Galaga '88 Board

Tighe

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Hi All,

I want to find a Galaga '88 board to run as a secondary board in my original complete Galaga. I can't seem to find one anywhere, are they really rare?

To be honest I like Gaplus even more, but that require me hacking the control panel to make it a 4 way. Which I am in no way doing. I just want to add another game to my Galaga. Galaxian is way to crude for my taste.
 
I have a dedicated Atari / Namco Galaga 88' machine and it's not that it's incredibly rare, although pcb's pop up from time to time and usually go for around 100-150 range. Galaga 88' is a JAMMA PCB, i'm guessing the easiest way would be to just wire it up so it can accept JAMMA pinouts, I don't know of any adaptors.. unless you really want to keep your original wiring.
 
Jamma Adapter

There is one, ArcadeShop sells it:
jamma2galaga-adapter-5.jpg

http://www.arcadeshop.com/parts.htm#JAMMA

$150 is suppose is reasonable, but for less I could get the 60-in-1. But then I would be tempted to hack the control panel for the other games on it. :) I figured I would be safe as long as I stuck to games like Galaga. LOL

As for Gaplus being a 8-way, 4-way or 8-way would require messing with the CP. I suppose I could get a repo and hack that and save the original. But that really isn't what I want to do.
 
What is your plan for adding another game ? You mean just swap the boards out or actually modifying the harness to run two games in one cab ?
 
What is your plan for adding another game ? You mean just swap the boards out or actually modifying the harness to run two games in one cab ?

Nothing quite so expensive, just a open the back and unplug one and plug in the other. I currently do that with my Marvel Vs Capcom cabinet. I have a Street Fighter Alpha board and Street Fighter II board inside and just swap the plug. Jamma switchers are too expensive.
 
I think that the only thing bad about Galaga '88 is the cabinet. Just so blah. Looks like someone retrofitted a Centipede.
 
And now for something completely different.
Don't worry that the game uses an 8 way joystick and you can move the ship in the y axis. It plays fine just plugging it into a galaga cab. The only thing you really have to do is remember which side the ships com in from on the backpeddling levels and go to that side and strafe to the opposite side as they come in. Then they come in from that side and you do the opposite. I have a Gaplus in my spare Galaga cab, and while I do intend on modding the game to have the up and down,its not necessary to really enjoy the game. Plus its easier to find than a Galaga 88. The real problem with that board is you can swap roms and turn it into quite a few games(to the best of my undrestanding). So they are all pretty good games and fairly popular and none were made in a very large quanity. Games like Splatterhouse, Dragon Spirit, and PacMania come to mind.
 
Somebody should make an add on multi board so you could play all the games available on that hardware.
 
Galaga 88 is one of my favorites!!!!

If someone else doesn't do it first, I'll attempt to make an FPGA version if I can stick with this FPGA-coding hobby. It'll probably take me a while. It's pretty high on my list of games to implement since it's one of my favorites, and I'm out of room for real cabs at this point.
 
WOW! I am really interesting in FPGAs what are you using for a reference?

Galaga 88 is one of my favorites!!!!

If someone else doesn't do it first, I'll attempt to make an FPGA version if I can stick with this FPGA-coding hobby. It'll probably take me a while. It's pretty high on my list of games to implement since it's one of my favorites, and I'm out of room for real cabs at this point.
 
WOW! I am really interesting in FPGAs what are you using for a reference?

For the most part, the schematic. If there are custom chips on there, you can usually find info on what the do. You are pretty much implementing the schematic in the fpga.
 
For the most part, the schematic. If there are custom chips on there, you can usually find info on what the do. You are pretty much implementing the schematic in the fpga.

Is there special software for doing that? Or do you write it in a programming language?
 
I'm using one of these:

http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,793&Prod=S3E1600

This site is a GREAT resource for this stuff:

http://www.fpgaarcade.com

Most of the examples on that site are for this board (I think it's this board. . may be the one directly from Xilinx actually. . I don't know if they are the same ornot.):

http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,792&Prod=S3EBOARD

Xilinx has a free "WebPack" software package that is a dev environment for these boards. I've been working with the Pac-Man implementation on fpgaarcade.com along with the schematics from Pac-Man to learn how this all works.

Here's a rough version of a scanned Pac-Man schematic that is a single image and (hopefully) easier to look at than the other ones out there:

http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,792&Prod=S3EBOARD

I'm planning on adding annotations to the schematic as I figure out how it works. Very interesting to me that the sprite hardware is just regular old ands/ors/counters/etc.

You end up coding in VHDL for this stuff. This book is great for learning the language:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262162245/ref=oss_product

This one is great if you are an electronics newb (like me) and want to learn enough to do FPGA programming:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0131733494/ref=oss_product

This last one is pretty expensive, but avoid the paperback version that is for sale on Amazon. It's a really poor printing (can't read a lot of the pages) that is made only for India and isn't supposed to be sold in the US.
 
Hi All,

I want to find a Galaga '88 board to run as a secondary board in my original complete Galaga. I can't seem to find one anywhere, are they really rare?
They are hard to find, yes. I'd expect to pay a minimum of $200 to $250 for a working one.
 
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