Taito F3 Elevator Action Returns - Prototype or old convertion

[GenocideNinja]

Hi good people!

I bought an elevator action returns a few years ago on ebay. I opened it recently and got a nice surprise inside. I was wondering if it's a prototype or a banal conversion (roms stack and weird cable link).

Thank you

 

[XtraSmiley]

Very cool, following for an answer from someone who would know! If that's a conversion, it's odd, why did they piggy back everything?

 

[advans14]

Maybe to do some odd bank switching

 

[Pythagoras]

Looks interesting. Does the game work? If it does what version is displayed at the bottom of the screen when you enter service mode? The program roms are labeled "E02" same as for "Elevator Action Returns". The hand written CRC16? Checksums are also interesting, would someone care about doing that on a conversation? I think it's some development/prototype version. So you should start with check the version. V2.2 is in the only version in Mame.

 

[GenocideNinja]

the game works well, I had a minor graphic problem and after reinsert the roms the
glitches is gone. I did a poor job to cover the the roms windows. but everything else was like that when i opened the shell.

 

[Pythagoras]

That's same version and build time & date as in Mame. Overseas version 2.2. So the contents of the eproms are probably identical to the dumped version. So the mystery remains about this conversion.

 

[twistedsymphony]

why did they piggy back everything

the piggy back ROMs with the wire are for bank-switching between the ROMs, it's a technique when you need ROMs that are 2x the size but don't have those ROMs available.
back in the day these ROMs were very expensive and a lot of the sizes we have today weren't available back then outside of MASK ROMs o they had to resort to techniques like this when using EPROMs

the solder work looks very professional and the fact that the same exact model EPROM is used through out this is either factory or a very high quality conversion.

generally for factory work the labeling I'd expect a sticker with a hand written label not the writing directly on the ROMs.

 

[blast68k]

My guess would be a factory conversion, which isn't so unusual.