Boots Vs Originals

[spadgy]

I know little about boot boards, other than the obvious motivations of those who make them.

But in simple terms, does the experience they offer differ in quality from playing on real hardware? I guess I'm talking about older boards of the 80s and 90s, as I often see them sold so often. I always avoid them (that's because of the collector in me, and because it makes me feel uneasy), and I'm not looking for an debate about the morality of boots.

I want to know this - are they (in laymans' terms) much like MAME, in that you're running the ROM images on hardware other than the original hardware, which is emulated? Do boots go as far as copying/emulating/using the sound chips and so on from the original arcade hardware? Do boots exactly replicate playing off of the original PCB?

Thanks!

[cools]

Some do, some don't. It's a mixed bag.

[antron]

probably depends on the boot. it's not emulation, so it won't add lag or problems like that.

I've seen boots of Street Fighter II that look nothing like a CPS1 (pcb wise), and you can probably tell.

But I have a boot flying shark that looks exactly like an original, I think they even copied the silk screen for component placement, but used cheap parts I guess because it sounds like shit and looses sync if the voltage isn't just right.

[Womble]

I want to know this - are they (in laymans' terms) much like MAME, in that you're running the ROM images on hardware other than the original hardware, which is emulated? Do boots go as far as copying/emulating/using the sound chips and so on from the original arcade hardware? Do boots exactly replicate playing off of the original PCB?!

Bootlegs of a similar vintage to the games they contain are nothing like MAME in any way shape or form, there is no emulation, which in general needs a lot more computing power than the device you are trying to emulate, afterall they have to do the work of the target system as well as all the translation between the host hardware and the emulated hardware. So if you were trying to bootleg a Z80 game using emulation you would need to use at least a fast 68K - which would leave the bootleg costing ten times more than an original board if you take component prices as they were at the time. Modern bootleg boards are the 48-in-1s or the 1000-in-1 boards, these do use emulation to get the games running and they vary in quality or so I hear. Hardware is so powerful these days that its cheaper to build an emulation system with a processor a thousand times more powerful than a Z80 than it would be to try to use original chips, which you can't buy new anyway, that's how they get so many games on board board.

Vintage bootlegs for the most part are almost carbon copies of the original boards, same CPUs, same sound chips, same logic layout too. If you look at an arcade board (original or boot) 95% of the chips are bog standard off the shelf parts, even the sound chips, yamaha didn't care who they sold their ICs to. Often the only deviation from using bog standard parts was done purely to make the board harder to bootleg or cheaper to mass produce, not from any actual functional perspective. Often the only difference between a bootleg and a legit board is the fact that any security system designed by the manufacturer has been removed. These usually took one of the following forms.

1) Security through encryption - the executable game code was scrambled in the ROMs and if fed in its native form to the CPU would be gibberish resulting in the CPU crashing. Usually this encryption was quite simply a case of mixing up the address or data lines so A0 needs to connect to A5 and visa versa, note that any encryption requiring extra CPUs in the decoding would make the board too expensive so usually its done through simple logic chippery in a black box. If it was just done with tracks on the board it would be too easy to work out so often boards used custom CPUs or custom address decoders. Often the boards were standard and it would be easy for unscrupulous operators to burn new eproms and get the latest game, so often the CPU itself was a custom part that was never documented with the lines stirred up a bit. The rom images had the data suitably stirred up so that when the data was applied to the mixed up bus the end result was the CPU getting code that made sense. So you would need the right custom CPU to go with the ROM images, to run the game with a standard CPU you would need to know how the lines were mixed up and then unpick the rom contents and burn new unencrypted roms. Sega did this a lot with 8 bit games selling upgrade kits for boards that contained new EPROMs and a custom Z80, they also used encrypted 68K blocks on System16 and System 18 games which contained a standard 68K core, some logic and data decode tables in RAM supported by a small lithium battery. All of that was contained in a solid block of black plastic. Any attempt to get into the CPU block made it likely that this battery would be disconnected and suddenly the decrypt table is lost from the RAM, it also is the reason these boards suicide, the battery finally gives out.

2) Security through obscurity - a lot of boards have fat surface mount custom chips, usually there is nothing magic about their contents and they could be made up out of standard TTL logic chips, if you knew what was in them. They were popular because the manufacturer could take commonly used board sections and compress the whole area of the board into a single custom chip, this made the board smaller, cheaper to produce (if the production run was large enough to off set the initial cost of making the custom) and made it much harder for the bootleggers to make bootleg boards out of off the shelf parts. Technically it would be possible but they would have to reverse engineer the custom chips without any documentation or help from the manufacturer. This is why later games often have bootleg boards that dont look much like the original, the customs have to be replaced with a lot more chippery.

