FS Armed Police Batrider Ver B.

[Crunch]

Lucky me, we mostly have Japanese or Asia versions here.
Actually Asia versions are overlooked by westerners IMO and should be considered the "best" versions since they're often identical to the Japanese versions in terms of difficulty and features with the added bonus of English texts.

Agreed. Especially with Batrider "B" and Bakraid "Unlimited" they are small bug fixes that 99% of the collectors owning the boards are never going to be affected by in their time owning it. It looks shiny being the final revision and thus fetches more. With prices the way they are I would be actively seeking out these "inferior" versions these days. Saved about 1000EUR picking up a non-unlimited Bakraid last year.

 

[Aurich]

Everyone must feel like a broken record saying this sort of thing, but if that's the price of Batrider these days, it blows my mind.

Such is the state of so many things. I know I've pulled back on purchasing personally. I could technically afford a $2000 PCB if I wanted it, but that's stupid money for a board, no game justifies it. Once you go over $400 my impulse buy is gone.

It used to be if you bought a game you could enjoy it, and sell it later for someone else to enjoy, and know you could probably buy another to play later if you wanted. It kept things circulating. Now if you let something like that go you're never getting it back, and the decision is to hoard or cash out.

 

[Nebula]

Everyone must feel like a broken record saying this sort of thing, but if that's the price of Batrider these days, it blows my mind.

I agree with this. And even more knowing that these pcbs eventually die due to their CPLDs...
We urgently need to make a replacement, or in the near future we will have a beauty $3000 unusable pcb....

 

[Hatsune Mike]

I agree with this. And even more knowing that these pcbs eventually die due to their CPLDs...
We urgently need to make a replacement, or in the near future we will have a beauty $3000 unusable pcb....

This is only sort of half true. The A1010 and A1020 FPGAs are early polyfuse FPGAs, and do not use non-volatile storage (e.g. Flash) to store their configuration (which has a data retention rate of like ~20 years in automotive graded parts, and likely less for consumer). Instead, the configuration has literally been burned in. These can die from internal die or bond wire damage, rust, corrosion, etc. but at least they are not slated to lose their data over time naturally. They can be compared to a mask ROM this way, and are on par with the reliability of the gate arrays that make most of these games work.

The MACH PLDs (which are really a few GALs in a trenchcoat) I managed to dump already, as they were unlocked. That leaves a handful of GALs, two of which are related to sound. They are locked, so they will require some craftiness. If those can be taken care of, we can consider the game "shelf stable".

Bakraid does not enjoy such a positive outlook, and instead has three Xilinx CPLDs doing the same work that the logic above did. One of them tends to fail, seemingly from ESD, but all three may eventually begin to leak their data and have invalidated configs. They are locked, so dumping these is a massive effort that requires an intersection of time, ability, and money.