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.

Anyways, this is interesting because it means someone has been taking other CV-1000 PCBs and re-flashing and repurposing them, OR has reverse engineered them

option 1) is the easiest and what most people do. In fact, my DaiOuJou and Ketsui carts are old PGM games that have been re-soldered, flashed and modded to have another ROM running in them, but that means taking old games that CAVE released (probably Medal Banchou Mahjong, which is not a shmup but some cheap mahjong game) which costs several thousands less than the CAVE games, and re-flashed them to be high-demand games, to sell at a fraction of the cost. It's the least ethical of the options since it kills availability of that specific game and removes them from the market, effectively, and only generates a new bootleg.

2) is reverse-engineering the PCB and then buying new-old-stock or used components (memory chips, sound chips, PPUs ) to re-create the board. It requires sacrificing a board entirely (CV-1000 is a 4-layer PCB, so you have to ablate the superficial layers of the board with acid or mechanically, sanding them, effectively destroying it fully, to have the entire circuit layout and then re-print it to add the components. Sometimes people use X-RAYs to reverse-engineer traces beneath the surface too, it's pretty neat, but hard to do for 4-layer.
It's the least likely of the two, though.

Arcade-projects has a thread about it. Go look at it and let me know, i haven't read it for a while, because reasons.

Anyways it's all pretty interesting and i will probably expand on it sooner or later since i want to shmup post a lot... I could write more i think but i literally just fractured a fucking molar EPIC STYLE, so i am just going to take 900 ibuprofens and go to bed. Ouch. Oof.

one last thing, regarding Dodonpachi SaiDaiOuJou, because i can't just not say it

it literally is the hardest game CAVE ever made, harder than even DaiOuJou death label, which took MON like, 8-9 years to clear and afaik he's still the only one to do so to this date.
It was released in 2011 and featured a secret boss you would access through obtaining a high enough rank during play (remember my pinned garegga post? that kind of rank) without losing lives or bombing.

It was finally beaten, on an arcade PCB, in april of this year. It took 13 years for someone, ONE PERSON, to finally beat that boss. The fact that we got a dump of the game ROM soon before that is no coincidence either, since it enabled practicing routes and re-playing states, which was unavailable to anyone.

The Xbox 360 port version of the game was beaten shortly before the PCB version of the game, but it's a different game... most CAVE ports are never faithful to the arcade originals with the sole exception of the M2-Shottriggers ports.
CAVE had made this easter egg boss as a 'swan song' of sorts, they never cared about making the game beatable by 'casuals' or just 'people not hardcore enough'. The whole point of it all was surpassing insormountable, absurd challenges, and that's who the games were made for. If you couldn't do it, that's okay too, you can creditfeed as much as you want, but you're not getting the REAL ending. Besides, even if you can't do it now, it doesn't mean you should try to practice and someday even manage it, in the future.

死ぬがよい。- "dying is good." It means that even if you fuck up and die, that's fine, because that's how you learn. Die all you want, that's what our games are made for. No shame in dying. Just pick the pieces back up and try again. As long as you keep dying, you keep learning. At some point, you'll die little enough to maybe clear one of our games. You just have not to give up.

If you wish to know what a game hard enough to not be beaten in more than a decade looks like, here is the winning run. If you read the comments, you will agree that it is quite a historical moment for humanity, in terms of sheer will and dedication, skill in something so specific like shmups demand, and pure plain old fucking autism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9skBAPlC2U


Oh, by the way: the navigators were all voiced by famous seiyuu at the time. The element doll 'Saya', the main protagonist of the game, is voiced by none other than Aya Hirano herself, of Haruhi and Konata fame!
Of course, that was before she got cancelled in japan because she slept with her whole band and half the producers in the company that she worked in or something. lol, lmao even.

i will take this chance to re-post my Espgaluda II PCB, full fucking kit, by the way

i love money puzzle...