Arcade Otaku - アーケード オタク

Certainly original. The Altera matches. That's unique to this board & was never cloned

Awsome !! I just started collecting neo geo games so when the scans said toshiba for the roms but these didnt i got a bit worried. Im glad it really is an orginal! Got it for a decent deal to

Wonder Boy PCB, I suspect it's a boot. I need to set Dipswitches to Continue: ON but... no dipswitches?? WTF is this crappy job?

Boot.
If you can't find the dipswitches at the bottom left corner of the board, under the patch board, then some "clever god of electronics" tought of fixing once and for all the problematic loose joints which plagued his game. Needless to say, he didn't need any other settings other than those which maximised his profits.
Hopefully he didn't cut of f*** up any trace, in which case it should be an easy fix.

Thanks Asayuki. I've just desoldered the problematic wires, but can't test right now - I'm in the process of making an adapter. But besides the inabity to change dipswitches, this board worked OK.

It's working great now! Continues on
The board has a strange behavior in that, sometimes when turned on, it displays most of the sprites mirrored AND cocktail mode, but just like internet routers, you just turn it off and on again, and its working great

Anybody with a legit Steep Slope Sliders who can verify if this one's a boot or not? The case label didn't seem odd and the art/manual all looks legit but once I got the bit for opening the cart and saw MX IC's I got suspicious. Also some of the solder joints on IC's 11 and 12 looks shady

Please click the thumbs for larger photos. Thanks in advance

This is Radiant Silvergun, as taken from the interwebz:



The first thing that hits the eye is the custom in the bottom right not being sanded, but rather proudly marked; including a specific sega part number.
The two GALs on the bottom center, replaced on yours with two 74LS373 TTL ics, are also imprinted with a sega part number.
Note also how Sega had branded mask ROMs. On your picture the Macronix 29F16 flash memories are manually numbered with a pencil.
And let's not forget the number of layers!! As the expert eye can see on the original Sega board, the PCB is definitely 4 or more layers. Your cart, on the other hand, has very likely just two. Due to this, the power distribution strategy on the board is entirely different. Finally, the font used on your board to apply the PCB part number is different than the stroke font used for everything else. This might mean that it has been added at the last minute before rendering the gerber files. on Radiant Silvergun instead the same stroke font is used. And by the way, the only sega part number that can be seen around is the PCB model.

Although I don't own any ST-V game, I would still definitely consider the board you posted as a bootleg.

Asayuki wrote:Although I don't own any ST-V game, I would still definitely consider the board you posted as a bootleg.

Thank you for yout insights. You're basically confirming my suspicions. What bugs me it the case/label looks legit and the art and manual definitely are legit

EDIT: if anyone's got a legit SSS cart please post a few photos of the PCB for comparison.

Ok, so I posted about the SSS cart on another forum (for using a PC term ) and initially I got the same response but then this was posted by one member:

I personally doubt this is bootleg. I see no way how bootlegers can get this game hacked - such type protection chip decryption alghorythms was RE'd not a long time ago, so I dont know how bootlegers was able to get decrypted data chunks for this game.

I tend to think this is some early game cart, then mask roms was not yet manufactured but developers run out of time, so they reused flash rom boards. have seen the same in the case of many other Sega games.
indeed, scratched chip looks very suspicious, perhaps they want to hide shame fact same security chip(?) was reused in 3 games

"regular" rom board is very different, there is Mask ROMs stamped "Sega MPR-something", not Flash ROMs like this one have.

And it makes sense. It's not a high value game. The encryption didn't get RE'd until lately. The cart label I'd say is legit to almost 100% certainty. I'm starting to lean toward it actually being a genuine albeit early version.

I'll be shipping it to someone who will dump it.

Stompp wrote:RE'd

Reverse engineered

Neat find. It pays off going through your games looking for minute details.

nem wrote:

Stompp wrote:RE'd

Reverse engineered

Neat find. It pays off going through your games looking for minute details.

Yeah, nerd lingo deluxe

Hi Guys, i got 6 PCBs : Hyper Sports, Gals Panic1 , Gals Panic2 , Psychic5 , Tetris, Tutankham.
Hyper Sports and Gals Panic2 looks original to me (with serial nr and brand)
Tetris is 100% a bootleg.
Dont know about Gals Panic 1,Psychic5 and Tutankham. (i think bootleg)

Gals Panic 1 Psychic 5 Tutankham

Y es.... 3 bootlegs, but you got the names the wrong way for nr. 2 & 3, They are The other way round.

Hi Guys
I've recently purchased a Crazy Taxi Cartridge, but it looks pretty weird compared to all my other Naomi games. It has some sort of an extra pcb stuck on the main game board. Also some chips are sanded.
I don't have a driver cab at he moment but it looks good on my standard universal cab. The only odd thing i've noticed is, when i press the 2p start button a "debug" menu comes up which i can control with the 2p joystick. Can't find anything about that in the original manual.
Here are some pics i took from the game. http://imgur.com/a/0kROD
What do you guys think? Bootleg or something else?

Thanks

Bootleg.

Karnickel wrote:The only odd thing i've noticed is, when i press the 2p start button a "debug" menu comes up which i can control with the 2p joystick. Can't find anything about that in the original manual.

That's normal. The original cart behaves the same way. The menu is for debugging, so it's not mentioned in the user manual.

nem forgot to mention, that Crazy taxi is a bootleg. He mentioned that the original does the debug thing, too. Edit:(ops I saw the *bootleg* after posting this. )

Shaaaaaame

Thanks for the fast answer. Didn't know there are other bootlegs besides the well known Ikaruga. Still an interesting piece in my collection.

Karnickel wrote:Thanks for the fast answer. Didn't know there are other bootlegs besides the well known Ikaruga. Still an interesting piece in my collection.

Sanded chips (usually these are ALTERA or XILINX FPGAs or CPLDs) and boards without the original board manufacturer logo are dead giveaway of a bootleg board.

It's not uncommon that original boards have flash chips on them but mostly the flashes hold program code, not data. Data that is never supposed to change (graphics and sound) is cheaper to store on maskrom ICs. So in the case of NAOMI carts you have a lot of SMD ROMS with the "SEGA" logo in them and a EPROM or flash which contains the "meat" of the game program, which can be updated in case of a bug is found within the game. That's the main practical reason for having FLASH or EPROM on original game carts.

The MX chips on your cart (Macronix) are of flash/eeprom variety.

Hi every one,

I recently bought this Street Fighter EX2 Plus. I suppose this is a Bootleg but I want to have your opinion :


Maskrom printed like orignal, UVprom's stickers look weird


Qsound and CPSB2 are not Capcom printed


Never seen this romboard number before


X2PA-04 CRC : 6179F937 (Unknow in romcenter)
X2P-01M CRC : 5EA82500 (Unknow too)
X2PA-02 and X2PA-03 are same CRC as the original. I cant read the others with my programmer because it's 64Mb rom.

ROM Check :


Nevertheless the game run perfectly, no glitch, no différence with the original. Secrets caracters are unlocked.