『HARDWARE ROMANCE』 – Telegram
『HARDWARE ROMANCE』
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Music, shmups, rhythm games, cute stuff and assorted media/tech from the recent past, and the occasional personal blog post.

If i like it, it ends up here.

My text posts are very long.
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『HARDWARE ROMANCE』
Video
i love this stupid fucking video so much
south american memes are an untapped gold mine, i tell you
oh and tomorrow it's arcadeposting all day, i'm going to a Pump it Up tournament.
Yes, i will be playing. No, i won't win shit. But it'll be fun.
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alright then

let's fucking go
qualified for the bracket stage

LET'S GOOOOO
eliminated during the second round of the direct elimination stage

still very happy! it was great

now to chillax for the rest of the evening
i thought I'd be posting more but all i am is exhausted

i have to say, it is impressive that in a room full of sweaty people that have been exercising all day the air is still lighter than a magic the gathering tournament with 1/4th of the people
sick turnout tho
my apologies for no posts about anything after and about the event, they will come, but the award ceremony happened at 3:30 AM yesterday (the tournament started at 2 PM, by the way), and happened

OUTSIDE the venue

at -3 degrees

and it took about an hour as well so we left at like 4 AM

you can imagine the condition i am in

in the meantime, have a few images i have saved

I'll now go back to akdhrhdhshhwywgshsudjrjtkgltltoglj
Forwarded from skög5.55 (vla)
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Forwarded from skög5.55 (vla)
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Forwarded from ::fs
Forwarded from ::fs
::fs
Photo
what you are seeing here is around... 15.000 USD worth of PCBs

Pink sweets -Ibara Sorekara- would probably go for around 3-4K now
Ibara is a cool 1200? without box you could get away with 800 maybe. MAYBE.
a Dodonpachi SaiDaiOuJou PCB is EASILY 10k. like, EASY.

CAVE boxes are around 250 bucks each, the instructions and the rest are expensive as well. If these are full kits you really are looking at a massive amount of money.
They didn't use to cost this much but they've become rare collectors items over the years. The fact that the CV-1000 hardware is still impossible to emulate 1:1 and doesn't work on FPGAs like MiSTER doesn't help either.

There have been bootleg chinese boards popping out on ebay and such though, the CV-1000 PCBs were the "base" board and the game was what was written in the sound and program ROMs. Desolder / flash them via JTAG (a process which takes THREE DAYS per pcb, by the way!) and you can change games. Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, actually.

You see, to save money, CAVE used substandard memory chips. They're not, like AAA "actually working" memory chips, the program itself is much smaller than the maximum memory capacity of the program ROM, but the ROMs they bought in bulk were ROMs with corrupt sectors. They costed less.

So, to write the programs in the good sectors, they just used a secondary ROM that contained data about the sectors that worked and the ones that didn't, a "map" of sorts. Therefore, to add a program to the program memory chip, you have to analyze your specific memory chip for bad sectors, map the location of the bad and good ones to the secondary ROM, then read the bad sector ROM so that you know which blocks can be written, and which ones cannot to then, finally, flash the game to the good blocks, and the sound portion of the game to the sound chip.

Oh, the bad blocks sometimes corrupt other blocks adjacent to them, which means that the good blocks could fail over time, and they often do. So, every time you turn on the PCB, you run the very real risk of fucking up your ROM and having to replace the whole chip or re-analyze the memory chip to know what are the new bad blocks.
It's actually quite insane. Oh, and you better have a dump of your game. If you didn't, and there were no public dumps, then you now have a very expensive and rare brick.

Until 2 years ago, SaiDaiOuJou did not have a public dump. Neither does Akai Katana right now. Both games cost more than 9k USD for just the PCB. You could buy them new (game + motherboard) via ExA arcadia, which is a completely new and official arcade system, but that would cost you MORE.