Announcing the Sky Skipper Project!

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Awesome,looking forward to reading the backstory on the team and hunting to put this together.
 
Looking at the MAME driver it appears that Popeye and Sky Skipper are similar hardware with the major difference being in the bitmapped video layer (Popeye has twice the bitmapped video RAM as Sky Skipper). There may be other hardware differences between the boards (like ROM sizes, number of ROMs, address decoders, etc.) but from a software perspective it might be theoretically possible to modify the Sky Skipper code to run on a Popeye board though it certainly wouldn't be a trivial task as one would have to disassemble and study the Sky Skipper code to figure out how to modify it for a Popeye PCB.

Interestingly, according to this post over at MAMEworld, a version of Popeye that ran natively on Sky Skipper hardware has just been dumped. This version apparently predates the ones in MAME and that most folks have played, so it does sound as though there were at least two hardware revisions of Popeye.

As a side note, I can very clearly remember playing a Sky Skipper cocktail at a Marie Callender's restaurant in Burbank / Toluca Lake (not sure which side of the city boundary it fell on; the restaurant was shut down three or four years ago), California. What sticks out in my mind about it is that it was the only one I ever saw, and I was really unhappy when we went back there one time only to find that it had been replaced by... Popeye.

While I have no clue if the Popeye that replaced it was a dedicated or Sky Skipper variant, there was at least one Sky Skipper cocktail in circulation in the US c.1982. And I did eventually grow to like Popeye, but Sky Skipper stuck in my head largely due to the Donkey Kong-alike gorilla character wearing a Walkman.
 
Interestingly, according to this post over at MAMEworld, a version of Popeye that ran natively on Sky Skipper hardware has just been dumped. This version apparently predates the ones in MAME and that most folks have played, so it does sound as though there were at least two hardware revisions of Popeye.

As a side note, I can very clearly remember playing a Sky Skipper cocktail at a Marie Callender's restaurant in Burbank / Toluca Lake (not sure which side of the city boundary it fell on; the restaurant was shut down three or four years ago), California. What sticks out in my mind about it is that it was the only one I ever saw, and I was really unhappy when we went back there one time only to find that it had been replaced by... Popeye.

While I have no clue if the Popeye that replaced it was a dedicated or Sky Skipper variant, there was at least one Sky Skipper cocktail in circulation in the US c.1982. And I did eventually grow to like Popeye, but Sky Skipper stuck in my head largely due to the Donkey Kong-alike gorilla character wearing a Walkman.

The hardware was made for Sky Skipper (1981) and modified for Popeye (1982). It will be interesting to see if this older (prototype ?) version of Popeye is different from the released version as far as gameplay, graphics or sound.

It will be interesting to see Sky Skipper in a real cabinet (at CAX). It's a fun game and personally I think it's much better than Popeye.
 
Nice going Whitney. You're awesome for teaming up with the Nintendo Arcade guy to do this. All I'm trying to do is to resurrect the art for Bucky O Hare ^^
 
The hardware was made for Sky Skipper (1981) and modified for Popeye (1982). It will be interesting to see if this older (prototype ?) version of Popeye is different from the released version as far as gameplay, graphics or sound.

It will be interesting to see Sky Skipper in a real cabinet (at CAX). It's a fun game and personally I think it's much better than Popeye.


All Indications point to this being an earlier revision that made its way into actual JP cabinets. Not a proto. We will have to wait for MAME .178 to be sure tho.
 
Really Neat. Reminds me of the Screw Loose project that was done. Excellent work.
 
The hardware was made for Sky Skipper (1981) and modified for Popeye (1982).

Correct. My wording on that progression was somewhat clumsy.

It will be interesting to see if this older (prototype ?) version of Popeye is different from the released version as far as gameplay, graphics or sound.

One other thing I'd be interested in finding out comes down to a comment in the source for the Popeye driver in MAME: "The bootleg derives from a different revision of the program code which we don't have."

Basically, I'm wondering if the bootleg may be derived from the 'native' Sky Skipper version.

It will be interesting to see Sky Skipper in a real cabinet (at CAX). It's a fun game and personally I think it's much better than Popeye.

It's a shame that it didn't get a wider release than it did. Sky Skipper always struck me as being the game that Looping should have stuck a little closer to for inspiration - less frustrating and with in-game goals beyond shoot & avoid that add to the gameplay. Namco's Sky Kid was a fun variant in its own right, but always seemed closer to Fast Freddie in concept.
 
All Indications point to this being an earlier revision that made its way into actual JP cabinets. Not a proto. We will have to wait for MAME .178 to be sure tho.

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I dumped it and have 2 boards of this type. It's definitely the original version sold in Japan before the later 2 layer board.

Original Popeye is TPP1, 2 layer is TPP2.

I have Sky Skipper as well.
 
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I dumped it and have 2 boards of this type. It's definitely the original version sold in Japan before the later 2 layer board.

Original Popeye is TPP1, 2 layer is TPP2.

I have Sky Skipper as well.

Are there any graphical or gameplay differences between this version and the later version ?
 
Are there any graphical or gameplay differences between this version and the later version ?

Just tried the Sky Skipper version in MAME 0.178. The only graphical difference that I picked up on was on the ship level: when you catch the letters spelling 'HELP', the ladder to the deck that Olive Oyl is standing on builds in the same manner as in the dedicated hardware version, but the ladder has no rungs.

There may be others, but that was the only one that was noticeable to me. FWIW, I don't know if this might be an emulation issue or an actual difference between hardware versions. Gameplay seems virtually identical.
 
Just tried the Sky Skipper version in MAME 0.178. The only graphical difference that I picked up on was on the ship level: when you catch the letters spelling 'HELP', the ladder to the deck that Olive Oyl is standing on builds in the same manner as in the dedicated hardware version, but the ladder has no rungs.

There may be others, but that was the only one that was noticeable to me. FWIW, I don't know if this might be an emulation issue or an actual difference between hardware versions. Gameplay seems virtually identical.

That there is little difference doesn't surprise me. The increased bitmapped video RAM in the later release of the board only seems to allow for a cleaner implementation, the capabilities seem to be basically the same.

Gotta hand it to ShouTime for getting this and many other lost games out there. He must be one of the biggest arcade PCB collectors around - http://collectedit.com/collectors/shou-time-213/arcade-pcbs-281
 
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