![\"20151014_terra_cresta\"](\"https:\/\/blog.system11.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/20151014_terra_cresta.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Storm Blade – very respectable Visco shmup, I’ve owned it before but sold it during a bad money period.\u00a0 It’s also a little on the easier side, so my kind of pace these days.\u00a0 Between this and the amazing Vasara 2, I really do wonder what Visco were going to come up with next.\u00a0 They were definitely getting better, and for the price in todays market the two games are a pretty good deal.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Sei Senshi Amatelass – I’ve seen three of these for sale in my time collecting, including this and the bootleg I already owned.\u00a0 I’ve been searching for a while for an original and while it cost a lot, I had to grab this as soon as it came up.\u00a0 It’s a vertically push-scrolling shooter from Nichibutsu somewhat like Commando in play featuring a valkyrie who occasionally gets to ride a jetbike.\u00a0 It’s got fantastic music and lots of weird graphical design.\u00a0 You should definitely check this out in MAME.\u00a0 I may sell my bootleg one now (it’s a straight clone and excellent quality), not sure yet.\u00a0 Some of these Nichibutsu titles really are absurdly rare now.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Pleiads – sequel to Phoenix and despite the lovely permanent label someone has added (seriously I tried, it won’t shift), it’s an original Tehkan board.\u00a0 The sound in MAME is incorrect for this game, it’s pretty fantastic in reality – there are a few recordings on Youtube taken from PCBs.\u00a0 I thought I owned a Phoenix adapter, and I cannot find it….<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Quiz 6000 Academy – and then it was time for more SuNA collecting.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ninja-kun Majou No Bouken – or Ninja Kid as some people call it.\u00a0 The first and by far the hardest to find of UPLs ‘little Ninja dude who can jump really high’ games, honestly I prefer this to the technically better sequel though.\u00a0 It’s usually very expensive in Japan but I managed to get this for a reasonable price in the UK, very nice condition too.\u00a0 Pro-tip – both Ninja-kun games are available on Japanese PSN for the PS4 now courtesy of Hamster.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Penguin-kun Wars – sort of like Dodgeball, if you only had left and right and a whole stack of balls to throw.\u00a0 You’re a penguin of course, and all the other animals need to go down, or they’ll laugh at you.\u00a0 Serious business.\u00a0 I got this very cheap (80 euros) after Happy Manor tried to ask $350 for one.\u00a0 It’s the English revision though and came with something I’ve rarely seen – actual English language instruction cards, I’ve got some Robo-Kid ones too like that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Lightning Swords – World revision of Ken-Go which you can only find in Korea (we’ve seen two but I failed to win the first one).\u00a0 Seems to be official although you’ve got the typical Korean short cuts applied to what is otherwise a Japanese spec board – no heatsink, cheap type of interconnects and no proper labels on the EPROMs while the mask types are correct.\u00a0 I still can’t make up my mind whether this game is mediocre or just really bad – it’s certainly no Ninja Spirit despite being an obvious sequel in .. spirit.\u00a0 Music is nice.\u00a0 You’ll be able to play this in the next MAME since I’ve dumped it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Monster Slider – more SSV hardware.\u00a0 Very strange puzzle game a bit like Puyo Puyo, if Puyo Puyo had the floor at an angle which you could flip left and right, causing individual tiles to slide down the slope until the floor\/other tiles stop them.\u00a0 Er… bad description, check it out on Youtube.\u00a0 It was exceptionally cheap and I’d planned to use the motherboard to swap with a slightly tempramental Vasara one, but I feel bad about it now because the game is quite endearing.\u00a0 It’s also bloody impossible to beat the AI.\u00a0 For me at least.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Exed Exes – another inexplicably expensive game which isn’t really rare at all (also known as Savage Bees).\u00a0 It’s an early vertical shooter from Capcom with some nice music and an insect theme which carries into a lot of hexagonal shapes in the background.\u00a0 It’s actually pretty decent and I got lucky with this one – cheap untested on ebay and despite the best efforts of Pitney Bowes shipping it loose in a box on behalf of the seller, it just needed a new sound capacitor or two.\u00a0 I’ll be writing an article on PB soon.\u00a0 I have photos showing the scam they’re running with ebay.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Gulf War II – I wanted a slightly cleaner one than I had, and it was cheap.\u00a0 Pure Comad goodness – instead of being another wonky porn game, they switched tactic for this and totally ripped off Twin Cobra, just changing the graphics and music a bit.\u00a0 Even the enemy placement is identical, they’d tired of cloning Thunder Dragon by this point.\u00a0 There is no reason to play this instead of Twin Cobra, none at all.\u00a0 Unless you just like Comad anyway.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Astro Blaster – MAME does not do the audio in this game justice at all – really oldschool analogue sound section.\u00a0 Inside the huge metal box there’s a backplane with no less than 5 PCBs making up the boardset.\u00a0 The JAMMA adapter is serious business and luckily came with it – although the amp mounting needs strengthening.\u00a0 As for the game, it’s a wave based early shooter with a variety of different waves similar to games like Gorf and Phoenix but with a pain in the neck laser which can overheat if you spam it – you’ll live or die based on accuracy in this game.\u00a0 It also has a lot of in-game speech, that great robotic style you don’t hear anymore.\u00a0 One of the oldest games in my collection dating from 1981.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Atomic Robo-Kid – I’ve had two of these for a while but my second board takes 5 minutes to warm up before it will run.\u00a0 Not knowing if it could ever be fixed (I’d tried before) I bought this US revision one because it was really well priced.\u00a0 With both on the bench I’ve isolated the problem on my older board and it should prove an interesting repair article when the parts arrive.\u00a0 This game is an unsung gem in the world of shooters, and I highly recommend trying it in MAME.\u00a0 It seems to have done better as a home computer port in Europe than it ever did in arcades.\u00a0 You play a cute robot with boosters, a massive laser and a big nose, who doesn’t like those?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Asterix – it was cheap and broken, and I felt like something to repair, so I did.\u00a0 One of Konami’s scrolling beatemups from the same period as Simpsons.\u00a0 It’s pretty good but I’m probably not going to keep it – one for fans of the theme, very authentic sprite work and animation and some good bosses.\u00a0 Fault was a broken LS253 but I had to replace one of the input SILs to prove it first.\u00a0 That and a volume control had been broken off but I had a correct spare on a parts board \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Pass – it’s pretty much a variation on Mile Smile but by the Korean company Oksan, it’s not too bad really but Mile Smile is better in every department and extremely cheap.\u00a0 It’s Korean and weird and I didn’t own it yet….<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ponpoko – a strange and totally unlabelled bootleg of Ponpoko with a JAMMA pinout.\u00a0 It’s indistinguishable from the original pretty much.\u00a0 Not sure why but this game was really popular in Korea, loads of bootlegs floating around plus of course Candory which was the Mario themed boot\/hack.\u00a0 Let’s not forget the bizarre song in the game:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Gardia – this was hard to find, and I had to buy it from Japan with chips obviously missing and take a chance on it being repairable.\u00a0 Well, there was good and bad news.\u00a0 The good news is that bar some cosmetic damage to the capacitors and the missing ROMs, there was nothing wrong with it at all – an operator had simply used it for parts (ouch….)\u00a0 Bad news is that it was an undumped code version and 2 code ROMs were missing.\u00a0 I’ve had it running with incorrect data as those two purely by chance are the level data, but I’m waiting for dumps of them having found that fortunately someone I know had the same version in storage.\u00a0 I dressed it up with correct labels for the photo.\u00a0 Such vanity.\u00a0 Sadly this kind of part raiding by ops of working games was not uncommon.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n