New arrival - V-V

It's been a while since I've got a new game since money is a little tight and I have loads of other stuff to be getting on with. Today I got this in the post though. I got it as my end of a trade; out goes R Type Leo, with V-V replacing it. I've only had a chance to test it and snap these, I'm excited to sit down and give it a proper try out this evening. I just paid for another MVS cart too so hopefully that will turn up shortly.

New arrivals: MVS, raizing, toaplan

I received a few new bits and bobs ove the last week or so. The breakers mini marquee means I have them for 101 of the 133 games that came with them. I also picked up a tiger heli pcb. It curently has no sound but two of the caps in the audio section were all but snapped off and dangling by one leg when I inspected it. I've bought replacements, hopefully once they've been soldered on it'll be fine. Finally, I had a dimahoo CPS2 B board arrive. It's a conversion but that doesn't bother me. I've really been looking forward to playing this!

New arrivals: A little more toaplan goodness

Another day, another three toaplan pcbs. Having to let go of so many cabs because of the move has had its benefits; I've managed to snag some nice bits in trade and had the money to buy a few bits and pieces too. I'm really looking forward to playing zero wing and hellfire; I only have a U4 as a hori cab at the moment and that's obviously MVS wired rather than straight JAMMA. For now I could only test them on a vert cab but I have an MVS > JAMMA adapter in the post. Hopefully it'll turn up very soon! Dogyuun is pretty good fun, I need to spend a bit more time with it, so far I'm liking the graphics and music and stuff but I'm not sold ont he power up mechanic. We'll see.

New arrivals: Toaplan goodness

I had a couple of parcels of awesomeness delivered earlier this week. There were a couple of other pcbs I'll take pics of later but also this lovely trio of toaplan games; Out Zone, Fixeight and Truxton II. I'm sure these will get a ton of play, Out zone and Fixeight in particluar are great fun in two player. I was really happy to track down copies of these three, they don't pop up for sale all that often.

New arrivals - Twin Cobra 2 and Mahjong

The other day I got this Twin Cobra 2 F3 cart in the post. It has some minor corruption to the title screen and during the bomb explosion but otherwise plays perfectly. It's not at all obtrusive and means I got it cheap. It's credited to Takumi but a lot of the programming was actually done inside Toaplan before they folded. A lot of staff who were working on it then finished it off under the Takumi name.


I also got Mahjong Kyuretsuden. That's 120 / 148 MVS games.

ROM swapping - fire shark > same! same! same! and Battle Garegga Zakk ROMs

I said there'd be more on those ROMs I received the other day. The ones labelled ZAKK are for my Garegga pcb. The Zakk ROMs fix a number of niggly little issues witht he game such as the rank increasing with plays etc. I fancied that and also wanted some other ROMs anyway since I had an asian board and fancied a JP one with those extends etc. These and the others were burned by the exceptionally helpful Southtown Homebrew.

The chips you need to swap are the two in the centre.

Easily done. I also needed to change the region of my board.

To do so I just had to clip these two jumpers. Located int he bottom right on the board on the above pic.

Another super simple job. And that's it!


Nippon only, just like I like it.

The other 4 chips up there are to turn my fire shark into a same! same! same!. The JP region same game is substantially different. It's one player only (fire shark has 2p) it's zoomed in somewhat and the screen can scroll a little left and right (fire shark is slightly panned out and the screen only scrolls directly up, it has checkpoints (shame since they are mega annoying in any game) and it's substantially harder. There are a bunch of minor differences in enemy fire patterns and pick up colours and stuff too. Well worth doing.


The two sets of chips, including international postage, only set me back $37. And Southtown wouldn't accept payment til I'd confirmed they worked. Superb service, speedy and reasonably priced. I'll certainly use them if I need any mor ROMs burning.

New arrival - Tatsujin

Well, it's not really a new arrival. Just newly living. I picked this up as a faulty board a while back. It's just been resurrected and send back over to me. In case anyone out there has a dead truxton / tatsujin this problem with this one was a dead sound ROM. The pcb won't boot without a working sound one crazy as that sounds. The dude who fixed it just swapped in a working chip and it booted straight up. Strange! This is a nice original JP version. Great game!

New arrivals - dynablaster / fire shark / mahjong MVS

I had another little influx of goodess! Firstly a nice dynablaster / bomberman pcb. It's really good fun, was nice and cheap and is a beautiful original irem board with a lovely foil seal sticker. I may try to ROM swap it into a bomberman since that has an extra mode in two player I think.


Far more expensive was this beautiful pcb.


It's the fantastic and fantastically hard fire shark. I've played this a LOT since it turned up. It's awesome. I definately need Same! Same! Same! ROMs for it though. The list of ROMs I need is pretty long now. The price adds up when you need a bunch.

And, finally, for this little flurry of parcels, I got this. It's mahjong bakatonosama manyuki. The quiz and mahjong carts aren't very common outside Japan although they are plentiful and cheap there. I imported this one. It was only about £9 including SAL shipping from Japan. With this one I now have 81 / 148 mvs games.

New arrivals - A pair of pcbs

One of these had actually been sitting in the sorting office waiting for me since before christmas. I only managed to get there this morning though. First up is...


It's a rather nice pcb. A lovely Japan version too. Sadly it has a slight fault. I bought it knowing that though. The price was right. Intermittantly there is a sprite fault where all the sprites are replaced with white rectangles. I'm almost certain that it's due to a dry solder. If you keep it in a certain orientation it seems OK so fingers crossed it'll be an alright fix. I managed to play a credit or two just fine so long as I didn't move it.

The other pcb is 100% working



It's supposed to not be a great game though sadly. I'll give it a go and make my own mind up like. Most toaplan stuff is decent.