Bear in mind the purpose of all this was not to make the game totally bootleg proof for all time, just long enough for the game to be past its peak money earning phase, a bootlegger offering 5 year old games is not likely to make much money out of it, if they could bootleg that years best seller then they could really dent the official manufacturers income, it was all delay tactics. A lot of these game were actually not fully decrypted until MAME came along and suddenly the incentive was there to go back and put in the hard yards to crack the game - effectively MAME is modern bootlegging for many games, except the security systems are now emulated in software to get the games running again. Using software doesnt make it any easier, you still need to know how the game was protected.

As for the games themselves - are bootleg games any better or worse to play? Nine times out of ten there is no difference at all, often the rom contents are identical to the original game so its like running a video game on an identical PC that was just build by someone else. Sometimes you might find some slight changes, the manufacturers logo or copyright statements might have been removed or the game title and screen changed e.g. Bubble Bobble becoming Bobble Bobble. Usually they are totally unchanged tho, firstly because its more work to change the game code and secondly I am sure they didn't want the bootleg boards to smell like bootleg boards, once they are locked away in a cab no-one would know and the coins would start rolling in. I am sure in many cases they were sold as being the original at a slight price cut, I imagine it was all a bit hush hush. In the odd case the bootleg game may actually be better, I have heard that bootleg Double Dragon boards used a slightly higher clocked CPU and suffered from far less slow down in busy scenes than the original did.

However bootleg boards are often not as well made as originals, not enough to make them fail but often they are quite ugly. Silkscreening is often missing, or wrong, chips are often not soldered in straight (perhaps because the boards were hand assembled and soldered), and sometimes the boards used had errors in them (or were PCBs bootlegged for other games that only required a slight change to make them run the latest target game) and therefore have wires patching areas up and tracks cut on purpose.

I am in two minds about bootlegs, I prefer an original because it is original, but as a board repairer I am no fan of the protection systems that can take a perfectly working board and render it total scrap as the part that failed is the only non standard part on the board.

probably depends on the boot. it's not emulation, so it won't add lag or problems like that.

I've seen boots of Street Fighter II that look nothing like a CPS1 (pcb wise), and you can probably tell.

Yeh thats because the Capcom custom ICs have had to be replicated with standard logic chips, it means the layout of the board has to totally change to accommodate it, the custom would have had over 100 inputs into a 2 inch square area of the board, the standard circuity is going to be a lot larger but still have to hook up to the rest of the system. Also you sometimes find that prices had fallen since the original board was released and so 3 256kbit eproms were cheaper than replicating the 6x128kbit chips used by the original board. So the address decoding section can be halved and the ROM images glued together.

But I have a boot flying shark that looks exactly like an original, I think they even copied the silk screen for component placement, but used cheap parts I guess because it sounds like shit and looses sync if the voltage isn't just right.

That's more likely to have tired components rather than cheap components, the RAM and ROMs were the most expensive parts of these boards when new so that's were the economies were often made, cheap bordeline quality RAM would not cause your problems, it sounds like you have a board with a chip on it that is borderline faulty. I have an original Capcom 1943 board that does the exact same thing, very fussy about volts, loses sync and colours go fruity if its not spot on. Crappy sound is likely to be an ill amp chip or failing electrolytic capacitors in the amp section, nothing bootleg specific.

Hope that covered everything

[Khan]

wow thats a good post womble, Nice!

[Ex-Cyber]

A common type of protection is/was to put a microcontroller (a self-contained CPU/RAM/ROM package) on the board. Sometimes the microcontroller directly implements some kind of protection function such as managing decryption. Other times, parts of the game logic actually run on the microcontroller so that they can't be easily dumped. Bootleg versions usually don't have a microcontroller at all - the bootleg engineers would examine the data returned by the microcontroller and just write new routines to perform the same task on the main CPU. This can be a source of minor variations (IIRC the best-known example is that bootleg versions of Bubble Bobble don't spawn the "EXTEND" letters with the same frequency/order as the original board).

[spadgy]

Thanks all, and in particular Womble. That was a great post, and read very well. I found it really clear and informative considering my relative ignorance in this field.

[dpful]

I thought that the most common issue was that sometimes boots are huge, and just because of their size, ate up more of the 5v, so you had to keep the 5v up for them to run properly (I've had some like that). I've had some great boots. I had a stikers 1999 boot once that was very bad- blinking graphics (nes style) and no transparencies (so shadows and clouds blocked stuff out).

[Womble]

I thought that the most common issue was that sometimes boots are huge, and just because of their size, ate up more of the 5v, so you had to keep the 5v up for them to run properly (I've had some like that)..

