I will leave this information here just because it was mostly working in this form - however there are graphics glitches I was never able to overcome through adjusting the jumpers, if someone has more luck, hopefully they will let me know so I can update this thread with the information to make it work 100%
Pelly sent me his boardset so I could give him a hand getting this up and running so I thought I'd do a small write-up to explain a couple of the pitfalls of this particular conversion.
The MAME driver needs updating with a lot of the jumper settings for various games, and the decrypted MAME ROM set listed in the driver for use on this board is missing the sound ROMs which must then be obtained by downloading the parent set and burning those onto the correct size ROMs.
If the jumpers are incorrectly set it will certainly not boot and worst case scenario will destroy the ROMs inserted on the board, so I think it's worth talking about how to do this properly.
NB: The ROM board used for this conversion is a 171-5704 type - other games that use this board type are:
Bay Route
Golden Axe
MVP
Aurail
Flash Point
Wonderboy III
Cotton
Wrestle War
Riot City
Tetris
To perform the Altered Beast conversion you will require:
17x 27C512 EPROMs for object, sprite and sound data
1x 27C256 EPROM for sound program data
7x 27C1000 EPROM for main CPU, scrolling background and speech data
There are 2 ROM sets you will need to download to get the correct EPROMs
Altered Beast Set 5 (317-0069) - This has all the ROMs including the decrypted main CPU code required to run the game
Altered Beast Set 8 (317-0078) - This has the sound program ROM at A10 and speech data ROMs at A11 and A12 that are missing from the set above. This set requires the 8751 CPU that the board I'm using does not have, so we use the above set which was designed for the FD1094 encrypted CPU.
Install the EPROMs in their correct locations on the board (the MAME naming convention tells you the correct sockets to install everything so there shouldn't be any need for me to put that information here)
Here is a picture of the fully populated board in case anyone wants it as a reference
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sthx0pjdvxjl5rc/File 20-2-17, 19 21 49.jpeg?dl=0
You will then need to set the jumpers - I worked out by downloading several of the MAME sets that use this ROM board that Bay Route uses almost exactly the same size ROMs for all parts of the board. It does however use smaller sound ROMs than Altered Beast uses, where Aurail uses the same size sound ROMs but larger object ROMs.
These were the jumpers I shorted on the Altered Beast board to get it to run:
S2 - S3 - S5 - S7 - S9 - S11 - S13 - S15 - S17 (this may get adjusted after I do a test run with the board in a cabinet to confirm any issues, but these settings are safe and the board does boot with these jumpers shorted and there does not appear to be any issues)
It's also worth mentioning if you want to set up free play as I did, set all Dip Switches on SW1 to the on position, and if you want Attract Mode sound, set Dip Switch 2 on SW2 to the On position.
Enjoy!
