Good to see this cabinet getting some attention again.
For those of you interested in playing this game in MAME, too bad so sad...the game doesn't work in MAME. Read below.
Forum member Darthi8nt and I spent a LOT of time in 2013 working on a few Space Demon and Space Firebird board sets when I did the restoration of my Space Demon cabaret. There are 6 different flavors of this game:
Space Demon (Nintendo)
Space Firebird (Nintendo license)
Space Firebird (Sega / Gremlin license)
Space Firebird (bootleg hardware)
Space Bird (bootleg hardwae)
Space Thunderbird (bootleg hardware)
All 6 board sets run on the same basic three-pcb setup: CPU pcb, video pcb, and ESS sound pcb. To my knowlege, the top 5 in that list all use the little black connectors (or the .100 equivalent found on early DK boards) for all connections. The last one, Space Thunderbird, uses an edge connector.
From what I understand, the bottom five games all use the exact same ess sound board.
Space Demon, however, uses a slightly different sound board. It's bigger and has a few extra components on it. The ess board (on all 6 hardware revisions) is where the starfield is generated, as well as the "flashing red screen" when your ship is hit in the Space Firebird flavors. The screen does not flash red when your ship is hit in Space Demon.
Here's why Space Demon doesn't work in MAME:
They (incorrectly) have it listed as a "child" romset under the "parent" rom Space Firebird. This is incorrect. Space Demon should be considered as more of a "sister" to Space Firebird, not as parent/child. Because the MAME devs incorrectly coded Space Demon as a child rom to the Space Firebird parent, they coded the driver in MAME to play the game using Space Firebird hardware, but using the Space Demon prom/eprom data. This doesn't work. The title screen and attract mode looks fine, but the minute you coin up a game and start, the background of the screen takes on a blue tint and stays that way throughout gameplay.
This "blue screen" behavior can be duplicated by taking a Space Demon board set and swapping out the ess pcb with a space firebird pcb. Even if you move the SD sound rom into the SF ess board, you're still going to get the blue screen problem. You NEED to have the Fortrek ESS board in the mix to correctly play space demon. Since the MAME devs have not bothered to go back and update the Space Demon driver with the correct ESS board hardware, we will never be able to play this game correctly in MAME. I've posted about this a few times in the MAME dev forums, and my latest attempt to get any traction with fixing this got me a hand slap. So, there's that.
Read more here:
http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=276497
So, long story short is this: If you don't have a genuine Fortrek ESS sound pcb available, you're not going to play Space Demon, ever.
I documented my progress in creating a reproduction Fortrek ESS sound pcb in another thread, here:
https://forums.arcade-museum.com/showpost.php?p=3028533&postcount=101
Unfortunately I lack the skills to recreate the board in Eagle. Otherwise I'd try it.
Darthi8nt was going to try and convert a Space Firebird sound board to work correctly with Space Demon, but his life went in another direction in 2013/2014, and now he doesn't really post on the forums any more.