mikejmoffitt
Member
I've posted this around in a few areas with very limited response, so I figure a forum dedicated to arcade-related topics would have a decent response!
I purchased for what I thought was a decent deal a Konami GX board with Sexy Parodius on it. i'm a big fan of the Parodius series, and we have a JAMMA cab at work I wanted to play Sexy Parodius on.
That cabinet, by the way, is a conversion disaster outside of my control... for clarification, it went:
Atari Missile Command --> Shinobi --> Some Tekken nonsense --> Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition --> Street Fighter 2 "Rainbow" --> Street Fighter Alpha 3.
Anyway, back on topic.
I received the board in a timely manner, it was well packed, and labeled, etc. Upon opening the package, I was surprised though...
The boardset was only one PCB. Strange, I thought - even the Rev 2.0 Konami GX boards should have two interconnected boards... The JAMMA connector also does not have a key, nor the "JAMMA" stamp, though looking at the tracks it was clear it is in fact JAMMA.
Either way, I wired up a little test rig by soldering to the PCB (BEHIND the JAMMA connector - I'm no hooligan who solders directly to an edge connector) just to get power, audio, and video to see that the game runs.
I powered it up, and thought something was wrong... I heard the speaker click as the audio amp turned on, but no attract mode audio was playing. Further, the video looked wrong - it would lose sync, and the colors were wrong.
Still, I managed to coin the game up, and I heard the coin insert sound - so audio is working! - and started a game. I thought the coin insert sound was very... low quality and crackly, but I noticed a capacitor near the audio amp was very screwed up and simply chalked it up to a bad capacitor.
As the game brought me into the character select, the correct music played, and the sound effects were there. Through the unstable video, I could see that the game looked fine apart from the sync issues as I picked Vic Viper.
Then, I noticed the problem, the icing on the cake...
As the music looped, something seemed off. The song is a simple loop, but it has a small one-measure lead-in intro that shouldn't be included in the loop. As this song looped, though, the intro was included, and it was off-beat! How horrifying!
As I got in-game, I realised in great shock that the Konami audio synthesizer was NOT implemented, and all of the audio was shitty bootleg looped PCM samples. The in-game music tracks aren't even the full songs - halfway into the songs they just restart! Awful!
The sound effects play fine, though also in the low quality, but some songs are mixed up in their order - for example, Vic Viper's background music features Mambo's theme instead. Phooey!
Anyway, after that audio disaster, I realised I had switched the part-side and solder-side JAMMA connections for the RGB video. After slapping myself for such a stupid mistake, I fixed it. The video syncs fine, and is clear.
Having clear video did let me notice one thing, though - the graphics are generally okay, but they aren't perfect - the character select screen has minor layering issues, the bathhouse stage doesn't have the underwater palette ( I guess scanline counter isn't implemented ) and there is a missing background in stage 3-1. Fun fact: the EXACT same missing-background bug occurs in MAME.
Anyway, I was refunded 50% as I wanted to keep the board. Furious as I was, this is a very interesting board from the hardware perspective, as apart from the audio it's a fairly impressive FPGA-based re-implementation of Konami GX hardware. The main CPU, the 68020, is a real one on the board, but the audio 68000 CPU is missing, replaced by two crappy PCM playback chips. I'm curious how they made it listen for the original audio cue calls and had it play back in a timely manner.
Another tidbit: the title screen features English text from the AAA version of the game, but all other text is from the JAA version. The game, on bootup, claims to be the "EAA" version.
Here's a full list of oddities:
version EAA
mask rom check fails
skips most of boot tests
Hast real 68020, other chips done in FPGAs
Has no dip switches
During palette fade at the start of level and also character death, lag occurs
English title, everything else japanese
All text missing from intro sequence
Flipbook effect has layering issues in character select
Not seen in the video, but backgrounds missing on stage 2 (just like in MAME...)
Here are two videos, one pre-video-fix and one post-fix:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugtUpldW9MQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUg5cjwkJko
And finally, an open directory of snapshots of the PCB:
http://mikejmoffitt.com/img/fakeparo/
After that long-winded type up - if you're still with me - I've dumped the roms as well, though I won't post them since I'm not totally familiar with the rules for such things. Looking at them in a hex editor, some ROMS bear similarity to actual Sexy Parodius dumps, so maybe I can get it running some time.
