My findings - updating a Showtime cabinet

TerryMasters

Member
Joined
Jun 29, 2009
Messages
75
Reaction score
4
Location
New York
I'm posting this thread to share my experience for those who are curious about whether or not this will work, as there is not a lot of clear info on this.

I was recently fortunate enough to obtain a Showtime 3.0 CHD. My current version was 1.5. According to reports on several different forums, this one included, Midway released a few different boot ROMs for their Vegas hardware. The version I have is 2.5 (the only other known ROMs are 2.7, and 3.0).

I took the hard drive out, made a backup of my 1.5 image, and copied over the 3.0 image. After the installation I fired it up, and to my surprise, NBA Showtime started up. It read 3.0 and everything, but the dipswitches were set to start Blitz first. Sure enough, after inserting a coin and trying to load Blitz, the game crashed.

No matter how I try to load it, any attempt to load Blitz causes the machine to restart. HOWEVER - not only can I get into NBA Showtime's test menu, but I can get into Blitz's test menu as well. I tested both NBA and NFL file systems and all files come back OK (3060 NBA/1066 NFL). I tried resetting both to factory defaults, but Blitz still refuses to load. I have every reason to believe that this is related to the 2.5 boot ROM.

There are only two other possibilities as to why it wouldn't load. Either Chdman has to load the image onto the drive using the same version that was used to rip it, or my 3.0 image file was somehow damaged. Ironically, the backup I made turned out to be larger than the new 3.0 image (3.0 was 6.0GB, 1.5 was 6.9GB). I'm going to do some further testing, and I'll report back with the results.

Can anyone here with a 3.0 Sportstation confirm that the file system checks are infact 3060 for Showtime, and 1066 for Blitz?
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom