My PCBs
Here's the list of PCBs I
own now, or have owned in the past, along with a little information about each.
I've done some hacking on some of the PCBs, so I'll occasionally include a link
to extra information. I'm also interested in trades, so if you see something you
like, drop me a line.
- 1942
I got this board off of ebay a few years back, with a
wiring harness. I got burnt out on doing arcade projects after Jammatizing
my Gauntlet and restoring a Pac-Man cocktail, so it's been sitting in a box
for a while waiting to be Jammatized. I'll get to it soon, though!
1/02 - finally got around to making the adapter.
- 1943
This is actually pretty similar to 1942, but it's
JAMMA. It's a decent game, but I prefer Sky Shark and Star Force to this
one.
- Black Tiger
Another horizontal platform/RPG game. Funny how I traded Cadash, but then went and bought this. It's actually pretty fun, but like most of these types of games, it's loooong.
- Bubble Bobble -
sold
I got this board (untested) for $50. It's
a really funky board - it has a 44-pin edge connector, a 36-pin edge
connector, and a separate 12-pin molex connector (.156 inline) for the power.
Just thinking about making an adaptor for this makes me tired, but I will as
soon as I get my parts together (I need to pick up an extra molex connector
and some fingerboards). Actually, I just decided to sell it.
- Cadash - traded
This board came with my Jamma cabinet. It was a fun 2 player RPG
(or 4-player, if for some reason you would ever want to link 2 Cadash cabinets
together). I'm a big shooter fan, so I didn't play it for very long before I
traded it for Sky Shark.
- Cyberball 2072
I really liked this game in the arcades - it's a pretty vanilla 1/2 player football game, but with robots and an exploding ball :). I thought it was similar to Gauntlet (where the sound board is only an external amp), so when I found one on ebay in March of 2002 without a sound board, I jumped on it. Turns out that the sound board actually generates the sounds for the game, so I'm stuck with a silent game until I can track one down.
2/1/04 - I sold my Cyberball PCB and purchased a new one with a working sound board. I'm disappointed that the vanilla Cyberball 2072 doesn't let you play in 2 players "versus mode" - you can only play cooperatively against the computer.
- Donkey Kong -
sold
I picked up this board for cheap on ebay -
I would've gotten a 1943 for a similar cheap price, but I forgot to go back
and snipe it (DOH!). Anyhow, I wired up an adapter, plugged it in, and got
some sounds, but no video. It turns out that the second board that generates
the video signal wasn't getting power. I made a little cable between P4 and
P12 with .100 inline molex connectors (click here for the pinouts)
to carry power to the other board, and it worked like a charm. I got tired of having such a huge backlog of game projects, so I sold it at this point.
- Garou: Mark of the Wolves
I picked this up a few years back, as it's supposed to be the best fighting game for the MVS. I'm not a big fighting game fan, so I can't vouch for this, but people seem to like it.
- Gauntlet
2-Player
I picked this one up in August '99 from Dick
Millikan. I've finally built a JAMMA harness for it, and it works like a
charm. I created a web page
documenting the steps I took to create the JAMMA adaptor here. I think I went
a little overboard on it (it includes a picture of some crazy stuff, like wire
ties and a crimping tool), but hopefully people will find it useful.
- Gauntlet II
I bought an EPROM burner and burned a double set of ROMs, with a toggle switch on the high address line, so I could switch between Gauntlet 1 & 2. The slapstic chips are different on both, so I had to burn the non-slapstic versions, but it works great.
- KLAX - sold
I picked this up in a trade with Christophe Lefebvre in France. It's a
funky little bootleg board - the video screens say "(c) 1989 Atari", but the
board doesn't say Atari on it anywhere. It was a little bit of a pain in the
butt - when I first got it, I plugged it in, and the game video worked OK, but
pressing any button or moving any joystick acted like all the buttons/joystick
directions were being pressed. It turned out that the edge connector was not
exactly lined up with the tabs on my cabinet harness. I fixed that by
carefully lining up the tabs, but then I couldn't coin up the game. It turned
out that for some stupid reason, the board left pins 'f' and 'e' on the solder
side floating, instead of tying them to ground. My cabinet expects the board
to tie those pins to ground, because that is what the coin switch ground is
wired to (this has burned me several times in the past). Tying those pins to
ground on the board solved the problem.
- Life Force
This is a fun little game in the Gradius series. It's
something like the movie Fantastic Voyage, where you go through some hapless
person's body, fighting various mutants and antibodies (who look strangely
like aliens - funny how that works). The game is easy at first, but then
somewhere around the 4th level it just gets insanely hard (and stops letting
you continue your game) so I've never finished it...