If anyone knows anything about it or has questions (or wants to buy the damn thing for science) do let me know!
I purchased for what I thought was a decent deal a Konami GX board with Sexy Parodius on it. i'm a big fan of the Parodius series, and we have a JAMMA cab at work I wanted to play Sexy Parodius on.
That cabinet, by the way, is a conversion disaster outside of my control... for clarification, it went:
Atari Missile Command --> Shinobi --> Some Tekken nonsense --> Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition --> Street Fighter 2 "Rainbow" --> Street Fighter Alpha 3.
Anyway, back on topic.
I received the board in a timely manner, it was well packed, and labeled, etc. Upon opening the package, I was surprised though...
The boardset was only one PCB. Strange, I thought - even the Rev 2.0 Konami GX boards should have two interconnected boards... The JAMMA connector also does not have a key, nor the "JAMMA" stamp, though looking at the tracks it was clear it is in fact JAMMA.
Either way, I wired up a little test rig by soldering to the PCB (BEHIND the JAMMA connector - I'm no hooligan who solders directly to an edge connector) just to get power, audio, and video to see that the game runs.
I powered it up, and thought something was wrong... I heard the speaker click as the audio amp turned on, but no attract mode audio was playing. Further, the video looked wrong - it would lose sync, and the colors were wrong.
Still, I managed to coin the game up, and I heard the coin insert sound - so audio is working! - and started a game. I thought the coin insert sound was very... low quality and crackly, but I noticed a capacitor near the audio amp was very screwed up and simply chalked it up to a bad capacitor.
As the game brought me into the character select, the correct music played, and the sound effects were there. Through the unstable video, I could see that the game looked fine apart from the sync issues as I picked Vic Viper.
Then, I noticed the problem, the icing on the cake...
As the music looped, something seemed off. The song is a simple loop, but it has a small one-measure lead-in intro that shouldn't be included in the loop. As this song looped, though, the intro was included, and it was off-beat! How horrifying!
As I got in-game, I realised in great shock that the Konami audio synthesizer was NOT implemented, and all of the audio was shitty bootleg looped PCM samples. The in-game music tracks aren't even the full songs - halfway into the songs they just restart! Awful!
The sound effects play fine, though also in the low quality, but some songs are mixed up in their order - for example, Vic Viper's background music features Mambo's theme instead. Phooey!
Anyway, after that audio disaster, I realised I had switched the part-side and solder-side JAMMA connections for the RGB video. After slapping myself for such a stupid mistake, I fixed it. The video syncs fine, and is clear.
Having clear video did let me notice one thing, though - the graphics are generally okay, but they aren't perfect - the character select screen has minor layering issues, the bathhouse stage doesn't have the underwater palette ( I guess scanline counter isn't implemented ) and there is a missing background in stage 3-1. Fun fact: the EXACT same missing-background bug occurs in MAME.
Anyway, I was refunded 50% as I wanted to keep the board. Furious as I was, this is a very interesting board from the hardware perspective, as apart from the audio it's a fairly impressive FPGA-based re-implementation of Konami GX hardware. The main CPU, the 68020, is a real one on the board, but the audio 68000 CPU is missing, replaced by two crappy PCM playback chips. I'm curious how they made it listen for the original audio cue calls and had it play back in a timely manner.
Another tidbit: the title screen features English text from the AAA version of the game, but all other text is from the JAA version. The game, on bootup, claims to be the "EAA" version.
Here's a full list of oddities:
version EAA
mask rom check fails
skips most of boot tests
Hast real 68020, other chips done in FPGAs
Has no dip switches
During palette fade at the start of level and also character death, lag occurs
English title, everything else japanese
All text missing from intro sequence
Flipbook effect has layering issues in character select
Not seen in the video, but backgrounds missing on stage 2 (just like in MAME...)
Here are two videos, one pre-video-fix and one post-fix:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugtUpldW9MQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUg5cjwkJko
And finally, an open directory of snapshots of the PCB:
http://mikejmoffitt.com/img/fakeparo/
After that long-winded type up - if you're still with me - I've dumped the roms as well, though I won't post them since I'm not totally familiar with the rules for such things. Looking at them in a hex editor, some ROMS bear similarity to actual Sexy Parodius dumps, so maybe I can get it running some time.
If anyone knows anything about it or has questions (or wants to buy the damn thing for science) do let me know!