientist BBH!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNqYss8Q0cE

"BOUNS"

Hmm, not in my 143u9 set, must have been added more recently?

[Dave_K.]

Super Locomotive - incredibly rare, very cool, but it's just no Star Fighter.

Contrats! I know you been looking for this for awhile. I remember bidding on Star Fighter and not winning when it was on eBay a couple months ago...should have bid more I guess.

There was one on ebay? Wow, never saw that, but then at that point I probably wasn't looking for it. How much did it end at? I paid 40 euros for mine but had previously offered $200 to someone who declined to sell.

I'm pretty sure it went for over $120 (+$30 shipping from Korea).

[emphatic]

Quite the haul there, system11.

[Ed Oscuro]

I was laughing on reading the Hard Head / Super Ranger comments because yeah, I've played them too.

Nice haul. Nice Jackal arts!

[robivy64]

[Ghegs]

A big, big thanks to Prometheus for helping me acquire a Bay Route board:

[Jonst]

Nice! I've missed out on this game twice,although I did score esprade...I can't have everything I suppose!

[system11]

A few stragglers arrived since the mega post:

Toffy - a bit like Boulderdash, nice music.




Super Toffy - definitely a better game than the last one, recycled music though.




Last Striker - very unusual football game, actually pretty good fun!




Denjin Makai - been hunting a while, one of the Korean sellers put one up, I won it, they immediately listed another. I'd love to know where all these games are coming from.




Big Fight - another rare one from Korea, I didn't even know Tatsumi sold their games over there. ROMs are soldered in, it's like it from the factory. Very fragile boards, you have to treat them like they're made of glass. I'm sure some of the Korean sellers are getting all this from one supplier - all of a sudden two different sellers have started putting the same labels on the chips. No idea what happens to the original ones.




Buccaneers - a bad take on Vigilante with pirates. Had to fix this one, random untested purchase. ROM labels had fallen / disintegrated away, they're original.

[CIT]

Dude, Big Fight!

It is incredibly rare and not emulated either. Played it at Try in April, has nice big sprites (hence the name?) but overall pretty run-of-the-mill.

[system11]

Dude, Big Fight!

It is incredibly rare and not emulated either. Played it at Try in April, has nice big sprites (hence the name?) but overall pretty run-of-the-mill.

It's emulated

[spadgy]

Had it a couple of weeks or so now, but Twin Eagle just joined my collection. It's kind of shite, but in an awesome, lovable way!

[system11]

Bought a pair of untested games, one a Time Pilot 84 which is on the repair bench and in a very sad state. The other was this Twin Cobra bootleg, which I was *certain* wouldn't work.

Except it does.

Tidied up some bad quality repairs and it seems fine now. You get small amounts of sprite sparkly near the top when it's having to draw a lot, otherwise seems identical to a real board.



Won't be keeping it, but it was interesting enough to post.

[system11]

Two more repair bench successes!

Dyger - actually sold as working, but there were broken caps here and there, a strangely burned-but-not track which I tidied up and covered with green masking fluid, and worst of all, all the PCB leg mounting holes had been drilled out to 5mm. That's when I worked out why it hadn't come with any legs - because that causes the 5v and GND planes to be exposed, the bolts ran a very real risk of shorting them out, which is exactly what happened first time I went to turn it on. I ended up solving it with a combination of fibre washers, and rubber rings which sit in the oversized holes, which I made from the outer insulation of an old printer cable. Amazingly this was the best condition Philko Dyger I could find, actually it's in nice presentable shape now.




Samurai Nihonichi - sold as untested, wouldn't boot - seemed like the Z80 was cooked due to how hot it was getting. Replaced it and same problem - found it was a broken LS245 between the CPU and the ROMs. I know better than that and should have checked it first. Then it had a sound problem, which... went away. I still don't know why (maybe when I reseated the ROM removing it to scope data lines), it's rock solid now. Had a really ugly mess of an adapter soldered to the edge connector, my Mission 660 is the same adapter though so I ripped that off and cleaned up the edge connector as well as I could.




Cookie & Bibi's 2 - actually worried when I tested this, needed a few chips reseating, all good now.

[Ed Oscuro]

That Dyger proves there is no degree required to run arcades. Delicate electronics + incompetent yobs running the show = success! Makes me pause about how smart it really is, sometimes, to complain to the operator when something isn't working.

[emphatic]

Admit it, System11, you prefer getting them broken so you can fix them!

[system11]

Admit it, System11, you prefer getting them broken so you can fix them!

I do enjoy fixing games and it does make them cheaper, but it's harder to get good condition broken ones - often there's bad repair jobs, rust, etc.

[CHI]

Traded Brave Blade for Thunder Cross II