- Magical Drop 3
This is perhaps my favorite puzzle game. It's deep, and fast-paced. It doesn't have the "set up a huge combo avalanche" strategy of Puyo Puyo, and so the games feel a little more fast paced, and speed really is of the essence, because you can create combos out of pure speed and reflexes. Watching a good player play this game is humbling. I bought a Japanese BIOS switcher kit for my MVS so I could play this game in Japanese - they don't have many voices in the English version, while in Japanese each character has their own voice. Oh, and the "World" character is totally hot...
- Make Trax
I picked this up in Jan 2002 - it's a great little
variation on Pac-Man, although my coworkers hate it for some reason. It can
be a little hard to control because it doesn't deal with having the joystick
held at an angle very well, but it doesn't bother me at all...
- Mario Bros
This game has surprisingly deep
gameplay when played in 2-player competition mode, where the goal is to
outscore your opponent by whatever means necessary (including killing your
opponent off). It's a blast. By default, the board generates unamplified audio
and inverted video - however, with a couple of simple board
modifications, the board will generate amplified audio and uninverted
video, making it very simple to JAMMAtize. Anyhow, I changed jobs, so I don't
really have a worthy opponent any more, so I traded the board away. I'll pick
up another one someday, I reckon.
2/1/04 - I missed this game, so I picked up a new PCB. The PCB had an overheating issue but it's fixed now (see my repair log for more info). I did the "uninverted video" mod, but I have an amp in my cabinet now so I didn't bother populating the amp circuitry on-board. Even after all these years, I still love this game!
- Mr. Do!
I love this game. I don't know why, but I do, er, Do!. I've installed the
high-score save hack described on JROK's page, so my scores will
be saved for posterity (or the 10 year shelf life of a DS1220 RAM chip,
whichever comes first). I bought an NOS instruction card
for $8, which I like to keep around just to watch people weep when they try to
understand it.
- Mr Do's Castle
I've been looking for this game for a while. I was going to
snipe one on eBay, but I forgot about the auction (doh!) and didn't put my
final bid in. Luckily, one of the helpful folks on RGVAC sold me an untested
one. When I got it, I resoldered a capacitor that had broken lose, and it
worked! I don't think it's as much fun as the original Mr. Do! (it also seems
to be quite a bit harder), but the music and the gameplay is cute. I miss the
Mr. Do! intermissions, though.
- Namco Classics Volume 1
Nearly
flawless versions of the classic Xevious, Galaga, and Mappy games, and updated
versions with simultaneous 2-player gameplay. I bought this for $300 from
Steve Eisner, and it's worth every penny. I find that I play a distressing
amount of Mappy, though.
- Neo-Geo 1-slot (MV-1F)
I bought this from eBay in August 2002. It had no video sync when it arrived, but that was easily fixed and now it's up and running. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of fighting games, so that cuts out about 3/4 of the games for this platform, but there are still some intriguing shooters and puzzlers. I bought a Japanese BIOS switcher kit for it so I could play games in Japanese or in the "home version", as there is often extra functionality in those versions.
- Pang! 3 - FOR TRADE
I picked this up in a trade. It's a 1995 Capcom game, and is the
3rd release in the "Buster Bros." series. It's a cute little balloon popping
game, with nice graphics. It's a great game when you have kids in the house,
as it's cute, non-violent, and supports two-player simultaneous play. The
normal game is a little monotonous for me, but the "panic" mode is a
blast.
- Pengo
Another "I don't know why I love this, but I do" game. Pengo is just
SOOOOOO CUTE! This game is much harder than I remember when I was a kid, but
what else is new... I also hacked it to store the high scores (thanks to jrok.com).
- Pulstar
This is a Neo-Geo cartridge. Great little horizontal shooter, in the mold of R-Type.
- Puyo Puyo 2
This is a cool little Japanese puzzle game I got off ebay for a cheap price in March 2002. The game is really popular in Japan, and it's similar to nintendo game "Dr. Mario", although with some gameplay tweaks. I don't really have any puzzle games (unless you count Pengo) so this should be fun...
- Puzzle Bobble
A favorite of laundromats across the world, this is the canonical game for the MVS, and a must-have for any puzzle fan. Unfortunately, the first game in the series has only "puzzle" and "2-player versus" modes, and doesn't have a "one player vs the computer" mode.
- Robotron- converted to Williams Multigame
I always sucked at this game when I was a kid. Heavily. I rediscovered it
in emulator form as an adult, and it was one of the main reasons why I made an
- Robotron- converted to Williams Multigame
I always sucked at this game when I was a kid. Heavily. I rediscovered it
in emulator form as an adult, and it was one of the main reasons why I made an
arcade control
panel for my PC. I picked up a boardset for it, and after it sat around
for a year or so, I finally got around to Jammatizing it. Next up is one of
those cool Williams Multigame boards at multigame.com. There used to be a
really cool page by Chad Gray describing how to hook up a Williams boardset to
a JAMMA harness, which I relied on pretty heavily. That page inspired me to
make my own "Jammatizing
Gauntlet" page. Too bad he decided to take his down...
