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twistedsymphony

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I'm curious if anyone has successfully done a conversion on the Namco System 12 Hardware.

There are a couple of games on this hardware: Aqua Rush and Tenkomori Shooting (English Version) that are expensive and hard to find respectively, meanwhile You can buy boards like Soul Calibur, Tekken 3, and Tekken Tag PCBs pretty easily and reasonably priced.

I know I'd love to see a multi on this hardware the Namco System 1x hardware has a lot of great games; knowing the conversion viability would give some idea of multi viability as well.
 
i was looking into this, another problem is there are lots of different rom boards - each taking different numbers and types of chips.
look at the mame driver - it has a table of romboards and what games use them.
 
I'm really curious about sys 10 conversions. The keycus chip looks like a jtag flashable one. I would love to see a sys10 multi even but I don't think enough people care that much about mr driller and star trigon lol
 
well i dont have any, and AFAIK they are pretty rare compared to 11 & 12.
so that limits the market for any real dev work.
 
I should be able to send at least one sys10 main board and 2 rom boards to someone if they want to do real research on them.
 
I would love to see a sys10 multi even but I don't think enough people care that much about mr driller and star trigon lol
There is a nice little collection of obscure games on that platform. You have Gamshara which is a weird cross between a mounted gun game a shmup and a run and gun title, then you have Star Trigon which is kind of cross between a rhythm game and a puzzle game.

of the games that can be played without a special cabinet:
-Shmup??
Gamshara

-puzzle:
Gekitoride-Jong Space
Kono TACO!
Kotoba no Puzzle Mojipittan [Requires understanding of Japanese]
Kurukuru Food
Mr Driller 2
Mr Driller G
Panicuru Panekuru
Star Trigon

-MiniGames:
Uchuu Daisakusen : Chocovader Contactee

-Football
NFL Classic Football

-Quiz:
Seishun Quiz Colorful High School / Ren-ai Quiz High School Angel

i'd say it's at least as multi-worthy as the Kaneko SuperNova. At very least it'd be nice to be able to convert to some of the harder to find titles.
 
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classic football needs trackballs. That's actually what I have extras of for research or spare motherboards.

Also for the record star trigon and Chocovader are insanely fun
 
well i suppose the starting point would be to kill the protection in mame.
only problem, i dont think mame handles it yet.
 
NAMCO SYSTEM 10:

Star Trigon - I wouldn't really compare that to a rhythm game. There is timing, but nothing is set to the beat. It's just knowing when to hit a button to sling shot your character from each planet's gravity. It's definitely a unique puzzle game that's worth playing, but it has limited replay value compared to the Mr. Driller games.

Gamshara - This game isn't really a shmup per se, but rather a Nam-1975 styled action shooter with a jump mechanic and a feudal skin. It's definitely a hidden gem if you liked Nam for the MVS.

Panicuru Panekuru - This is a bizarre puzzle game. From what little I've played of it, it is hard to figure out the point and it is quite easy to just randomly drop stuff and beat a level.

Kotoba no Puzzle Mojipittan - If you don't know Japanese, there isn't any point trying to play this Scrabble-like word game as it's all hiragana.

Kono TACO! - Now this is a fun and challenging puzzle game that requires you to clear both sides of the screen. Mr. Driller G is my favorite System 10 game and Kono Taco is number 2.

Uchuu Daisakusen: Chocovader Contactee - Lots of bizarre X-Files-y mini games centered around UFOs and Aliens. There are some games similar in to Tenkomori Shooting, but it feels more like a Wario Ware-style game overall. It's a party game that you can kill a few minutes with, but wears thin fairly quickly.


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Kurukuru Food - I think System16 might have incorrectly listed this under Namco System 10. The picture shows Kurukuru Fever, which is a cartridge for the ALECK-64 platform (and it had a Nintendo 64 port).
 
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So it seems that while the base hardware is the same there are quite a bit of differences in which chips are populated on the main board as well as the sub-boards

I started looking at what might be required to region swap a game, or to change the revision level of a game.

Mostly I really want an English Language Tenkomori Shooting, but I've never seen one around and they all seem to be the Japanese version.

looking at MAME source there are two TSOP flash chips on the main board that run different code and other than that the two versions of this game are identical. I'm curious what the possibility is that these could be reprogrammed in-place on the PCB... I would think that for something like revision updates or region changes Namco would have the ability to reprogram these boards.

it looks like Tekken 3 has a nearly identical setup so I'm tempted to play around with that since it's a fairly cheap PCB and if I muck it up I'd only be out $50.
 
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