Often they are larger than the original, and they can draw more current than the original board as the chip count is much higher, so yes they can be more susceptible to bad power supplies, or more commonly these days the fault of having far too thin wires between the board and the PSU. If you have massive voltage drop between the PSU and the board then you need thicker power and ground wires. The JAMMA looms you often see on ebay have ridiculously thin power wires that have no hope in hell of supplying an ampy board and boots can be more ampy than the originals, but only really if the original had fat custom chips that the bootleggers had to mimic with standard TTL chips which will be far more thirsty than a VLSI custom chip.

I had a stikers 1999 boot once that was very bad- blinking graphics (nes style) and no transparencies (so shadows and clouds blocked stuff out).

Sounds like the board has some faulty logic, it wouldn't have been like that when new. People who bought bootlegs still expected them to work properly. In many cases they probably didn't know the board they spent a lot of money on was not an original and the bootleggers only chance to steal some of the market was to make their boards as close to the original as possible. Even bootleg boards were expensive, not as expensive as the official board but certainly not cheap.

Basically a faulty board is a faulty board, I don't think bootleg boards are any more likely to develop faults than the official boards, a lot of the faults probably stem from how the board has been treated rather than any inherent weaknesses in the design. It is possible that bootlegs did not hold their value as much as official boards and so had rougher treatment over the last 20 years.

Bootleg boards can be a lot easier to fix tho as everything on it is likely to be a standard off the shelf part that can be scavenged of any number of scrap boards. Replacing a custom is harder as often the only place you will find the right custom is on an identical board and if the donor board is faulty you have no way to know that the donor custom chip is any good.

[neorichieb1971]

I have a Bubble Bobble boot. Firebug made an adapter and it seems to work fine. Its more fussy with the voltage than other PCB's though, and the audio chip for SFX needs to be reseated.

I do not know if its faithful to the arcade though. I have the PS1 port and it plays a little different to the bootleg I have. The PS1 port also has more details in the graphics which make up the platforms and borders.

In the case of my Bubble bobble boot, it seems to be designed better than the original PCB from Taito. Which had 3 connectors if i'm not mistaken. Which makes making a Jamma adapter a tad difficult, or more difficult than most.

[system11]

I try to avoid bootlegs as far as possible, anything past the early 80s is generally garbage, in build quality at the very least. I've also seen sprite timing issues, worse quality sound (sometimes downsampled, missing stereo, etc).

When I get a bootleg board and it's not working, or not a very easy fix, I throw it straight in the parts pile.

[neorichieb1971]

Does the parts pile live in a dustbin? After getting my Bubble bobble PS1 on a cabinet, it seems pointless having the PCB at all.

[Womble]

Some people really do prefer the original hardware, bootleg or not, people like me Which is why old hardware is still worth money, even a bootleg bubble bobble should get a good price.

[spadgy]

I've now seen a boot Terra Cresta PCB – a game I've always wanted, and the original doesn't run in JAMMA as far as I know. The boot is JAMMA. I guess that's another reason to consider boots? Still, I guess these adapters are the real way to deal with a non-JAMMA Terra Force PCB.

[system11]

Does the parts pile live in a dustbin?

Nope, box in the corner. Whenever I need a chip I don't have a new one of, I go raid something, sometimes even do that with capacitors. The bootleg World Cup 90 I couldn't be bothered to fix has been a great source of parts.

[Ed Oscuro]

I've now seen a boot Terra Cresta PCB – a game I've always wanted, and the original doesn't run in JAMMA as far as I know. The boot is JAMMA. I guess that's another reason to consider boots? Still, I guess these adapters are the real way to deal with a non-JAMMA Terra Force PCB.

Terra Cresta is old enough that it's pre-JAMMA, but Terra Force is from '87. Are there any non-JAMMA Terra Force PCBs?

[spadgy]

I've now seen a boot Terra Cresta PCB – a game I've always wanted, and the original doesn't run in JAMMA as far as I know. The boot is JAMMA. I guess that's another reason to consider boots? Still, I guess these adapters are the real way to deal with a non-JAMMA Terra Force PCB.

Terra Cresta is old enough that it's pre-JAMMA, but Terra Force is from '87. Are there any non-JAMMA Terra Force PCBs?

that was me being stupid and tired. I meant Terra Cresta both times...

[cools]

I have a Bubble Bobble boot. Firebug made an adapter and it seems to work fine. Its more fussy with the voltage than other PCB's though, and the audio chip for SFX needs to be reseated.

I do not know if its faithful to the arcade though. I have the PS1 port and it plays a little different to the bootleg I have. The PS1 port also has more details in the graphics which make up the platforms and borders.

In the case of my Bubble bobble boot, it seems to be designed better than the original PCB from Taito. Which had 3 connectors if i'm not mistaken. Which makes making a Jamma adapter a tad difficult, or more difficult than most.

http://forum.arcadeotaku.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=5154