- Rolling
Thunder- traded
I got this game for free when I bought my
Asteroids Deluxe. I mainly picked it up because it was a favorite game of a
friend of mine. I thought the game play was OK, if a little monotonous (think
Shinobi with a gun). Anyhow, I kept it for 6 months, then traded it for Twin
Cobra.
- Scramble
I got this board because my friend Jim was hot for it. Scramble is fun,
but doesn't hold alot of replay value for me. The audio amps tend to go out on
these, but mine still works (although it gets loud sometimes).
- Shinobi
- sold
I
bought this board in a supposedly "tested and working" condition, but when I
plugged it in to my Golden Axe cabinet, it had graphics problems that made it
unplayable. Shinobi is supposed to be a great game, but I've sold my Golden
Axe cabinet, and I'm not too hot on the idea of adding a 3rd "Ninja Magic"
button to my JAMMA cab's control panel, and the board isn't working anyway, so
it just sits there in limbo. I'll probably dump it on eBay one of these days.
- Soul Edge
My daughter and I started playing a bunch of Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast, so I decided to get a copy of the predecessor for my JAMMA cabinet. I don't know if it's the more primitive graphics, or different controls, but it's just not as fun as Soul Calibur was.
- Sky Shark (aka Hishou Zame, aka Flying
Shark)
Ahhhh, Sky Shark, the king of the vertical shooters.
This game rocks, period. Simple, elegant controls, an uncluttered game field,
and unforgiving, unfailingly accurate enemies. It's Hard. HARD. But it's one
of the few games that can get me into The Zone. It's not one of those quarter
suckers that throw you into impossible situations - you can play through the
entire game with a single ship, if you don't make any mistakes. This is a big
part of the appeal of the game - no matter how bad you are playing, you know
that you can always salvage your game with a single plane. Did I mention it's
HARD?
Occasionally these silver planes come out which give you an extra plane if
you shoot them all. I've never been able to figure out what causes them to
come out, and I suspect it's totally random. Does anyone know for sure?
- Star Force
This
is a great vertical shooter that I first played via MAME.
- Time
Pilot
I used to love this as a kid, and I still like it a
bunch, but the game play isn't very deep. If you set the game difficulty to
its highest level, it's frantic enough to give you an adrenaline rush, but
there just isn't enough variety in the game for me to keep it in my cabinet
more than a week or two at a time.
- Time Pilot '84
I picked this board up off of ebay, untested, and
when it arrived one of the EPROMs was plugged in backwards. I turned the
EPROM around, and poof, Time Pilot '84! This game is a blast, with fun and
frantic gameplay, as well as lots of secret things to destroy for higher scores.
- Twin Cobra (aka
Kyukyoku Tiger) - traded
I had high hopes for this game. Made by the
makers of Sky Shark, with similar graphics, I was excited about the
possibilities of a two-player simultaneous Sky Shark, with the added bonus of
extra powerups. I was disappointed. The single-player game is kind of fun,
although you don't refuel with extra bombs at the end of each level, which
makes the game needlessly difficult, IMO. But the killer is that the 2 player
mode is very poorly implemented. In one-player mode, you can scroll
horizontally slightly by moving your helicopter to the edge of the screen. In
2-player mode, either player can cause the screen to scroll, which means that
it's impossible for the other person to aim or dodge effectively - the
background can scroll unexpectedly causing his shots to miss, or causing an
opponent's shot to veer into his chopper. Anyhow, I traded this to a guy in
France for Pang! 3.
- Venture
I loved this game as a kid, but it was really
really hard. I just picked this up off of ebay, untested, and I'll make an
adaptor for it Any Day Now. Winky will live again!
2/02 - Got the adapter working after some repairs. Winky Lives!
- Vulcan Venture (aka Gradius II)
I played this in an emulator several years ago. It ran too slowly on my old 200MHz Pentium, but I played enough of it to be totally hooked. I finally tracked one down on ebay, and I love it. The only problem is that it gets unforgiveably hard after level 3, so I've never gotten any further...
- Williams Multigame
I had a blast playing my Robotron PCB, and was investigating getting some Joust ROMs to make my board switchable, when I saw that multigame.com was selling a Williams Multigame kit that converted your Robotron into a board that played Robotron, Joust, Defender, Stargate, Splat, and Bubbles. I've gotten it all hooked up and ready to go, but I've still got to modify my control panel to provide some extra buttons (Stargate has a million buttons). On the bright side, my cabinet will finally have 4 buttons for each player, so I can play some of the JAMMA+ games now.
11/03 - I updated my control panel to allow me to play Defender and Stargate as God (or Eugene Jarvis) intended.
Last updated on June 17, 2005
drews-arcade_AT_aqualion.net
