Double Dragon bootleg needs more voltage than legit pcb's

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Double Dragon bootleg needs more voltage than legit pcb's

I've got a bootleg pcb in my Double Dragon and never really worried much about that fact until this morning. I swapped in my WrestleFest board and it was glitching just a litttle so in the course of trying to figure out why it turns out that my WrestleFest board was getting over 5.5 volts on it. The Double Dragon bootleg was set very close to +5 so for whatever reason it is a power hog. I was just curious in general if that's common for bootleg boards to be power hogs like that or not. Right now my plan is to just get an original Taito pcb at some point and if I want to play Double Dragon, it's going to have to deal with the +5 reading low at 4.75 when other legit JAMMA boards read much closer to how they should. Like I said just curious to know if it's a common thing for bootlegs. I did try a TMNT pcb and it was close to the same reading for WrestleFest.
 
clean your JAMMA edge and find out. I don't understand how much more different it can be. I also don't understand the concept of "power hogs". people insist Midway Seattle boards are "power hogs" yet why is it that I have like a .12V difference between my power supply and the roms on the board?

EDIT: my math sucks today. I have pictures if you'd like to see though. heh
 
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possible failed component on the board causing a higher voltage. definitely give the edge connector a good cleaning tho as mecha stated.
 
Well, there are probably bootleg boards that are less power consuming than the original game.
Regardless if it is bootleg or not, if there are more circuits there should be more need for power. Many bootleg games might have more standard logic circuits to overcome special IC's etc, that might explain why they are bigger and have multiple boards and so on.
Sometimes there could also be cheaper components, bad wiring and soldering etc.
 
Yeah, it may just be a bad board. I do know that some people prefer the Double Dragon bootleg as it doesn't have the slowdown that the original does. But I kind of like the slowdown. It's more "original" :D
 
the MAME rom for the bootleg still has the slowdown, oddly enough. I haven't checked in awhile, I thought the genuine boardsets had some copy protection that wouldn't let you play and you HAD to play the bootleg rom.

the slowdown is kind of irritating though. I guess my 6 year old counterpart never noticed or gave a shit about it or something... Double Dragon was classic and I spent a ton of time playing it in my family's arcade back in the day, but once I was exposed to Final Fight and The Combatribes I stopped caring about Double Dragon. :p

I also enjoyed Bad Dudes, even though it's just a side scroller.
 
I also enjoyed Bad Dudes, even though it's just a side scroller.

I remember playing Bad Dudes a lot on NES. And remember this from Parenthood?

[Movie]Parenthood%20(1989)_03.jpg


[Movie]Parenthood%20(1989)_02.jpg
 
In general, I've heard in the past that Double Dragon bootleg boards actually perform better than the original board. Some of them don't even slow down like Double Dragon is notorious for because they used better speed cpu's than the original did.

Edit just noticed somebody else already mentioned this, sorry!

Not all Jamma boards bootleg or not use the same voltage though, if you swap a lot of boards you'll probably have a lot of discrepancies between the different boards.
 
In general, I've heard in the past that Double Dragon bootleg boards actually perform better than the original board. Some of them don't even slow down like Double Dragon is notorious for because they used better speed cpu's than the original did.

Edit just noticed somebody else already mentioned this, sorry!

Not all Jamma boards bootleg or not use the same voltage though, if you swap a lot of boards you'll probably have a lot of discrepancies between the different boards.

yeah there's several factors that contribute to that. I got an Area 51 board that if you run it above 5.05V the LED for high voltage comes on. game runs mint, it was operated commercially. only time I ever had a blackout with it was before I cleaned the edge connector. that, and an experience with my Sportstation is what sold me on edge connector cleaning. you can at least eliminate that from the factors of voltage discrepancies.
 
This isn't about voltage issues on DD bootlegs, but on DD bootlegs in general. Have any of you come across the bootlegs where there was missing text throughout the game? i.e. the manufacturer info and "Insert Coin" text on the title screen, the word "Credit" missing when you insert a credit, "Mission 1" missing after you begin your game, and the big blue 1P and 2P flashing text above your character missing? On mine, everything else is there, and I can play to the end, get end credits, etc. But just some of that text is missing. What would you suggest? Finding someone that can burn replacement roms? Any other suggestions? Thanks.
 
Similar issue with mine. I have a bootleg DD board that is a huge power hog - I need to pump out well above 5.3v on the PS for it to not freeze a few minutes into gameplay. It also requires -5v for the sound to work, not sure if the real taito board did as well. There is some slowdown in mine, I'm not sure how similar it is to the real board as I don't have one to compare and my 20 year old memories of the pizza parlor down the street are probably grossly inaccurate at this point.

Don't get the error message in mine mentioned in the above post, all eproms check out ok, but it does seem like mine is missing a few graphics / sounds. Specifically, I remember the P1 and P2 arrows above the characters to be gone. Also some of the non standard sounds like bobo smashing through the wall are absent. Anything I can do about this or is that by design?
 
Similar issue with mine. I have a bootleg DD board that is a huge power hog - I need to pump out well above 5.3v on the PS for it to not freeze a few minutes into gameplay. It also requires -5v for the sound to work, not sure if the real taito board did as well. There is some slowdown in mine, I'm not sure how similar it is to the real board as I don't have one to compare and my 20 year old memories of the pizza parlor down the street are probably grossly inaccurate at this point.

Don't get the error message in mine mentioned in the above post, all eproms check out ok, but it does seem like mine is missing a few graphics / sounds. Specifically, I remember the P1 and P2 arrows above the characters to be gone. Also some of the non standard sounds like bobo smashing through the wall are absent. Anything I can do about this or is that by design?

It's strange. Mine isn't a power hog, but the blinking 1P, etc. are missing on mine too (see a few posts back). I guess it's just the nature of bootlegs. You either get a 100% clone or you get a 90-95% clone that "works."
 
I have a 1943 bootleg board that also needs a little extra juice. There is a daughter board in place of a custom graphics chip, with about 30 TTL chips on it. At normal 5v levels the graphics are corrupted or missing.
 
I've never, ever seen the legit DD's for that cheap.

Nope, me neither.

I bought a few non-working ones ('untested'on feePay) before I finally landed a good deal on one that worked.

Should have just sprung the $60 for a working one. Now I have $100 into 3 boards, two of which are only partially working. :(

Being cheap is not cheap sometimes.
 
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