Arcade Modkits: Whats the deal?

Joshmans

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Howdy everyone,
So, recently I've been hearing a lot about High Score Save Kits, Alternate Maze Roms, and multigame board add-ons, and chips you can buy to turn your Galaga's into Osama Bin Laden.

The real question I have, is which high-score kits, alternate maze kits, and graphical hacks are worth getting for older games.

Anyone have any info or any idea where I can even get these neat things? Aswell, in the interest of fostering discussion, what modkits do you guys own and what did you think of them?
 
Kits that add more games are cool like missile command-there is a kit that lets you play super missile attack...that pcb is rare and to play it on a kit that lets you play missile command too I think that idea is cool.
You can switch games by pressing the 1 and 2 player buttons together at the same time.

G12
 
off top of my head anything from braze is good.

The qbert multi kits that have been offered at least twice in limited releases are really good.

The exidy 440 shooter kits that I believe have been run twice are great but were limited and are generally pricey if you find one.

The DIIK kit which is basically the DK high score save with DIIK rom is cool if you are a big DK fan.

Generally stuff from romhack or Jeff's romhack (the guy who made DIIK) are nice additions and work well. I think most may be high score saves. I know I have his stuff in my kangaroo and it works great adding free play to the game which is nice.

In general it would seem that the feed back on most high score save kits/hacks are good. Most free play as well

Mike Doyle's pac man multi is great. 96 in 1 I believe.

Although they rarely pop up these days Clay Cowgill kits seem to be great although I believe they usually require some soldering rather than simply plug into existing sockets like most new kits do.

Although technically not a kit jrok's multi williams is great and in it's first run he even offered harnesses that allowed the board to plug into existing wiring in many williams games. I don't think the harnesses are readily available but you can always build one yourself.
 
Anybody have any good things to say about the multi-pac ones? I've got a Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac dedicated that I think I might want to put a multi-pac in, but I'm on the fence.
 
Anybody have any good things to say about the multi-pac ones? I've got a Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac dedicated that I think I might want to put a multi-pac in, but I'm on the fence.

I have the 96-in-1, and it's very nice, but I don't play most of the games on it. Fast/slow Pac/Ms. Pac is pretty much it. Not a big fan of the Super / Plus Pac variants, and most of the rest are bootlegs that ran on Pac boards and maze hacks. There's a setting that lets you turn some of the maze hacks off, but you can't choose the individual games in the list.
 
I've got:

- shilmovers 8-1 multipac, which I've been happy with. I also got the HSSK with it, but haven't installed it yet.
- DK HSSK...installed, works great. Didn't get the DIIK upgrade for it though.
- Galaga Enhancement Pack, not installed yet.
- Multi-qbert, no machine yet.

You can get a lot of the HSSK kits from Mike's Arcade, Arcadeshop, etc.
 
I made a list of all the (free) high-score save, freeplay kits, and bugfixes I knew of a while back: http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=205382

On the non-free side, I own two of the Braze kits (Asteroids & Battlezone) and the "Galaga Enhancement Kit" (a JROK design, sold by Mike's Arcade, IIRC). I am happy with all of them.
 
I've got the Braze Mario Bros High score kit.
Makes it nice to have scores and names stay up to try to beat at a later time.

The DK high score kit allows free play and also sound can be limited during the attract mode... (play sound 50% of the time... but you can select the % of time)

I installed the Q-Bert kit from Mike Doyl, works great, I have it booting into Q-Bert so it runs like normal unless you know to push the 2 start buttons and hold them. The Qubes and FHMC versions are well worth the money!!!

I had a JROK multi-Williams Joust... loved it, but I love Joust so much I went back to dedicated just so the 2 way joysticks are correct. Wico 8-way's don't feel right at all.
It didn't hurt to snag a nice Joust for $200 either though. :D

ArcadeSD will also join the gameroom hopefully soon dressed in a PacMan cab.
 
I have Matt Osborn's Vs. Super Mario bros. free play with attract mode. It adds a whole new level to the replay value.
 
I also have the Galaga Enhancement Pack. I only use it for the HSS, though. I tried the fast shoot and immediately turned it to normal speed shooting only. I don't know if it's a different hack than the one I played in MAME or what, but it sucks pretty hard. The shots move so fast they pass through some of the enemies without hitting them — So you can be firing at a column and killing the enemies 2-3 positions back while the one in the lead escapes unscathed.

The HSS is really nice to have, though.
 
i just got and installed the galaxian high score save kit from http://arcade.souzaonline.com/ and it looks like it's working great. i might have gotten the last one though.

i made sure to clean the legs on my z80 with a fiberglass contact cleaner pen and it worked perfect on the first boot.
 
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