MiSTer FPGA Forum

I know this is a bit of a niche game, but it's one of my favorites. I managed to grab a partially working arcade board for it, and will begin repair work on it soon. Once it's properly working, I'll inquire with some Arcade core devs to see if they have any interest in working with it. I have the ability to troubleshoot the board, but not any FPGA coding knowledge unfortunately. Anyway, just thought I'd pop a thread up, and will update it once I've spoken to a few of the FPGA devs that I'm somewhat in contact with. Might be an interesting project. Most of the board seems pretty straight-forward, but the Kaneko Pandora VDP may be the tricky part as I'm not sure the IC has been used elsewhere at this time.

From some of my digging, I think there may be a few other games that used a version of it, but information is fairly scarce. (I can't remember for sure, but I think a couple of Jaleco games may have used it or some derivation)

Anyway, I'll post anything interesting that comes about either during board restoration, or if someone agrees to take a look at it for FPGA development.

I realize that there are passable versions of this on the Genesis/Megadrive and TurboGrafx/PC Engine, but personally I like the arcade version as it's the one I played the most as a kid. I can of course play it in MAME, but it's basically the only game that I really love that isn't on an FPGA system yet, so I thought I'd give this a whirl.

Plan to start with a cleaning, re-cap, then start analyzing voltages, logic signals, etc. Anything interesting will be added here.

Well, it arrived. Waiting for my JAMMA gear to show up for testing. (already have tons of test equipment for my other hobby/side-job)

While I was waiting I went over the photos of the board again, and already found what may be the problem. There appear to be two traces scraped off from the corner of the Kaneko Pandora VDP chip. That may be the cause of the graphical corruption. I've also read that the color static RAMs can be problematic, so I'll be checking those as well.

It may also have some audio issues, but the ICs for the audio are quite easily obtained, so may just swap them out if needed.

Anyway, just a small update. I know there's probably limited interest, but I figured it will become at least marginally relevant if I can get it fixed and into the hands of a willing FPGA dev.

Aside from that, I'm already having fun digging into this before I've even really started, so I may start restoring arcade boards for fun here and there.

Went a little crazy. Ordered a working board too because I couldn't pass up the price, and my offer was accepted for a little less even. So I'll have a working board to compare the semi-working board to. Got in touch with Jotego, and I will be donating the repaired board for future FPGA conversion. No ETA, but no rush either. It will just be nice to preserve the game.

Then... ...I went even crazier... My brother and I love Mappy, so I ordered a set of Mappy boards to repair.

Once I'm done with all these, I'm sure I'll start working on more. I want to get an Ordyne board for one. Momoko 120% if possible (not likely). Repairing arcade boards seems like it will be a fun distraction from some of my other projects.

Anyway, Air Buster is up first. More to report soon.

I found three traces that need repairing. The caps look good, but I'm going to swap them anyway. Once that's done, I'll do some powered-on testing.

Air Buster is one of my favourite horizontal STGs. Good luck!

Mine too, thanks!

Picked up a few other boards as well while I was at it. I threw some wild offers out, and some of them came back accepted. More than I thought, so I spent a bit more than I had in mind, but I think this is going to be a lot of fun.

I design/build analog synthesizers and audio PCBs, etc. and have been feeling a little bit burned out on it lately. This will be a nice way to break it up a bit between projects.