cliff_poole
Active member
Since coming back to UKVAC I have been frustrated by a bootleg Outrun for a while, followed by a couple of easy successes with Konami 88 and a bootleg Pengo.
While waiting for some non-JEDEC EPROMS to come in the post for my Pacmania, I bought the following unknown board from Alpha1. I was of course warned about the condition, but at least the dirt tells me that it probably hasn't been messed with since the 80s.
It looked to me like Defender bootleg hardware but not the same as my Defense Command. There are pictures of a similar board online, Defence Command by Outer Limits, but with one extra ROM and buttons for Advance etc.
I started by lifting all the socketed chip as carefully as I could. Or course, many legs broke off and were left behind in sockets, but not as bad as could have been. A few hours later I had soldered on replacement legs from a donor faulty EPROM.
Next I decided it was time to dust off my trusty old Data I/O 29b, but had to clear some stuff from in front of it on the shelf first. This included my Ikari Warriors, a SFII B board I didn't know I had (is anyone producing replica C boards yet ?), and a pile of random sub boards from old bootlegs which I might upload pictures of to ID at some point. I powered up the 29b and was greeted with a beep and a flash of the screen before just fan noise alone, thats now all I get from power on. If I have problems fixing this later, I may post for help. So I'll leave reading the decoder PROMs for now and dig out an alternative programmer. Powered up the old 486 laptop, beeeep beeeep !. The perished rubber feet had glued it to the shelf so I pryed it off and cleaned up. Pulling out a faulty memory module brought it back to life, and it runs fine on 20MB.
Because ZIF sockets grip the edges of chip legs, I found I had to put some of the ROMs in a regular DIL socket first before they'd read and verify reliably. Only one would read but not verify consistently no matter what I tried, so I saved one of the resulting reads anyway.
So, the sound ROM matches Defender, no great surprise. The three ROMS with the orange labels identify as Black Beauty (Shuffle) in MAME. All the remaining ROMS are not recognised, although interestingly, these all have the same white labels as the sound ROM. The hardware doesn't seem to match Black Beauty, but all the ROMs have been in the board for about the same amount of time I'd say, they all have the same level of dirt and corrosion.
If anyone would like a copy to mess about with, please let me know, I'd be interested to know what you can find.
cliff_poole2022-04-08 13:34:54
While waiting for some non-JEDEC EPROMS to come in the post for my Pacmania, I bought the following unknown board from Alpha1. I was of course warned about the condition, but at least the dirt tells me that it probably hasn't been messed with since the 80s.
It looked to me like Defender bootleg hardware but not the same as my Defense Command. There are pictures of a similar board online, Defence Command by Outer Limits, but with one extra ROM and buttons for Advance etc.
I started by lifting all the socketed chip as carefully as I could. Or course, many legs broke off and were left behind in sockets, but not as bad as could have been. A few hours later I had soldered on replacement legs from a donor faulty EPROM.
Next I decided it was time to dust off my trusty old Data I/O 29b, but had to clear some stuff from in front of it on the shelf first. This included my Ikari Warriors, a SFII B board I didn't know I had (is anyone producing replica C boards yet ?), and a pile of random sub boards from old bootlegs which I might upload pictures of to ID at some point. I powered up the 29b and was greeted with a beep and a flash of the screen before just fan noise alone, thats now all I get from power on. If I have problems fixing this later, I may post for help. So I'll leave reading the decoder PROMs for now and dig out an alternative programmer. Powered up the old 486 laptop, beeeep beeeep !. The perished rubber feet had glued it to the shelf so I pryed it off and cleaned up. Pulling out a faulty memory module brought it back to life, and it runs fine on 20MB.
Because ZIF sockets grip the edges of chip legs, I found I had to put some of the ROMs in a regular DIL socket first before they'd read and verify reliably. Only one would read but not verify consistently no matter what I tried, so I saved one of the resulting reads anyway.
So, the sound ROM matches Defender, no great surprise. The three ROMS with the orange labels identify as Black Beauty (Shuffle) in MAME. All the remaining ROMS are not recognised, although interestingly, these all have the same white labels as the sound ROM. The hardware doesn't seem to match Black Beauty, but all the ROMs have been in the board for about the same amount of time I'd say, they all have the same level of dirt and corrosion.
If anyone would like a copy to mess about with, please let me know, I'd be interested to know what you can find.
cliff_poole2022-04-08 13:34:54
