Rockin' Bowl-O-Rama: From shell to restored

Heathen

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I finally found a Bandai-Namco Rockin' Bowl-O-Rama at auction last year. It had been a dream of mine for awhile. I should have researched more and seen all the hardware problems and hard to find parts issues. For some reason, these are harder to find on the east coast (US) so I won an auction and shipped it from CA to SC. Yeah a cross country trip. Keep that in mind.

Upon delivery, it was locked up tight. I plugged it in to see what would happen out of excitement - nothing. Time to drill the locks out. The cabinet was filthy, scratched up, missing exterior parts, and nothing worked. Great.

Upon drilling out the last lock, the back plate fell down...and the keys with it. It was empty. Completely empty. I had high hopes, but that's how it normally goes with these, you have to piece them together from others.

The pictures don't do the cleanup justice. That was an ordeal on its own.

After a somewhat complete and pricey rebuild:
-Locks and light bulbs of course
-Cleaned power supply and new cord
-New extremely hard to find ashtrays
-All new CPU with extra memory/IO board/Video/Fans, etc.
-New trackball (the old one was too far gone to polish)
-Hot Rod shop powder coating of the trackball plate to match the base. Unknown bastard will never carve their initials into it again.

Other stuff was done, but this post is long enough. I left some chewing gum underneath as I believe this is a good omen

Many lessons learned, but it is a hit with the family and guests. The soundtrack is awesome. Nothing beats Little Richard, Fats Domino, and a good Elvis impersonator while you are playing
 

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You should take a pic of that I/O board. I heard it was a problematic part (unsurprisingly for a non-JVS game). There is multiple versions of the I/O board from what I heard.
 
Here is the old one that was the only piece left on the chassis. I'll take a picture of the new one the next time I pull the cabinet out. She's a heavy one.
 

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Edit: It's an NXP (HCS08/68HC08 family originally from Motorola) MCU. I myself don't know much about those. This specific MCU looked like a custom variant only designed for this I/O board.

Only other arcade hardware I seen use this MCU is a Raw Thrills RIO board but those boards fail far less often.
 
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It's my family's favorite arcade game and would be the absolute last to go if I ever sold my games.

As for the IO card, I've seen three versions. Two different red versions, one with a smaller microcontroller, and the blue one (current)
 
Nicely done! It's a great game, and the dedicated cabinets are beautiful.

One tip for anyone else who may be looking - I found replacement ashtrays for my machine for about $8 on Amazon. Looks like they're still out there. Just search for "spinning ashtray."
 
You did a great job on this!

It seems like most people have never played this game. We have one in our arcade, everyone loves it.
 
It's my family's favorite arcade game and would be the absolute last to go if I ever sold my games.

As for the IO card, I've seen three versions. Two different red versions, one with a smaller microcontroller, and the blue one (current)
Most likely all 68HC08 based MCUs (an upgraded 68HC05 to be exact). I would rather not explain how a 68HC08 would marry the I/O card to the motherboard.
 
Most likely all 68HC08 based MCUs (an upgraded 68HC05 to be exact). I would rather not explain how a 68HC08 would marry the I/O card to the motherboard.

No need to explain - I've already figured it out ;). At least from the user perspective of monitoring the linux app's (game software) behavior while running and interacting with the IO card.

All the IO card does is monitor inputs, provides serial output based on the inputs, and verifies that the motherboard BIOS serial number, NIC hardware address, and rotating hard drive serial number match (only if you started out with an older version of the linux software) what's in memory on the microcontroller.

The game software sends this info every second or so. If the data that is being sent from the game software doesn't match up on the IO card side, it will reboot and keep rebooting until the data matches. If the game software can't talk to the IO card, it will then display an error message saying to contact support.
 
If the I/O board and motherboard are mated based on BIOS, I wonder where the BIOS is stored...maybe on the PLCC chip on the motherboard?

I have a spare MB, and wonder if getting it to work with my existing game is as simple as swapping that chip.
 
If the I/O board and motherboard are mated based on BIOS, I wonder where the BIOS is stored...maybe on the PLCC chip on the motherboard?

I have a spare MB, and wonder if getting it to work with my existing game is as simple as swapping that chip.

The serial number is stored on the BIOS's EEPROM (socketed). Unfortunately, that's only half the battle on the motherboard. You'll also need the hardware address of the NIC (ethernet adapter / surface mount chip) to match as the game software register's both of those with the IO card at the initial pairing.

If you swap the BIOS to another motherboard without the NIC matching, the game will actually boot and run, but very choppily and none of the buttons will function.
 
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