Alien Arena conversion question

Tornadoboy

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Just curious, has anyone here tried converting a Williams boardset to Alien Arena? The ROMs are public domain and even come with the instructions on how to do it and in theory it looks very doable, so I'm tempted to give it a try as I've always wanted something very rare in my collection.

One thing I have noticed though is that I can't get the sound to work in MAME even though it's supposed to have it, in fact it uses the same sound ROM used by Defender and Stargate, but no matter how I juggle the files around between the different sets I can't get it to work.

Also does anyone know how to get in touch with the author Duncan Brown? If I get everything to work and build it a custom cab I'd love to send him a pic.
 
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Just curious, has anyone here tried converting a Williams boardset to Alien Arena? The ROMs are public domain and even come with the instructions on how to do it and in theory it looks very doable, so I'm tempted to give it a try as I've always wanted something very rare in my collection.

One thing I have noticed though is that I can't get the sound to work in MAME even though it's supposed to have it, in fact it uses the same sound ROM used by Defender and Stargate, but no matter how I juggle the files around between the different sets I can't get it to work.

Also does anyone know how to get in touch with the author Duncan Brown? If I get everything to work and build it a custom cab I'd love to send him a pic.

Duncan is a great guy. Very accessible. Check out the pinball newsgroups, rec.games.pinball and do a search for Duncan. You'll easily find his email there. He's very good at responding to emails (if he's not out of town on work). He's the guy that found and donated the 30 level Blaster ROMs to the world. He also set a marathon world record on Asteroids many years ago (don't know if it still stands). But I remember him showing me newspaper articles on it. 28 hours or something like that.
 
For anyone else who has this problem I've figured it out, at least with the Stargate upgrade version of the roms. Under MAME you've got to go to the game's properties and under the sound tab click "enable sound and CPU sounds", that seems to make it work. I've got all the boards now for the conversion, I've just got to fix them and burn a new set of EPROMs.
 
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