Space Lords - hard drive?

Solder

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Just got hold of a Space Lords (Atari) boardset minus the hard drive. From looking at MAME there is no mention of a hard drive or CHD file, so do all versions of this game require a hard drive?

If so, what does it contain? Boot code? Graphics?

Thanks
 
Just got hold of a Space Lords (Atari) boardset minus the hard drive. From looking at MAME there is no mention of a hard drive or CHD file, so do all versions of this game require a hard drive?

If so, what does it contain? Boot code? Graphics?

Thanks

Space Lords doesn't have a hard drive. It's got a double boardset (one for the left and one for the right player, bolted together in a metal cage) and the ability to connect out to another cabinet for 4 player fun. I've got a set myself, and plan to hack together a single player cabinet for it (I haven't got the room for a full setup).

If you google around you can find a scan of the manual which may help you identify what you are looking at.
 
I see. Am now wondering what this long ribbon cable is doing attached to it, as the seller told me that a hard drive attaches to it. Haven't really had the time to study it though so I'll have a hunt around for the manual.
 
I see. Am now wondering what this long ribbon cable is doing attached to it, as the seller told me that a hard drive attaches to it. Haven't really had the time to study it though so I'll have a hunt around for the manual.

Hmm. I'm looking at the manual now (my boards are stuffed away in the basement at the moment).

The metal cage should contain 2 large boards (the game PCBs), each of which has a smaller daughterboard attached (The JSA3S PCB), 2 Jamma filter PCBs (these are small and attach to the large boards edge connectors), a CLARN II PCB (also smaller than the game boards, and attached to them at the top of the stack).

The two game boards and the CLARN II board are connected together by a ribbon cable (it jumps from one board to the next, to the CLARN II board).

The CLARN II board has some cables that come off of it (but they aren't ribbon), and there's going to be Jamma connectors from the controls.

If you have an unattached ribbon, I'm guessing that you are either missing a game board, or the CLARN board is missing, or someone has jammed a ribbon cable onto some connector that shouldn't be connected at all.

I don't know if it will run without the CLARN board, though I mean to find out if I can run a single game board all by itself, at some point.
 
I see. Am now wondering what this long ribbon cable is doing attached to it, as the seller told me that a hard drive attaches to it. Haven't really had the time to study it though so I'll have a hunt around for the manual.

The manual is linked off of Wikipedia, at least for the moment.
 
From what I can determine, the ribbon cable (which is plugged into the CLARN board) is for the connection to another CLARN board.

Does that sound logical?
 
From what I can determine, the ribbon cable (which is plugged into the CLARN board) is for the connection to another CLARN board.

Does that sound logical?

Not to me. From what I can see here, the interconnects to another system don't appear to be ribbon cables.

What I see in the book is that there should be a ribbon cable (flat multi-conductor cable like seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_cable ). This cable should have 3 connectors crimped onto it - one for the smaller CLARN board, one for the first game board, and one for the second game board.

I'll try and dig my board set out later tonight and get some photos. That would clear things up nicely, I think.
 
Pictures! (worth a thousand words?)

OK, I got it out and took some pictures. I must say, the drawings in the manual are pretty bad. Perhaps if I had the original manual (not the PDF) it would be better, but I'm not sure.

In the first picture (2552) you can see the entire assembly. Note that I do NOT have the jamma filter boards installed at the moment.

In this picture you can see the two game boards stacked one on top of the other, and on top of them two smaller boards (the one on the left is the JSA3S board, the one on the right (mostly hidden behind the metal support) is the CLARN board. The ribbon cable is pretty much behind the metal support in this picture as well. On the outside of the shell you can see the cables for interconnect to another system.

On the left hand side of each of the game board, you can see a spot for a board edge connector to plug in. That's where the controls connect (via a short board that appears to just have some filter caps on it). These appear to be more or less standard Jamma connectors.

In the second picture, you are looking in from the left side, to try and make the ribbon visible. It's right behind the metal support, and I was wrong in how it runs - it runs from the LOWER game board all the way up to the CLARN board. Since the CLARN board sits directly on top of the UPPER game board, it appears to direct connect with headers instead of a second ribbon. Notice that the ribbon has a big grey thing clamped onto it - that's an inductor and is usually used to suppress RF noise.

As near as I can tell without a working unit to look at, the ribbon cable behind that metal support should go where it's seen here, and there are no others.

I note that there is only one JSA3S board (even though the manual says '2 places'), and I hope that I'm not missing one.

Good luck!
 

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